World Building in Details

I watched the Pacific Rim director's commentary this weekend.  It's one of the better commentaries out there, because Guillermo del Toro has a lot to say about everything without getting off on tangents or leaving long pauses.  He shares a lot of secrets and I found them all pretty interesting.

The thing I found most interesting was when he talked about world building.

“We designed everything in this movie.  We designed the patches in the shirts and the uniforms, we designed the banners, the badges.  We designed the robots to the minimal detail, so if you zoom into the controls you would see electrical discharge warnings, you would see ladders, you would see places where you would connect, and to engineer the amount of detail is staggering.  We spent about a year texturing this world, and the accumulation of that mosaic of detail, design-wise, gives you the sense of a real world.  People think that a ‘world creation’ movie is the ‘big gestures,’ but it isn’t, it’s this small detail.”

World building is in the details.  It makes the world feel lived in.  It hints there there's history.  It makes it more immersive.

My favorite example of this is the first launch sequence in Alaska at the beginning of the movie.  There is so much detail on all the machinery and the fork lifts and people's uniforms.  Everything must do something and everything is worn like it's been used for a while.

Look at all that

But then it's not just that it's there.  It's also that everyone is interacting with the word.  People are pushing buttons and screwing things into place.  They do it with efficiency, like they've done it before.  We don't need to be told what everything does.

I've been thinking about this since Fellowship of the Ring.  Where all the armor is worn and used and covered in iconography that I don't understand, but I'm sure whoever's wearing it is.  And everyone is that detailed, and when extras have personality, it makes the world seem expansive, like there's more to the world than what we're shown.

I've been trying to bring this into my writing as a way to expand the world (without making it the longest novel ever), make it immersive and organic, and to possibly avoid exposition dumps (but I'm not sure how well that's working.  I'll need to work on it more.)

Do you know of other examples of world building through details?