As a space nerd, part of my personal prop projects include rockets. Here are three examples.
A Steampunk rocket, made from a wooden toy puzzle. This was made about 20 years ago.
A rocket I’m working on for a personal book project. More this summer.
In 2013, I was contacted by Tony DiTerlizzi to create a couple of keyframe illustrations based on his book “The Search for Wondla”, the first book in his excellent science fiction trilogy. It’s a superb series, and it would be incredible to have it made into a feature film franchise or Netflix series.
The final illustration, showing Eva and Muthr, beside the Goldfish flying car, the city of Solas in the background.
My sketch of Solas, used for the final painting.
Her’s the kit bashed car I built for the Goldfish to use for reference.
Here’s the model car in front of my iMac, the Photoshop painting in progress. This way I can get the realistic lighting on the car, and refraction through the windshield.
Here are a couple of new “inventions” – a Dream Reader, and a wizard staff, both made with found objects.
Made with a plastic box, some voltmeters, a slide viewer, antique headphones and various other bits.
Wizard staff lit up. It’s quite heavy. The wiring needs to be finished so a ring on your finger lights up the staff when you touch the metal triggers.
Staff in progress. Lots of found objects and sewing machine parts.
During the holidays last winter, I created a few personal works for a project, and here are the results. I will be moving in a different direction from this style of Photoshop painting over the coming holidays. Descriptions below, and of course, click to see bigger.
I love the idea of massive oversized industrial ruins in a landscape. The rocket pack in this picture is the one I built for my spacesuit costume.
The rough sketch from my sketchbook.
Rough sketch of steampunk-styled astronaut.
Final painting.
The bunny rabbits in the centre of the gear were indecisive lines right up to the end of this painting, but because they looked like bunnies, I decided “why not?”.
2017 is going to be the 50th anniversary of Expo 67. I was there when I was 9 years old, and it helped fuel my imagination for future visions ever since. This is my take on Expo 2067, the 100th anniversary, with a bit of a retro-future flair.
My rough sketch for Expo 2067
(Part 1 here) Once again, no spoilers.
When I was asked to take a shot at designing the aliens for Arrival, I leapt at the opportunity. It was still the very early days of pre-production, and Denis and Patrice had already given the alien task to a couple of concept artists. The extraordinary concept artist Peter Konig was working at the same time as me, but I didn’t get to see any of his work till a few weeks ago. In the end, veteran creature designer Carlos Huante was the one that got it right; his majestic and mysterious heptapods embodied all the qualities Denis was looking for.
My contributions were more to see if I could come up with something different than the other guys, so I had a little free reign to mess around with ideas, with the mandate to “design something we haven’t seen before.” I had only a couple of weeks for this task, so I experimented more with shapes and impressions. Below are just a few samples of ideas I tried. In hindsight, after seeing the film, I’m glad these didn’t make the cut, as I was going a bit too abstract to identify with the beings. Once again, I’m still so grateful that I got to work on such an incredible film, even if my part was small.
A fairly abstract version of the aliens.
My first doodles, based more on the original short story, “Story Of Your Life,” by Ted Chiang.
More shape explorations. The bottom two rows were created using Alchemy, a little drawing app that allows you to draw symmetrical objects.
More early impressions.
Smaller, smokier shapes.
I built this contraption, with a 16-sided prism from an old film editing bench. The idea was to experiment with flickering light on the screen and see if I could create some kind of sense that the aliens entered and exited though a projection. The video below was taken with my phone camera. The last 3 or 4 seconds are what I thought had an interesting feeling.
More roughs, playing with shapes and symmetry again.
Getting weirder with ideas here.
Playing with very alien anatomies, shape-shifting and kinetic forms.
In February of 2015, I began work on “Story Of Your Life,” the Denis Villeneuve movie that would eventually be called “Arrival.” I worked with Patrice Vermette, the production designer to illustrate his and Denis’ ideas, and over the course of three months provided many variations of designs for the ship and its occupants. It was a real treat to be part of this film, and to work so closely with one of our most visionary directors, a real honour.
Here are a few samples of the various designs, beginning with the vessels which were called ‘shells’. There were many shape explorations, beginning with a sphere, some triangles, odd shapes, and eventually an ovoid. The lozenge shape seen in the final was designed by another concept artist; sorry, not sure who*. No spoilers here, as most of what you see ended up in the trailer. (*Edit – the final lozenge shape was rendered by assistant art director Aaron Morrison)
Coming next, Part 2: Alien designs
Spheres were in the first script I read. Thanks to Noah Bradley for his fine photos of Iceland, used in a couple of concepts here. The sphere shape was abandoned quickly at the start.
One of many texture exploration pages.
Getting closer to the final idea.
An illustration of the basecamp, with the final design of the shell.
Base camp, and on the way to the shell.
Early explorations of the meeting room in the shell had various shapes and colours at first. this was getting closer to what Patrice and Denis were looking for. I loved the idea and simplicity of a wide and empty space – the exact opposite of typical cluttered movie spaceships. With less to distract, we pay more attention to the main characters.
More interior explorations.
The top image was going to be called “The Meinert Room”. The way one “entered” the room – inside it while being outside it, like a Klein bottle, was going to be a challenge, FX-wise, and for set-design it added a bit too much to an already tight soundstage. The bottom image shows some early exploration of the alien appearance.
Here’s the full trailer to Arrival. I did a fair bit of concept art during the early stages of preproduction, and I’m pleased to see a lot of my work in this trailer. It was by far the best screenplay I’ve worked with. The work itself challenged me immensely – in a good way. Denis Villeneuve and his production Designer Patrice Vermette were a joy to work with – brilliant minds both. Intelligent, thoughtful Sci-Fi.
This is one from my sketchbook. Quick spontaneous scribble that I turned into a pencil study. Turned out ok.
Back in 2011, I posted some images I created, trying to reproduce the effect of light through eyelids that are almost closed. Recently, I created a video based on these images for an exciting exhibit at Dawson College called Vision(s), on till May 11th at the Warren G. Flowers Gallery at Dawson College in Montreal. The video was created using photography through polarized mylar, Photoshop layering and effects, video segments using lenses and found objects in front of the lens and After Effects compositing – my first full video using that program. I created the music using a tiny segment of the end of a song, time stretching it, reversing it and layering it on top of itself to create an ambient wash.
Here’s the stuff I used to make the video.
Every once in awhile, I like to grab a pencil and draw without any preconceived idea or rough sketch. Sometimes it’s just random scribbles, sometimes it’s something like this that happens. It’s got some old-fashioned Sci-Fi clichés. Guy standing, looking at alien stuff. Took me about about 4.5 hours total. Sometimes I want to smack myself and say “imagine how many drawings you could crank out if you did this every day.” Yeah, I know. We who carry our supply of pencils, pens and paints will always beat ourselves up for all the times we “could have been making art.” I think when all the client-based work slows down, and we have time to do other things, we do other things. Then, when the time is quiet, we draw, to remind ourselves that we can still do it.
