Interview – Miles Skarin: Creating ‘The Overview’ film with Steven Wilson (revised post)

“We look inwards so much, and when you look outwards at space there’s so much out there which is unattainable and unreachable for a lot of humans, so maybe we don’t give much thought to the perspective of what we are and what our reality is.”
Miles Skarin

Miles Skarin makes music videos for Steven Wilson and his band Porcupine Tree. He also designs websites such as Stevenwilsonhq with his brother, Rob Skarin. Miles has recently made a full-length animated film to accompany Wilson’s latest solo album, The Overview. The film has been shown during the tour to support the new album, and the track Objects: Meanwhile from the first song on the new album Objects Outlive Us has been released as an official video.

Nick Holmes Music has been given an exclusive insight into the making of the new film with Miles Skarin [MS].

Nick Holmes Music: How did you first meet and work with Steven?

MS: We go back about ten years or so. We originally started out as massive Porcupine Tree fans. We made the fan site starsdie.com. Being big fans of Porcupine Tree, Steven Wilson, and the other progressive rock bands at the time, we made a couple of fan sites. We really wanted to know everything about Steven and Porcupine Tree, and where the music was coming from because we just loved it so much. A lot of these bands hadn’t really taken off on social media at the time.

My brother wrote a load of the news articles for the website. I did a lot of the design work. And then one day we had an e-mail that dropped into the inbox. That was Steven saying, “Hey, you guys are doing this really well, do you want to come on board and help us out?” Which was incredible as fans, to have that message just land in your inbox, it was a fantastic day. And so we just jumped at the chance. We redesigned Steven’s website and tried to boost his presence on social media, and we’ve been helping with that ever since.

Nick Holmes Music: Didn’t he say at the time that your website was doing better than his?

MS:  I think that was what he said. I think it was just because we were putting way more content onto our website. One of the things that we were thinking about was that every now and again you’d have an album release. And then after the album cycle there would be nothing posted online. Maybe a year, two years later, there’d be another album and maybe there’d be some press.

Steven always did incredible box sets. There was always a massive wealth of artwork and stuff to complement the music. So it was just a way of keeping fans engaged with Steven, even outside of the album cycles. And also while on tour as well, making sure to post photos and updates from live shows and just build that online community.

We had a forum at one point which we really enjoyed doing because it was bringing fans together and talking about the music that we loved. Through that process we met a few more people in the progressive rock space, record labels like Inside Out Music, Sony and Kscope; Steven was on working with those guys through Blackfield and his own releases at the time.

Nick Holmes Music: How did you feel when you saw your film on a massive screen at BFI IMAX in London at the premiere of The Overview?

MS: Oh wow. It’s just the peak, isn’t it? As a filmmaker, it doesn’t get better than that, surely. It was such an incredible experience, to see your work on a screen that’s the size of a building is something that I didn’t think I’d ever experience. As I was delivering the DCP file you take to give to the cinema to put it on the screen, the projectionist, Michael, took me up into the projection room at the back of the IMAX. And that’s cinema history, because you’ve got all of Christopher Nolan films; these huge spools of film, and they’re just labelled with handwritten notes saying ‘Tenet’, ‘Inception’ and ‘Interstellar.’ it was just an absolutely wonderful experience to know that my film was going to be on the same screen.

I feel so fortunate and lucky to have to have been able to do it and it’s all thanks to Steven, for creating the music and placing his trust in me to do a film, hopefully that does some sort of justice to the incredible music that he produces.

Nick Holmes Music: Steven himself has often talked about his albums or individual tracks being like a film and even described his last solo album The Harmony Codex as ‘cinema for the years’ Was The Overview always going to be a soundtrack for a film? Is that how he saw it?

MS: I think he always saw it as a piece that was two halves, side one and side two. When we were talking about visuals for it, one of the things that we were talking about was if you’ve got two 20-minute-long songs there isn’t really a concept of singles. So the idea of doing a promotional single didn’t really apply. Of course we went with the Objects Outlive Us section Objects: Meanwhile as a single.

