Phil Saunders' Random Stuff

Cowboys & Aliens

2011-08-01T12:58:00.000-07:00

Cowboys and Aliens opened this weekend to somewhat disappointing box office, at least as far as I'm concerned - I personally thought it was great. Strong character work and acting, great dialog and lots of fun. Jon Favreau keeps pulling it off, and if anyone could have made a stronger film given the basic premise promised by the title, I don't know who. Let's face it, it could have been the summer's biggest joke. Instead, the material was taken seriously and treated lovingly, and we got a fine film I'm proud to have contributed to. So congratulations to Jon, writers Alex Kurtzman & Bob Orci and Production Designer Scott Chambliss for a great movie!

Anyway, I'll be posting some of my concept work for the alien "speeder" vehicle in the coming days. For now, here's the image that I was told caught Spielberg's eye and led to the speeder design as we see it in the film.

Avengers Assemble!!

2011-08-01T11:28:00.000-07:00

Most of you have probably seen this already as it was one of the most highly publicized images to come out of this year's Comic Con, but here's the Avengers Poster that Marvel released in seven parts to eager fans. Click HERE for the full poster in a larger size.

Illustrated by my good friends and colleagues Ryan Meinerding, Charlie Wen and Andy Park from their costume designs for the movie, it includes the first appearance of the Mk 7 Iron Man suit I designed for Avengers. Thanks, Ryan, for doing it better justice than I ever would!!

Looking forward to posting my own design sketches of the Mk 7 when the movie comes out. And watch out for this one in 2012, people. I don't usually make predictions on movies I've worked on, but if it's half as good as Joss Whedon's script we were working from, it's going to kick some serious ass!! And Joss is directing it himself, so how likely is it he'll screw that up? 2012 is going to be massive.

Captain America

2011-07-23T16:34:00.000-07:00

Going to see Cap tonight, can't wait! So to celebrate I'm posting my small contribution to the project, a couple of designs I did for post production while working on Avengers in the Marvel Visual Development department earlier this year. For a couple of day's side work this was really a milestone for me, since I basically began my passion for this business at the age of 7 when my parents bought me Joe Johnston's Star Wars Sketchbook. I must have copied every drawing in that book a dozen times before the age of ten (when I got the Empire Strikes Back sketchbook and started all over again!) and that's essentially how I learned to draw. So to get to contribute even the smallest bit to one of my idol's movies meant a great deal. And that he turned out to be a friendly, gracious man is just the icing on the cake.

This first design never made it into the movie sadly, and I don't know whether the sequence ended up on the cutting room floor or was ever even produced, but would have shown the early days of Hydra with a squadron of these heavily modified Messerschmitt BF109's. The first pass I added double engines with counter-rotating props and a twin-tail to accomodate a tail gun...

Someone in visual effects thought it needed to be more different, so the cockpit was updated, the nose lengthened and at Joe Johnston's suggested a pusher-prop a la Dornier Do335 was added. Too bad it never saw the light of day.

Lastly I was handed a pencil sketch Joe Johnston had made of this remote-operated bathysphere and asked to detail out the design for production. It was a quick-turnaround job, so I rushed this out so the previs department could model it up and start on the shot.

As far as I've heard this made it into the movie, so I'll have at least one thing to look out for tonight, besides celebrating the amazing work of my friends Ryan Meinerding, Charlie Wen, Andy Park, Nathan Schroeder Jim Martin and Daniel Simon! Hope you all enjoy the movie.

**And yes, the sub was in the movie... for all of about a half-second blurry shot! :) Great movie, though, I had a blast. **

Speaking at Otis

2011-05-05T17:21:00.000-07:00

Had a great time last night speaking to this year's graduating class in the Digital Media department at Otis. Watch out! A serious batch of talent about to flood the industry and take all our jobs!

With any luck I sabotaged them all with some timely misinformation and crushed their wills with my devastating criticism, so we can all sleep better.

Have to say, I am continually astounded at the level of technical skill and imagination that this generation of artists is entering the workforce with. As I told this lot of future future-builders, this truly is a golden age for conceptual art. The accessibility of the tools and availability of training has really accelerated what seemed for me to be a decades-long learning curve. With such a leg up I can't imagine what all of these artists will be doing two decades into their careers. Hope I'm still around to see it, and not doddering on about how "In MY day, you had to use GOUACHE! And it dried a DIFFERENT COLOR than what you MIXED! UPHILL! BOTH WAYS!!"

...Oh, crap.
That was me last night.

So thanks to Otis for hosting me and to all of the students for giving me their attention and honoring me with their appreciation. My best of luck to all of them.

The Rectifier

2011-04-28T19:07:00.001-07:00

Another of my first jobs in the art department was the final surfacing and detailing of the Rectifier, Clu's personal homage to his predecessor Sark's carrier in the first film. Production Designer Darren Gilford is a rarity in the industry, a production designer with a concept design background of his own. He worked out the simple evocative shape of the rectifier in sketchup, treating it simultaneously as a vehicle and as a set, working the design around very specific sight-lines that the director needed in order to tell the story.

Once again I was tasked with taking established forms and giving them life, scale and texture through my renderings, focusing primarily on the exterior. These were painted over screen grabs from sketchup, with textures warped to fit with the perspective tool in Photoshop, used as a channel in order to dodge in the varying specularity of the panel breakup.

