production company Limelight, where he designed and directed music videos, including "Paradise" (1988) for Nigerian singer Sade, to the prolific Propaganda Films, co-owned by director David Fincher. McDowell worked for a solid year with Fincher, seven days a week, designing sets for Madonna's videos "Express Yourself", "Oh Father" and "Vogue" amongst many others, and commercials for companies like Levi's, Converse, Nike, Pepsi, Revlon, Sony, Coca-Cola, and Chanel. As the young video and commercial directors that McDowell was working with started to attract feature producers, McDowell too was pulled towards film. His first feature was also the first to feature virtual reality, The Lawnmower Man. Back at Propaganda Films, his work was seen by director Alex Proyas who asked him to design The Crow (1994), an independent fantasy action film starring Brandon Lee, which opened at the top of the box office and went on cult status. Filmography Production design Beginning with The Crow in 1994, McDowell began to production design features back-to-back, working with directors like Terry Gilliam (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1998), and again with David Fincher for one of the most controversial films of 1999, Fight Club. In 1999, he was asked by Steven Spielberg to design Minority Report. This film, which began with no script and involved two separate pre-production design phases, provoked McDowell to develop a new design methodology that built a holistic world for the narrative, within which the script evolved, and created the first fully digital art department. When the film released in 2002, it was noted for its deep attention to the detail, and the reality of this future world. In addition, it became apparent that the visionary technologies that grew from the world and became part of the landscape of the film one by one became realized in the real-world. From the experience during the film and observation of its long-term world-facing outcomes McDowell developed a narrative design practice known as world building, which continues to be the basis of his creative practice. As a concrete example of the design fiction influence of the film John Underkoffler, who had acted as science advisor and collaborator with McDowell for the art-science of film's design had built a start-up, Oblong Industries, to produce systems using gesture modeled on the fictional ideas that he proposed in the world build of the film. The Lawnmower Man (1992) The Crow (1994) Crying Freeman (1995) Fear