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MILES SKARIN ON THE SHAPES IN ‘OBJECTS MEANWHILE’

“The shapes in Objects Meanwhile are constellations, connecting the stars into these shapes. The first one we see are constellation shapes based on the real star positions but later on we see this effect in 3D, where we see the connections forming between a “point cloud” of stars.“

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From the start, Steven wanted there to be visual material, a film to go across the entire audio, which is such an incredible challenge to have to try and think about, because especially in my style, which is animation that’s a big undertaking. It was always from the start, “let’s make a film, let’s make a movie for this.”

Nick Holmes Music: How much scientific research did you do for the film?

MS: I’ve always loved space. I’ve always been aware of space, been aware of missions into space and where we are in space, and galaxies and solar systems. So I think there’s a lot of knowledge I had already accumulated about space. I really wanted to build that kind of idea of scale into the film as well, because that was what we were trying to produce from the start, the idea of perspective.

And so I was looking up scales in numbers of how large planets are on Wikipedia. You can search any star or planet and it will tell you in astronomical units how large that planet or star is. And the numbers get big very quickly. I tried putting all those numbers into my computer software thinking, “this will be great. I’ll just put all the numbers in and then I can just pull the camera out and that would show me the scale.” But it starts to glitch physically on the screen. It can’t work out the coordinates for the polygons and the shapes you’re making to exist in a space that large because the computers can’t handle the sheer size of it.

So I was trying to find out as much as I could about space, and trying to keep it very scientific in a way. But as soon as I realised it was going to need a certain level of artistic direction, because the software couldn’t handle it, I had to kind of deviate. But I did definitely try to keep as much of the scientific information there, and I was also looking into different phenomena and objects in space; one of them is called a magnetar, which is these incredibly dense stars which have a very strong magnetic field. And it’s fascinating reading about these objects in space that just don’t seem real. And yet they are out there somewhere. It was very enjoyable doing that.

Nick Holmes Music: Tell me about the visual language of the film. How much were you influenced by space films like 2001 or Interstellar, which are fantastic films visually?

MS: Those films are incredible. I would say those films would be my main inspiration and reference points for The Overview. I remember watching Interstellar in the cinema and being absolutely blown away by it, not just visually from how it depicts space, but also the performance of the actors as well, and the emotion, and the effect that time dilation would have on people experiencing it. They did that very, very well.

I guess our challenge was to try and create a new visual language. But the person I have to thank for most of that is Hajo [Müller] who had already created all this incredible artwork. It’s so stark and beautiful in the way that he’s used real imagery and texture to create the pieces. I love the large format images that Hajo produced to really give you that sense of a wide screen or cinematic format. He sent through a load of the artwork quite early in the process. His artwork by the time that I was really working with it was already mostly there and just incredible images. I was looking at that and thinking he’s done it, he’s created the visual language of The Overview and if I can even get a small piece of that into my film then I’ll be happy because I love his work.

Nick Holmes Music: You have said the biggest challenge was to convey the scale of space?

MS: I think the main piece that really shows the scale would be Perspective, the first section of the second half. We’ve got Rotem [Wilson]’s voice, speaking through these incredible numbers such as ten to the power of twelve. But what does that mean? And so one of the things we were talking about was by putting up that number onto the screen, do people know that that’s going to be? The number of zeros that are at the end of these numbers, your brain can’t process it that well. And so when we were thinking of showing the scales, I had to split up those sequences and of course it has to be stylized to the music as well.

But there’s one moment where you can see the sun and you can see the different rings of the orbits of our planets in our solar system. And the camera bounces back and bounces forward quite fast. One of the things that I’m not sure if people quite catch is that our Sun just shrinks by a huge amount and then these absolutely colossal stars that are the next scale up swirl into the frame. So even on a 4K screen, placing these objects next to each other, our Sun suddenly becomes minuscule against these larger stars out there. So it’s actually very difficult to have a reference point when you’re looking at these sorts of visuals in a way that really puts it in perspective for us humans to understand.

The other part of the film that talks about scale is the section called Cosmic Suns of Toil which is midway through the first half. For that we’ve got the camera that just pulls back and goes through all the different layers of space. I wanted to frame our solar system and then what’s outside of our solar system. This is where I was doing my research on what these layers are, if I set a course for the stars and kept going, what objects would I move through. As you get outside of our solar system, there’s The Local Bubble, and The Local Cluster.