This was one of many quick comps done in Modo and painted over to come up with the layout of Clu's invasion force.

World of Warcraft cards

2011-04-27T14:30:00.001-07:00

Taking a break from Tron for a moment, here are a couple of trading card game illos for World of Warcraft I did between Tron and Cowboys & Aliens. Definitely a break from the world of black and neon blue!

For those familiar with the mythology of the game, above is Hemet Nesingwary with his latest creation, the Nesingwary 4000, and below is a Crypt Fiend.

I just sent off four more for the latest two sets, but those won't be published for awhile.

The City

2011-04-27T10:47:00.000-07:00

Just about everyone on the show did some work on the city, since it was such a major element of the film. Again I came in for final detailing and keyframe work. This was a moment to get a feel for Sam riding into the city. The beautiful bridge was the work of set designer & architect Ben Edelberg. Innumerable elements went into this frame, but Dave Scott should be singled out for his incredible graphic design work on the film. Every graphic element from fonts to control panels to the lines on the road went through him, and he would generate stuff on the fly to fit our needs.

Another city keyframe, painted over a number of elements provided by Ben Proctor, Joe Hiura, and Kevin Loo.

Daniel Simon was responsible for most of the vehicle design for the movie, but the original idea was to populate the city with a wide variety of background vehicles, so we all got to take a crack at some of those. This is the only one I did that actually made it in to the final film, but I was pleased to see it in a couple of shots.

In homage to the original Tron designer Syd Mead, I tried to come up with a simple shape that would evoke a Lincoln Town Car, a vehicle near and dear to Syd's heart.

I blocked out this quick model in Modo so the Digital Domain Modelers would have a reference for the scale, proportions and subtle surface development, otherwise such a simple shape could easily have ended up looking blocky.

I was all excited to have a toy of one of my designs, but the die-cast they ended up producing was of Daniel Simon's limo design, which never even made it into the film! Oh well...

Runaway Sam - A collaborative process case study

2011-04-27T09:49:00.000-07:00

Since I came into the project relatively late in the game, much of the design had already been established, so my job focused on final finish, whether taking loosely roughed out designs and detailing them or creating keyframes that would become style guides. As I mentioned in a previous post these images were often painted directly over rough previs frames, and served as templates for the VFX artists at Digital Domain for the final look and feel of the movie. I've never worked on anything before where the expectation of the final finish for concept art was at the level of matte paintings! Thankfully we were given plenty of time.

Here's the original Previs frame:

An early rough work-in-progress, Just blocking in the forms of the light-cycle and setting up the lighting and palette, still looking for the right shape for the towers:

And blocking in the towers. Note the perspective grid to get the foreshortening and repetition correct.

This image was a colaboration with Joe Hiura again. The Generator towers were a Solidworks model he created based on some very loose sketches of mine and incorporating his unique tech detailing sensibilities. Here's an early iteration of Joe's towers, rendered in Hypershot:

Joe's design was a little too vertical for my composition, so I cut and pasted and warped it to fit the composition as a test. When it was roughly comped in though, the production designer thought that the angles made the space feel like a high-tech barn...

...so we went back to the hockey-stick shape from my initial rough-in and Joe did another pass at the design, which I set up and rendered in Modo:

...And the final keyframe with Joe's towers comped in. The lighting was all painted in. Often for underlighting I'll just invert the image and use it as a mask to paint in the highlighted area, or I'll make a duplicate layer and run levels on it and then blend it with a layer mask. Ultimately I find it gives me more control to just play with the elements in 2D rather than trying to match my desired lighting in 3D. Plus you end up with a more painterly feel and all of the 2D manipulation kills the 3D "curse."

I was pretty wowed when I saw the final shot in the movie. I'm sure if I screencapped it from the Blu-ray it would look pretty close to this.

End of Line Club

2011-04-27T09:29:00.001-07:00

I had a crack at doing the final design for the End of Line Club, working again from designs established by David Levy and then Ben Proctor. A rough model had been started by a set designer in Canada (whom I never met so unfortunately can't remember the name.) Working off of that I finished off the design to the needs of the director, who wanted the exterior graphic of the windows to match the already established interior set.

Ultimately I had to produce a couple of keyframes that set up the sense of height above the city and atmosphere. This one showed how a recognizer would dock to drop off Clu and his minions...

...And the fateful attack by the Black Guards. I had a lot of fun with painting the clouds and the glow from the city below.

Digital Set Designer Joe Hiura ultimately translated my final design into a kick-ass Solidworks model.

More Tron: Legacy

2011-04-27T09:03:00.001-07:00

The first environment I worked on was the Game Grid. By the time I started the show the design had already been established and my job was to create a few "style guide" keyframes to set up the atmosphere, lighting and look-and-feel of the environment. Working over screencaps of Production Designer Darren Gilford's sketch-up models imported into Modo, I rendered these in Photoshop. David Levy had already found the sweet spot of heavy atmosphere and crushed blacks/blown out blues in his speedpaintings, so my job was really to find the moments and adapt that look into a more rendered finish.

