In the opening scene of the 1995 film Batman Forever, the Caped Crusader gathers items from an arsenal he uses to battle Gotham City’s worst villains. He turns and walks toward a giant turntable rising slowly out of the cave’s depths to reveal his greatest weapon and truest sidekick: the Batmobile.
“It’s a hero shot,” said concept artist and CCS Chair of Entertainment Arts
Tim Flattery, ’87, Transportation Design, about the first time he saw the car he designed on the big screen. “It gave me chills.”
Ed Natividad, ’91 Illustration/Transportation Design, who worked as conceptual vehicle designer for the Batmobile in the recently released
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), explained that he has always been fascinated by the iconic vehicle, and his role in its latest iteration was a lifelong dream. “I don’t know what the future holds, but this project will be a hard act to follow. The Batmobile is the holy grail of vehicles. Best of all it’s actually built.”
As a lifetime fan of Batman, Flattery agrees. He understands why the Batmobile maintains appeal across generations. “It’s an actual character in each movie. The car has become so iconic because of all the things it’s capable of doing and the way it supports Batman in his cause.”
Flattery held a summer internship, while still at CCS, with Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor John Dykstra, who helped him land his first design gig on
My Stepmother Is an Alien (1988). After working on Anton Furst’s Batmobile in
Batman Returns (1992), he started becoming known as someone who could not only design fictional vehicles for movies but also make the fiction real and build them. Eventually, he got the call.
“Warner Bros. said ‘we’re making a new Batman movie, and we want to do a new Batmobile. Are you interested?’” Flattery recalled. “To do a new Batmobile is every designer’s dream. And this was in 1993. So that early in my career it was huge.”
Natividad’s film career began at Industrial Light and Magic in San Francisco. His passion for cinema and industrial design culminated in 2013 when the production designer of
Batman v Superman asked if he would like to help with a new incarnation of the Batmobile. Like Flattery, Natividad and the production team had to reckon with the vehicle’s expansive legacy and yet create something entirely new.
“We didn’t have a script in the infant stages of the project, so we had to anticipate a scenario with a ground-to-air battle,” said Natividad, “hence the guns and anti-aircraft weaponry.”
Early in the process, the team visited the previous Batmobiles at the Warner Bros. Museum. “We noticed that the car had to be freakishly larger than a normal car to create screen presence and to coincide with the intimidating nature of the character. You can’t fall in love with the first sketch because it won’t reflect the realities of a practical build, where reliability and safety are as important as styling.”
“When you see them all together,” Flattery noted, “you realize that they all have their place in the movies, but they all have their place in design history as well.”
It’s a design history both men are steeped in, yet neither Natividad nor Flattery have a degree in Entertainment Arts, which didn’t exist at the time, but is now the College’s largest department and the one Flattery chairs — which speaks to the flexibility of CCS training.
“When you design something as iconic as the Batmobile,” explained Flattery, “you’re going to be judged for it, you’re going to become known for it. But at the same time, as scared as I was, I was also confident that I got the right tools from CCS to do what I do.”
Watch Flattery and Natividad discussing the Batmobile at
http://www.collegeforcreativestudies.edu/campus-life/alumni-stories