It’s amazing to consider that there’s so many other stars and solar systems out there, and then it just keeps going and keeps going until we can’t see any further because light can’t travel. There’s a certain amount of light that it can travel compared to how fast the speed of light is and that’s elapsed. Then eventually at the end of that section, Cosmic Suns of Toil, we reach the edge of the Cosmic Web, which is these, almost like strand filaments of the matter of galaxies.

And then what’s on the outside? We don’t know. So we have a slightly more abstract, stylized section and then we just dive straight down. The thing that I find amazing about that is it’s set up to be relative scale, not absolute scale. So when the camera flies straight back through the Local Cluster of our solar system and then back onto Earth, all of that’s over in about like three or four frames of video. It’s incredible that we cross so much distance in the space of a millisecond.

Nick Holmes Music: Can I ask you a bit more detail about the film? It starts off with the alien, saying, “Did you forget I exist now?” Steven himself has said that’s slightly tongue in cheek. How do you feel about the alien? There’s a beautiful section at the end of Part I, where the alien is floating around in space. What’s your reaction to that alien?

MS: I feel like it’s a great way to introduce where we are right now as a species. I think the key takeaway from the film is that we look inwards so much, and when you look outwards at space there’s so much out there which is unattainable and unreachable for a lot of humans, so maybe we don’t give much thought to the perspective of what we are and what our reality is. I don’t know how many people in the modern age are looking up at space and thinking, “I know what’s up there and I know what that means about where I am.”

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MILES SKARIN ON THE DESIGN OF THE ALIEN

“The alien design came from Hajo [Müller‘s] artwork… there’s the image of the alien, so using that as reference we designed it as a 3D modelled character.  The image in Hajo’s artwork had lots of earthy textures over it, so our first design used only these same materials for quite a flat, matte look. Steven Wilson then suggested that it needed to look more alien and like it had just crawled out of the muddy depths of the moor, and that influenced the more organic looking final design of the alien and the animation at the start of Objects Outlive Us.”

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Every time I go outside and walk down to the end of my road at night, and I’ve got stars above me, I’m always looking up and thinking, “that’s all right there.” I feel like that’s a great moment to start the record and say we’re not looking at humans this time around. We know we’re looking out at space, but then we are looking back at what that means for the human race.

And there with his first telescope
A teenager stands full of hormones and hope
As he squints at the night, like a painting of light
He doesn’t suppose that a black hole implodes
In a trillion years from now.

The section Objects Meanwhile, discusses a black hole swallowing an entire galaxy. And when you think, were there people in that galaxy, did they know what was about to happen to them and if so, what would they be thinking? We get wrapped up in things that maybe we should have a little bit more perspective on. If every single human on planet Earth was able to recognise that we are all just trapped on a rock that’s being flung through space, maybe we’d have a different worldview. But the human race is so complex, I’m not going to go there.

Nick Holmes Music: Talking of the human race, The Buddha of The Modern Age features a series of man-made disasters that lead to the destruction of the Earth?

MS: That section is looking at humans and what we’re doing on Earth before we go out into space. We meet the alien, and then after that we are presented with Earth. It’s not meant to be a future version of Earth. It’s meant to be a current version of Earth. I think it’s very easy to look at dystopian scenes of natural disasters, wars and climate change and think this is all set 20 years in the future, and we’ll work it out, we’ll be fine.

But actually, this stuff is happening now. It’s interesting that while all of these events are playing out and things are getting more and more serious, is enough being done by the human race to really set us on a course where we’re not just going to end up in that dystopian world of Interstellar, a global food crisis and dust storms that swirl around the planet, to the point where the planet is not habitable anymore. Are we barrelling towards that future, and is it too late to stop it? There’s a lot of those classic narratives tied up in that section.

But of course presenting it in such a stark way on screen and moving through all of those environments is one way of really showing this is the state of things right now. Of course it’s dramatized a little bit with animation, and at the end you’ve got all of the figures stampeding and falling off a cliff. I mean take what you want from that.