Originally Rinzler's bike was going to follow Sam & Quora out into the wildlands, so this was a frame of that moment. Daniel Simon provided the model of his beautiful Light-runner for this frame.

I had fun with this one. A lot of the keyframes were painted over frames of lo-rez previs, so illos actually match exact moments in the film. Sam didn't have a final helmet design yet, so I took my own crack at it.

This one was a real struggle. Figurative work generally isn't my forte, so trying to come up with a likeness of Jeff Bridges from an unusual angle and lighting was nigh impossible for me. Needless to say I did not succeed! I'm happy if it looks remotely human.

Again, this was more of a digital matte painting than an illustration. Again, taking screencaps of model elements to paint over. I think the bkgd even includes some of Ben Proctor's city map!

This job was such a back-and-forth collaborative effort, I don't know that there was much that any of us could claim to have done solely by ourselves. This may sound limiting but in fact it was a really fun and free process, and I think we all grew a lot as artists from passing our work back and forth between us.

Tron: Legacy

2011-04-25T14:23:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I know, it would have been cooler to post all of this when the movie was hot, but I'm either a lazy bastard (That or I just don't have any time!) So at long last here's some work from the grid. Since I started out in the costume dept. on this show, let's start with COSTUMES---

This was my design for the SIREN characters, back when money was no object. Neville Page had started this one out and I picked up where he left off. The costume would be practical and blend from makeup to suit seamlessly. The robotic pivots on the knees and ankles would be a digital replacement. The final execution ended up being a little less ambitious, but still retains the basic character and lines.

Following off of that aesthetic was the character that would ultimately become Zeus. Also started far more ambitious (and expensive!) Being a two-faced sort of guy, I liked the idea that he would have a drawer full of faces he could take on and off as the need suited him.

Below is the final design for Clu. I was the last of a long line of artist who took a crack at this character. The helmet was a tough design problem, finally cracked by Neville. The undersuit was also originally a lot more geometric, but budget dictated that we incorporate some of the moulds from the black guard character, so it ended up tying together pretty closely. The digital Jeff Bridges was also going to have a more Hitler-like haircut. My friend Fabian Lacey illustrated a ridiculous number of haircuts for him before they decided he should ultimately have a young Jeff Bridges mane.

Uber-zBrush artist Tully Sommers ultimately did the final polish on this costume in 3-D, making it all work in the round and adjusting for the countless practical challenges that kept coming up in fabrication.

Finally to give a sense of just how much detail we got into for these costumes, here are a couple of illos of boot designs, in this case for the Sirens and for Clu's major-domo Jarvis.

More environment, keyframe and vehicle art in the next couple of days. Stay tuned...

More Tron Legacy...

2010-09-28T16:04:00.000-07:00

Looks like I've got another concept in the latest batch of illos released by Disney. Check out my early design for the Siren at io9.com. Click on the image on their site for ultra-hi-res.

I hope to post more stuff as it gets released.

New Tron Legacy Art...

2010-05-14T17:10:00.000-07:00

Finally something from Tron Legacy that I worked on has been released so that I can post it. This just appeared on helloflynn.com:

I wish I could claim credit for the design of this, but it passed through a lot of hands before I got to do the final image. This is basically a photoshop paint-over and composite taken from several Digital Domain renders of their model made from Joe Hiura's Solidworks model of Ben Procter's design interpretation of Production Designer Darren Gilford's re-design of the original Tron Recognizer. See how it works in the movie world? When they say that film is a collaborative medium, they're not kidding!! At least I got to do the fun final touches. This image was created as a guideline to the visual effects department for lighting, texture and additional details.

I did a ton of work on this movie in both the costume and art departments over about 10 months. Looking forward to posting more work when the movie comes out.

Iron Man Concept Toys

2010-04-06T08:59:00.000-07:00

Never one to let anything go to waste, Marvel and Hasbro have put out the Iron Man 2 Concept Series of 4" Action figures. What does "Concept Series" mean, you ask? Well, dear reader, it means some of them are based on my UNUSED concepts from Iron Man 1. Click on the links for the original renderings these are based on.

The first is based on my Stealth Suit concept, and is known as the Hypervelocity armor.The second is the Deep Dive armor... And the last is one of my first attempts at War Machine (back when it was to be additional snap-on armor for the MK 3 & worn by Stark) now dubbed the Power Assault armor. As shown in the original sketch here:

Kudos to the artists at Hasbro, who translated the designs remarkably faithfully for such small action figures, and even filled in the back details (which I never addressed) with a great eye to maintaining the form vocabulary. Bravo!
All at your local toy store...

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN???

2010-04-06T08:19:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know, I am the world's worst blogger.
So I just finished up on COWBOYS & ALIENS, Jon Favreau's new movie. Looks like it's going to be a lot of fun, you know, like a Peanut Butter Cup. Two great tastes that... you know what I'm talking about. Anyway, I was responsible for designing the signature alien vehicle (oops! hope that's not a spoiler! There are...ALIENS in the movie! And they have some sort of... VEHICLE! I think I hear the Dreamworks police knocking as we speak! That's all you're going to get out of me though.)
Before that I finished up Tron Legacy, which I know everybody out there is madly anticipating. Tough to wait till December though. And that means there's a year's worth of work I have to wait to post!!
So in the mean time, I'm reaching way back to some work I did for the ill-fated Marvel theme park in Dubai. Why ill-fated, you ask? Well as soon as people started abandoning their Bentleys in the airport parking lot in their rush to escape from debtor's prison, the writing was on the wall that the economy just wasn't there for the worlds largest entertainment complex.

So here are a couple of pieces for some early ride concepts that didn't make the cut...

The first was a dark-ride in the vein of the Raider's ride at Disney, themed to Marvel's villains. Depicted is our tour vehicle in the wrong place at the wrong time as Electro escapes from his containment...

Above is one of the many versions of an Iron Man ride, this one a "people-mover' style dark-ride shooting gallery using video projections. Much fun! Ironically I noticed that the final presentation version sent to Dubai had the woman cropped from the image and replaced with the man. I guess I should have expected that...

Anyway, more from this on another post!

Phil.

Hot Wheels the Movie

2009-02-26T07:41:00.000-08:00

Yeah, I know how it sounds... Indeed there is a new movie genre out there, and it's the two-hour toy commercial. And with Transformers 2 & GI-Joe coming soon, don't expect it to die a quick death. I sure hope not, it's job security for people like me. Bring it on!

This one was fun though, basically a retelling of the Wizard of Oz, but with an orange plastic road rather than a yellow brick one. No flying monkeys, but hot-pantsed Snap-On Tools calendar girls instead. This is another one that didn't make it out of development (like much of what I work on.) The greenlight review happened the weekend that Stealth opened, so I don't think there's much doubt why Sony gave it the axe.

Anyway, much fun to be had with McG and his crew. He has a well-earned reputation as the industry's biggest cheerleader. Everything is positive with him, even the stuff he doesn't like is Awesome! Makes for a good time. I'm rooting for Terminator Salvation. After We are Marshall, I think he's redeemed himself from Charlies Angels 2. Maybe.

So here's the ultimate road movie...

I really loved this idea, the Snake Pit, our villain's lair. Looks like a strip mine as you approach, but as you get closer you realize that it's a junkyard hundreds of feet deep with nothing but the most desireable classic, exotic custom and rare cars. Look for some surprises among the Snake's "collection."

I did promise you calendar girls, didn't I?

The Emerald, er, Motor City, the end of the Orange Plastic Road. Some earlier versions of this by James Clyne and Mark Goerner were really cool, featuring transforming, automotive-formed architecture, but McG wanted a more grounded, 20th century americana take on the world, just as if someone went crazy with cloverleaf offramps.

One of my favorite shots, a bonding moment between son and dad. I think this image really captures what McG was trying to make out of this movie. Could have been fun.

More later, with storyboards...

Superman "Flyby"

2009-02-26T07:31:00.000-08:00

Here's a random image from the ill-fated Brett Ratner-directed, JJ Abrams-written version of Superman. I was on the show for about 4 months, of which I think about 3 months was without a director. I overlapped BR for about two weeks before he left, and I think about 2 weeks before I left to get married McG took over the show. This is about as un-dynamic a composition as you can come up with, but Production Designer Owen Patterson wanted a straight one-point perspective view of Superman facing off against the Rouser (a Japa... er, Kryptonian Battle Pod, don't ask) so you could compare scale. I had fun designing the Rouser, though.

More John Carter

2009-02-25T19:15:00.001-08:00

Here are a few more images from John Carter of Mars.

These are a couple of designs for the "enemy" city of Zodanga. It's supposed to be a very militarized industrial city. My thought for the design was that they would have built within a pair of overlapping meteor craters. Barsoom (Mars) in the stories is metal-poor, so my hypothesis was that the main source of mined metals would be nickel-iron meteors. Zodanga then is built within a deep mine at the center of the craters, while the debris walls would form an effective natural battlement.

This first shot features John's escape from Zodanga riding a stolen Zodangan flyer (beautifully designed by Ryan Church.)

John, Deja and company escape from the Warhoons on their Thoats, with Woola guarding the flank.

The ruined city of Thark. I loved the idea of erosion happening from below, rather than above, and I played with it throughout the various cities. Buildings would be glassy fused sand, so the thought of a kind of coastal erosion look from the eventual decay of the bonding agent and the constant sandstorms seemed natural. I also love the gravity-defying quality, since Mars' low gravity is such a major plot point in the story.

The City of Helium. I wanted a much softer look for this city, and more modern. To keep a consistent look though, I thought that it would be cool to have the Barsoomian architects adopt the look of erosion from their ancient cities as a deliberate design statement. I thought it could be like the way we artificially age materials, or grow ivy on walls, something that lends an artificial air of authenticity to relatively new architecture.

I also played with the idea of flared bases that were then undercut to emphasise the gravity-defying quality of Barsoomian architecture.

Jon Favreau also wanted to hint at an allusion to the Twin Towers in the twin towers of Helium, so topped them off with a bit of the WTC fluting.

More JCOM

2009-02-11T19:58:00.000-08:00

Alright, so you don't have to wait too long.

Process, process, process. I figured I'd show you some raw, uncensored thumbnails, right from the scanner. This is where most of these images originate, with a 4" x 2" prisma pencil on vellum sketch (or two, or three.) Some go somewhere, some don't. It's all about the composition and the idea at this stage. Sometimes I'll even scan them in and paint over top, just to get a head start.