The message of that section is that maybe the human race could be doing more, but then of course the human race is massively complex in itself. And there’s a lot of problems we need to work out. And I don’t think I’m the person to be able to offer the answers; but hopefully collectively, we can put differences behind us and actually try to work out these things.

Nick Holmes Music: Objects: Meanwhile is a very literal and specific description of small-town England with lyrics by Andy Partridge, contrasted with what’s going on in other galaxies. I was interested to see that you turned it into something almost magical with all these shimmering figures, but it’s not a detailed rendition of the lyrics.

MS: The lyrics tell a story, but I’m very mindful about not just taking the lyrics and putting that into visuals. The lyrics tell such a wonderful story and the way it flows from scene to scene, I felt that had to be the way forward for that section. And by setting these small sequences but made out of stardust and put them into these cosmic-looking scenes, I hopefully created a quite a nice way of showing that.

That was one of the things we were talking about first. Steven’s note was he wanted to have everyday objects presented as though they were like a nebula or a galaxy out in space. So I was trying to build different ways of showing that. We had a Nebula Generator [which digital artists use to create configurable space nebula effects]. I could put a 3D model into it, and then it would render it as a galaxy or a nebula out in space.

Her shopping bag broke sending eggs and flour crashing
Down to the ground, just like star clusters smashing.

And I wanted there to be moments like the opening where the shopping bag falls and then the flour spreads out and there’s stars inside of that. I really wanted it to look like we were seeing like the birth of a galaxy or the birth of stars or something like that, where an event on Earth has a parallel to events out in space, visually at least.

Nick Holmes Music: There are some very abstract instrumental sections on The Overview. How did you decide to illustrate those, because there are no stories in those sections?

MS: A lot of the designs come from Hajo’s artwork. There are various sections and we wanted to have a journey, especially in the section, where we’ve got Randy McStine’s fantastic guitar solo, just after the Ark sequence where we go into an alien planet and we see the ghost on the moor again. For that sequence, I really wanted to put the viewer into that environment. And the idea there is that we had launched ourselves towards the end of the galaxy into the end of the universe, and now we’re flying back and landing on some other planet somewhere else. That was definitely trying to bring in as many of the colourful possibilities that alien worlds could have and just trying to realise that, and trying to show what it could look like.

I think a lot of these things were so influenced by films that we’ve seen already and designs that have been made, but also there’s probably limits to what we can imagine these alien worlds would look like because we are only influenced by what we see directly around us.

Nick Holmes Music: And in Perspective where Rotem Wilson’s spoken words provide all the perspectives of sizes of planets and galaxies, how much were you drawing on real images and how much was your imagination?

MS: The James Webb Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope have been taking some absolutely fantastic images which are available online where artists can use them. That was a massive resource to be able to look at and get inspiration from.

But for all of the scenes in ‘Perspective’, especially the ones where we’re going through nebulas and the larger cosmic objects, what I’m doing there is creating what is called a Pyro simulation which creates these kind of smoke effects. And that is driven off images and source material that’s taken from these incredible pictures of space.

And because they’re only two-dimensional images that we’ve got from these telescopes, what I wanted to be able to do is create that, but in a 3D space so I can fly a camera through it and we can see there’s some depth to it. I’m sure there’s probably some very technical way we could scientifically accurately do that. But imagine there’s just a slice of the photo or the image of that galaxy or that nebula, and then smoke starts to rise from both sides of that piece of paper that then creates this 3D object that I can then fly a camera into. I can then scatter stars inside of that as tiny little spheres that can then emit light, and that creates the effect of this 3D nebula.

Nick Holmes Music: I’m going to ask a slightly less serious question now, but I have to say when I saw Steven as an astronaut, which obviously he was very excited about, I had this image of Buzz Lightyear.

MS: Yes! [laughs] One of the early notes that Steven gave me was that we didn’t want it to almost come across like an action figure, floating in space; but the actual range of motion you get in those space suits, there is only a certain amount of movement that you can do in zero gravity. But we added a little bit more movement into the character to try and hopefully reduce any sort of, ‘Look, it’s Buzz Lightyear floating out in space.’

That was really good fun. I think the idea for came from Steven – looking across the Earth initially and then just being pulled across time and space and then experiencing the entirety of everything in a flowing strand across the screen, and what that’s meant to represent is the passage of time in this thin thread that’s going across space. Steven falls into that thread and then visits the earth and all these different places and then falls in and out of that in space, which is quite disorientating in a way for him.

Nick Holmes Music: Steven has been quite open about his fear of flying, but has also said that on balance, he probably would go into space given the opportunity. Would you go into space if you had the chance?

MS: I would probably share his fear of flying in a way, because I guess I think about it too much. You’re being rocketed in a tiny little capsule across the sky. But we’ve got ways of managing it, and everything’s tested. And when we know that the technology works, it’s amazing. We’ve had so many years of space exploration that it’s now coming to a point where we’ve commercial astronauts going up and experiencing space. You don’t have to be a NASA-trained astronaut, you need a lot of money at the moment, but maybe one day it will be a point where we can maybe think about doing that, and maybe going on a trip to the moon won’t be something out of The Jetsons. It would be achievable for most people and a regular occurrence.

To answer your question, I think I’d have to think very carefully about whether I did it or not. I guess I like having my feet on solid ground. But I think if I were given the opportunity, I don’t think I’d be able to pass it up, because not many people get to experience something like that. So I probably would be saying yes.

Nick Holmes Music: The final section, ‘Permanence,’ with Theo Travis’ beautiful saxophone solo. Can you describe what’s happening visually there? Is there a green shoot of hope?

MS: At the end, we’ve just had the Infinity Measured in Moments section, which is such a huge crescendo to the piece. There’s so much going on in that section and everything’s building up, and then we get this very soft end to the film where we’re floating in space.

After the visual onslaught of the ending section, because it is quite a lot and it is intended to make the viewer feel dizzy, it is blurry in sections where it is difficult to focus on it. That section was meant to be a ride through space where we can really just take a moment to consider the frame and see this asteroid that we’re flying down onto, and in the background of that scene, we have a huge black hole. And so we’re just one of the rocks that’s orbiting this black hole. Inevitably, these rocks are going to be sucked into that black hole and shredded.

And then as we reach the surface, we have this green shoot of life appearing in a place where it really shouldn’t. We really wanted to have some sort of ending where it wasn’t all about space as a cold, dark place, where it’s about death and nothing exists out there. I would like to think that there is more life out there and that the chances of there being life are quite high, especially when you look at how many solar systems and planets are out there. We wanted to leave it with somewhat of a positive view after diving into the darker aspects of it.

Nick Holmes Music: It’s also a very Steven Wilson way to end an album, isn’t it? So many of his albums with Porcupine Tree and his solo albums end on a gentle, quiet track rather than in a very loud climax. Is it a technique which he employs a lot?

MS: Well, there’s always been the really big epic tracks at the end of Steven Wilson albums, but yes, it’s going in the opposite direction and putting something quiet has been very effective as well. It just feels like you’ve got that moment to just sit back and take in what you’ve just heard.

Nick Holmes Music: Can I ask you a more general question? Are you a musician? Because watching it again, it struck me how clever the editing is, and how beautifully it matches the pace, the rhythm, and the emotion as well. But from a technical point of view you’re matching the music really well. Where does that come from in your background?

MS: When I was at school, I took music, but mainly music technology and production rather than a classical musical education. I was a kid who was trying to learn as much as I could on guitar, but I found all of the photography, video production, and animation side, and that’s what I ended up doing more music production than guitar. But I still play from time to time, and I still want to try and do something musically because I’ve been so fortunate to work with a lot of my musical heroes.

At some point, maybe I’ll decide to give music another shot. But it’s interesting you mentioned that, because I spent a lot of time listening through the music and finding the moments and following the music, and a lot of the time I find that as a filmmaker, you normally have to build your narrative structure, but what I’ve found is that the musicians have done that job for me. They’ve done the hard job of working out the journey that they’re taking the listener on; all I’m doing is just putting visuals to that story that they’ve already produced. As long as I can follow where the music is going and the moods and the styles of it, then I guess that’s all I need to know musically.