Stunningly Long Absence!!

2009-02-11T19:29:00.000-08:00

Sorry to have been away so long from posting, I've been bogged down in work. I just finished a stint of 12 hour days (plus 2 hours of commuting) in the costume department for TR2N. I am now happily ensconced once again in the Art Department (shorter hours, 5 minutes from home... Ahhh...) so hopefully I'll have a chance to post more frequently again!

So here are a couple of things to whet your appetite... A pair of key frames from an early pass by Jon Favreau at bringing John Carter of Mars to the screen.

The first is a shot of John discovering the incubator (read the books if you don't know what that is.) I conceived of it as being a pit covered with Thoat skins covered in sand. This would have blown off, revealing the incubator to John. The skins were to quickly give him something to cover himself with since there was no way we were going to get away with him running around naked all movie like in the books.

The second is just a beauty shot of the Martian landscape with John and his best buddy on Thoatback. I liked the idea of there being a lot of obsidian-like fused-glass formations, which leads to their architecture, which I had envisioned as being sculpted like a sand-castle and then "fused" into glass with some kind of heat projector (8th ray? 7th?)

Anyway, more to come when I can get a moment to crop them to web size.

Spidey 3

2008-10-20T15:05:00.000-07:00

Here are a few keyframes I did for Spidey 3 a few years back. I joined the embattled project pretty late in the game, right after the production design regime change from Neil Spisak to Mike Riva a few weeks into principle photography. We were only a few weeks out from shooting the final battle scene and they had already started building a full-sized set of the first few stories of a skyscraper under construction. Unfortunately the actual scene to take place in the set hadn't been written yet.

I was brought in initially to visualize some of the action and also to design how the same set could be dressed to represent several different levels of the building under construction.

I've never been on a movie where the script changed so radically so often. I wouldn't be half-way through a keyframe when someone would look over my shoulder and say "Oh. Didn't you know? It's no longer Venom in that scene, it's Goblin..." This is why we paint in layers...
It was also pretty political with the change-over in art department. Jim Carson and I kept getting asked to do pretty much the same work, which was really demoralizing, particularly for him since he'd been on the project for over a year already doing great work. I felt really bad, it just wasn't a fun environment. The construction site set ended up being struck and rebuilt twice more for re-shoots. Ahh, this is how movies are made these days. And we wonder why they're so expensive... Anyway, on to the art...

The construction site, ground level. The illustration was painted over a photo of a foamcore & plastic maquette by Brent Phillips of the basic structure. I had to make this in an infuriating number of layers so that elements could be removed and added to dress the other levels. The other versions are even more boring than this though, as they consist of even more removed.

The big battle with Sandman. This version is based on the character design by EJ Krisor, but really doesn't do his awesome version justice. This shot owes a lot to Jim Carson's previous version which you can see on his site HERE.

Spidey swinging to the rescue, back when it was Gwen Stacey in her sports car, not MJ in a taxi.

And speak of the devil...

I can't even remember which way this went in the final film. I think it was venom coming out of the shadows and not goblin, but I can't be sure, since I painted it both ways.

This ended up pretty verbatim in the movie, which I was pleased about. Really saccharine colors, but fun to paint, since it was all freehand and not bogged down in a thousand layers of photo-manipulation!

Tripwire Magazine interview

2008-10-02T10:37:00.000-07:00

I was recently interviewed for the 2008 Tripwire Annual, a yearly compendium of genre articles and news out of the UK. Worth picking up if you're on the other side of the pond. It's one of those rare articles where they don't try to tell their own story by paraphrasing you beyond recognition, so kudos to Joel Meddows & his crew.

Also features a gorgeous 2-page Dr. Who spread by my buddy Jeff Carlysle & some really sweet storyboards by an english board artist named Martin Asbury who I'm ashamed to admit I'd never heard of.

So pick it up and support good entertainment journalism!

Oh, the Iron Man stuff keeps coming...

2008-09-26T15:02:00.001-07:00

I was planning on holding this stuff back until the "Art of Iron Man" book came out (come on, you want there to be some surprises!) but it looks like thanks to the internet once again the cat's out of the bag. A bunch of stuff got posted to Yahoo Movies, including these three images I did at the very end of production as alternate suit designs that would have been in a "Hall of Armor" coda at the end of the film.

This first one is a concept for War Machine. I spent a lot of time on developing this suit, which was of course cut from the script about half way through pre-production. Originally it was going to be called the MK IV armor and would have been weaponized swap-out parts that would be worn over the original MK III armor. Earlier versions were red and gold, and would have been worn by Tony Stark in the final battle sequence.

And for those of you speculating, sorry folks, as far as I know, if there is a War Machine in IM 2, it's unlikely to be this one. You'll just have to wait and see!

This next one is an attempt at suggesting "stealth" technology in the surface treatment of the suit. This was an idea that was played with early on in the MK 3 development, but was ultimately abandoned as not being classic enough. I revived and updated it for this special purpose suit.

This last one has a funny history. Throughout pre-production, every time we would present our designs for the suit, Avi Arad, the film's producer, would ask us for an underwater suit. Now I should mention that there was never an underwater scene in the script, but as the toy licencing is such a large part of the revenue from these films, there was a lot of pressure to use as many variations on the suit as possible in the film, all budgetary condsiderations notwithstanding. Needless to say, the underwater suit never saw the light of day, but in homage to Avi, I drew this one up as a possible addition to the hall of armor.

Reset Generation Launched...

2008-08-19T15:36:00.000-07:00

Ugh! Sorry it's been so long since the last post, I've just been slammed with work and daddyhood, and I'm a terrible multi-tasker!

A cel phone game I contributed a character to just launched for the Nokia NGAGE platform. Free to play online, so check it out at www.resetgeneration.com. They've been trying to market us as "celebrity designers" (yeah right!!!) so have a laugh at my profile here.

I designed the Monster Trainer character (supposed to be a riff on Pokemon.) Kind of a departure for me, they don't usually let me out of my tech cage to do cartoony work, so it was pretty fun to stretch those muscles. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out, they stayed pretty faithful to the design.

Below is the original design, along with a couple of development sketches.

Iron Man suit early development

2008-06-25T20:47:00.000-07:00

The suit design process involved a lot of ideation before settling down and refining the final Mk3 design. Below are some of the sketches from that exploration. This was kind of a shotgun approach, trying out a lot of different aesthetics and rendering techniques.

This first one was an attempt to try to update the color breakup of the original red and gold suit. This one is a lot more of a bruiser than the final production model, and I was exploring some form ideas to try to give the impression of solidity to the sheet metal, shearing off organic forms to create flat surfaces defined by strong edges. This was an approach that we ended up adapting to the final design in areas like the forearms & legs.

The next one came from the concept of "wearable ordinance" as an alternative to the more streamlined "wearable aircraft" approach that had emerged from Adi's original sketch. I referenced modern tank ablative armor, as well as medieval and roman armor. It had an interesting aesthetic, but ultimately wasn't iconic enough.

This was an attempt at a more modular and organic approach, that would have used Electroactive Polymer Actuators (real-life artificial muscles that are being developed by JPL and NASA, using plastics that contract or expand when current is run through them.) Jon noted that the audience expectation would be more mechanical, with miniaturized pistons, actuators & servos to connect with the metaphor of Iron Man. I think he went in the right direction.

A more streamlined and athletic approach that tried for thicker overlaps between plates. Jon felt that this was too much of a "swimmer's body", rather than the more powerful boxer's build he was looking for. As I think we all expected from the beginning, an evolution of Adi's wearable airplane design was ultimately the way to go.

I also spent a lot of time in this phase working on a Mk 4 suit which would be a militarized version (can you say War Machine, anyone?) that was ultimately cut from the script. With any luck it will turn up in the sequel!

John Berkey

2008-06-25T12:04:00.000-07:00

It seems to be a dark time for my childhood heroes. I only discovered in my latest Cinefex that one of my absolute favorite artists has also passed on. John Berkey was one of the greats, with an unmatched fluidity and effortless-looking style. I first discovered Berkey's work with the unforgettable poster for Star Wars, and the fold-up epic battle poster that came with the first album I ever bought with my own money, the Star Wars Soundtrack. I remember being outraged in the way only a nerdy kid can, at how there were multiple Millenium Falcons in the piece, and how the TIE Fighter's solar panels were square, rather than hexagonal.

As I began to become an artist in my own right, Berkey's masterful ability to denote solid form in the fewest, seemingly effortless brushstrokes became a goal that to this day I despair of ever reaching. It was always a delight to discover his visions of space and technology hiding in the pages of Popular Science or Road and Track, and I would find myself picking up softcover SF books from authors I didn't even read, as the Berkey covers promised wonderous adventure that the text could rarely live up to. There was an optimism to his visions of titanic, streamlined spacecraft tracing rainbow contrails through the firmament that evoked a heady time of exploration and discovery that we seem to have lost in this period of cynicism and apathy toward space.

A prolific artist, he left us a wealth of pieces to continue to inspire us, and in recent years two collections of his work were published, something I could only have dreamed of as a child. Hopefully his work can keep inspiring new generations for years to come.

Stan Winston

2008-06-25T11:51:00.000-07:00

By now everyone has heard about the passing of one of the greats, Stan Winston. Stan had been a hero of mine since the days of Terminator & Aliens, when as a kid I would pore over the pages of Cinefex and Starlog and dream of working alongside these masters of imagination. Well, by the time I got my chance, Stan had long since handed off the hands-on side of the business, but I did get to meet him & work closely with his talented crew on two movies, Zathura and Ironman.

While I only had brief contact with him, he was always gracious and complementary of the design that my colleagues and I brought to the process. I have never had any work of mine treated with more respect or been more faithfully and masterfully executed as his team has done.

Stan has left our industry with a legacy of some of the most iconic, memorable and convincing creations to grace the silver screen, always stealing the show from their flesh and blood stars. My sympathies go out to his family and friends and the long-time colleagues he leaves behind.

He will be missed.

Met talk a big success!