Nick Holmes Music: How would you sum up the narrative of The Overview?

MS: I think the main thing with The Overview, as Steven will say as well, is the idea of having perspective on what we’re doing and our legacy on Earth. What if an alien was looking down at Earth, what would they see and what would they think about us and the way that we live?

It’s a story of sustainability and trying to really protect the home that we all have and trying to forge a path towards being a sustainable human race where we’re able to live in harmony with the planet. A lot of people have had that same dream. But we have to make that align with the way that civilization has to run; we’re going to be consuming a certain number of resources for the human race to exist.

But I think that as long as decisions are being made, we’re consuming the right resources in terms of animals, forests that we’re cutting down, what we’re putting in the oceans. It’s an environmental message, but also an animal rights message as well, where I think that humans, hopefully at some point in time, can look at our impacts on the world and hopefully see a nicer world around us.

Nick Holmes Music: But I think, as you’ve touched on, it’s also a very human message about perspective, isn’t it?

MS: Yes, definitely that. We all get wrapped up in our own lives and everything can feel very overwhelming. You look at the news these days and it’s difficult to think we’re heading in the right direction. We are all just floating on a rock that’s flying through space. And as long as we can just be nice to each other – and I know that’s quite a naive thing to say –  but maybe that is the way that we have to look at the world, to take each problem as it comes and make the most empathetic response where we’re understanding our fellow humans on the planet, but also our fellow species on the planet, looking at animals and making sure that we’re providing the best world for us all to live in.

I feel like these days we have the technology to make a better world. And so it saddens me when I see that decisions are being made that are not maybe for the greater good of the planet, and it’s more just to make a bit more money, which only benefits a certain few.

I think there’s a lot of complexity in the human race, but I think that there’s definitely a message in The Overview, which is perspective; let’s try and forge a good path forward.

Nick Holmes Music: Is there anything you would like to add?

MS: I should also mention that I was assisted by my good friend Jack Hubbard, who helped me out with a lot of the more technical visual effects. We both worked on the film, and we were both there at the BFI IMAX show, and it was just an amazing thing to be able to share that experience with someone who has supported me massively over the years on pretty much every single project.

Jack is a visual effects artist who works at Framestore, one of the largest visual effects houses in London. He’s a very good friend and he’s always up for a challenge and he was amazing in answering a lot of the more technical visual effects questions because he uses a more advanced 3D software than I do.

Part of the process of putting it into the cinema is that you have to follow a certain amount of spec and quality control to be able to put it in that sort of environment. And so a lot of what I’ve been learning about in terms of video production and filmmaking is how to produce content to that kind of high-resolution, high-quality scale, and of course Steven works with Dolby Atmos and all of the high-end audio standard. So throughout the production of The Overview, I was really keen to bring that kind of high res, high end workflow towards the visuals as well.

Jack works in high end visual effects for TV, film, and advertising. I try to bring as many of those workflows from these high-end visual effects productions into the work that I do, which is much smaller scale, but it’s amazing what anyone can now access on YouTube software that’s freely available. And you can just follow these same standards and quality processes that feature films go through.

We had a test day at the Dolby showroom in London, where we screened the first version of the film and listened to it back in the Atmos mix. And it was fascinating talking to them about the Dolby Vision and the Dolby Atmos standards that they produce, the high-end HDR imagery. And then also the high-resolution surround audio.

Maybe that’s next on my list of things to do, to try and work out how I produce the highest quality image possible. I know that if you’ve got a Dolby Vision capable TV, there is a way that we could start to create a version of The Overview so that future projects could be Dolby Atmos, but also Dolby Vision as well. I’d love that.

Nick Holmes Music: Thank you very much for your time, and for spending so long talking to me.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. All stills from the film provided courtesy of Miles Skarin, with thanks.

For posts on Steven Wilson’s space music, see Space Songs Part I: The Porcupine Tree Years and Space Songs Part II: The Solo Years.

This post was edited on 2 August 2025 to include details about the design of the alien and the shapes in ‘Objects Meanwhile’ provided by Miles Skarin and again on 4 August 2025 to add a link to the Official Video for The Overview: Perspective.