2008-06-25T11:42:00.000-07:00

Just came back from New York, where Adi Granov & I spoke on a Costume Design panel at the Superheroes: Fantasy & Fiction symposium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Joining us was Gordon Smith of FXSmith, who was responsible for Mystique and Nightcrawler's makeup effects in the X-Men movies. Great guy, and a pleasure to get to know. Quite an inspiration to see how that work came together.

Many thanks go out to Peter Coogan, Shannon Bell Price, Joseph Loh and our moderator Geoff Klock for making it such a pleasant experience for us. Adi took some photos of us in front of the exhibit, and I'll be posting them as soon as he gets back home from Wizard World in Chicago.

Designer quotes page up at the Met

2008-06-12T12:31:00.000-07:00

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has put up a page of quotes by the designers of the costumes featured in their Superheroes: Fiction and Fantasy exhibit. Adi & I have our quotes HERE. Remarkable how we both seem to have come up with much the same thing to say about it, given we didn't talk about it beforehand. Just another example of what a great meeting of the minds this project was, if the final design wasn't evidence enough.

Below is a picture of the Mk2 suit in the exhibit, from the Met website.

Suiting Up

2008-06-09T17:23:00.001-07:00

Here's a concept painting I did in post-production for the suit-up sequence. This was a scene I really thought was important to selling the believability of the suit. An earlier and much more low-tech version (see Rodolfo Damaggio's excellent storyboards HERE) got cut for budgetary reasons early in the script, but thankfully the idea got revived for reshoots. The sequence is remarkably all-CGI, since it was accomplished long after the sets had been struck. For this illo I painted over (or into, rather) a plate from a dolly shot within the garage set. The idea would have been to composite the new CGI into the shot, replacing the existing live action. It ended up (as you can see) being a really crowded space, so they rightfully placed it in a broader expanse of the garage, rebuilding the set digitally from set photos. I worked with Kent Seki and his crew at PLF to storyboard and direct a pre-vis of the sequence, which was approved and sent to ILM. I was unbelievably impressed with their execution, it's remarkably realistic, and they did an incredible job expanding on the details I only suggested in this illo and a handful of storyboards. Kudos to PLF and the crew at ILM for one of the most convincing sequences I've seen in awhile.

Lecture at the Met!

2008-06-09T17:15:00.000-07:00

Adi Granov and I have been invited to participate in a conference at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City on June 22nd, as part of a special exhibit put on by the Costume Institute, "Superheroes: Fantasy & Fiction."

The exhibition is sponsored by Giorgio Armani and features movie costumes and the haute couture that they have inspired. Our Mk3 suit is exhibited under the category of "the Armored Body," along with some outrageous Thierry Mugler chestplates & other biomechanical fashions.

So if you happen to be in NYC, I'd love to see you there. I believe the conference is free to the public. You can find a link HERE.

Elevations...

2008-06-02T23:17:00.001-07:00

Oh, and here are the suit elevations, I thought I had posted them here, but I guess it was just up on conceptart.org.

More random Iron Man images...

2008-06-02T23:03:00.000-07:00

Here are a few more... A little post-action shot I did when I was tired of always drawing a standing design pose. You can see the design is almost there, but still a ways to go.

And here are a few alternate designs for the back of the suit. Version 1A was back when we were intending that the suit have add-on pieces to make it into War Machine, but the end result looked too aquatic. 2B was also a real contender for awhile, but the winglets would have looked like little fairy wings when deployed. NOT the look we were going for. You can be the judge for yourself if we chose wisely.

And on that subject... The Stark Jet

2008-05-21T19:39:00.000-07:00

This came at the last minute during production. The company had shot the tarmac scenes with Rhodie & Tony using a rented 737 Business Jet (the interior was a set.) Jon thought it wasn't sexy enough and had me rework the plane in a way that ILM could digitally replace everything from the wings back. The result is a Stark Industries modified Boeing. Full performance specs have not been disclosed, but you can bet Tony'll be sitting in the hotel bar a full hour before anyone else gets there.

This is just a digital paint-over of a location photo from the shoot. Production Designer Michael Riva kept me honest on proportions, and it turned out much better for it. This and a really crude set of elevations are all ILM went by to create the rather convincing plane shots in the movie.

Flying in Style...

2008-05-21T18:29:00.000-07:00

This is a commission I did for a magazine called Private Air, distributed to private jet owners. Kind of a lifestyle magazine for the conspicuously wealthy. Anyway, they have a monthly feature where they ask architect, designers & artists of note to come up with their vision of the private jet of the future. Mine is not so far off thanks to Burt Rutan and other pioneers of private space travel. This is designed for sub-orbital intercontinental jaunts at hypersonic speeds, thanks to the exotic scram-jet derived engines. The scene shows it landing using its vectored-thrust STOL capabilities at a private strip somewhere near Aspen. Or is it Chamonix? Could be anywhere.

You can find the article in the current issue, or online HERE.

Tony Stark's Bedroom

2008-05-21T17:15:00.001-07:00

Here's the site of one of the more memorable action scenes in the movie :) Wish we'd gotten to see more of this room in the final cut, but time was running long and there was all that superhero business to attend to, you know how it is...

The attempt here was to create a 'stark' designer environment, something that reflected a complete absence of personal touch. Anything that reflected Tony's personality would be in his basement garage/workshop.

This design also went through a lot of set-dressing variations, but once again came out much like the rendering. I was pretty thrilled with the bed & wall unit design (which separates the room from the bathroom which was designed but ultimately cut from the script.) They even managed to match the really bold woodgrain with a printed veneer. The ceiling was another experiment that turned out well. Matty Libatique gave this idea of light cans suspended over a stretched fabric ceiling the thumbs-up, and Production Designer Michael Riva managed to make it work. I just liked the idea of diffused pools of light when the lights were on, and a completely unbroken ceiling when they were off.

I wish I could take credit for the graphics projected on the window in the movie, but that idea was added in post. Brilliant!

Stark House Interior

2008-05-14T22:19:00.000-07:00

These have already been posted on conceptart.org for a few days, but it's been so busy I haven't had time to get them up here yet.

So these are a few views of the living room interior. As with the exterior it owes a stylistic debt to John Lautner's famous Malibu homes. We went through a lot of variations of set dressing, the floor was originally cut stone, the area within the cylindrical glass waterfall/ spiral staircase was originally an arboretum, and there were creeping vines on the balconies (which you can still see in the east view.) The staircase started out as glass, supported by cast aluminum cantelever arms of graded heights fanning out from the glass, but structurally it wasn't feasable, so cast concrete steps similar to another Lautner house's were substituted. It actually makes the center a little cleaner.

Essentially the interior is structurally unchanged from the original sketch though, and came out remarkably well in the final film. All told I'm very pleased with the results, as you can see in a frame from the trailer.

Tony Stark's house design...

2008-05-06T16:06:00.000-07:00

Here are some of the original sketches for Tony Stark's house. Production Designer Michael Riva mandated a Malibu cliffside home in the vein of John Lautner's really organic cast concrete & glass homes. The first designs were for set extensions of existing homes, but nothing we scouted looked like a billionaire's home. A few multi-millionaires homes but...

So I came up with this design and perched it in the most decadent location I could think of, right on top of Point Dume, a California State Park. Who else but a billionaire could get those building permits?

The garage under the cantilevered livingroom I really liked, looking out over the ocean between the buttresses. Since that's where Tony really lives, it should still have a nice view. The actual garage set is three times the size of the livingroom and would never fit in that space below, but thanks to the magic of movie geography, it's never apparent.

Master set designer Kevin Cross took these along with some loose elevations and built a beautiful model in Maya which the VFX companies used for reference. While the interiors were fully realized sets on stage, only the exterior of the living room balcony was practical, the rest of the exterior of the house is a CG model composited into plates of Point Dume.

I'll put up some of the interior designs next.

Ironman guts...

2008-05-02T11:51:00.000-07:00

Some details of the leg and torso mechanicals...

This represents the final leg design. The original concept for the "suit-up" involved an expanding "sarcophagus" that would open up into a kid of mechanical wardrobe or steamer trunk. Tony would grab onto something like pull-up bars and lower himself into these expanded legs first, and they would seal over him. The scene was cut before shooting began, but thankfully reintroduced in post production, in the more dynamic fashion featured in the film. I'll post design sketches and storyboards from that sequence later...

The torso section would have been lowered over Stark's head, expanded like a watchband so that he could slide it on like a pull-over. The idea was to give the impression of micro-mechanical musculature, a low-profile layer of pistons and levers that acted like abs & serratus muscles with a thin shell of armor over top. The chest piece would clam-shell over as it does in the final scene. We ended up splitting this piece into front and back sections bolted together at the sides, which made for some cool detail shots. The folks at ILM really expanded on the details I'd suggested, referencing a lot of cool robotic and mechanical components for the suit-up. I can't believe what an amazing job they did.

Ironman Suit Design Images

2008-05-02T11:26:00.000-07:00

Here are a few of the final design renderings for the Mk 3 suit.

The above is a nearly final iteration of the front 3/4 of the suit. The lower boots changed, as well as the upper chest & trapezius muscle area along with some cutline details, but that's essentially what we went with.

The back went through multiple proposals from both Adi and I. This was the final after some hip/butt area modifications mandated for flexibility by Stan Winston's team. I may post the rejected designs at a later date...

The final helmet design, streamlined by suggestions from Adi. The final helmet was sculpted by Miles Teves, who added the more direct cheekbone cutline as seen on the final suit. Miles's awesome sculpt was scanned and mirrored at Stan Winston studios, but his surfaces remain essentially intact in the final casting.

Ironman opens!!!

2008-05-02T10:28:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's finally here! And it does truly rock. Ironman opens wide today, and I'm hoping everyone goes to see it, since it represents about a year and a half of my life.

I collaborated on the design of the Mk 3 suit with comic art genius Adi Granov, as well as designing Tony Stark's house, the Stark Jet & designing, storyboarding and directing the previs for the "suit-up" sequence. My own site is due for an overhaul (and it's really hard to update, thanks to my lame website programmer... uh, me,) so I'm going to start posting some design sketches up here on the old blog. Look out for them! Sadly there's no "Art of Ironman" book announced (sigh.) I guess they were hedging their bets in case the movie flopped.

Which I can tell you after seeing it, it most decidedly WILL NOT. You're all in for a treat.

CTV (a canadian television network) just posted an interview with me about my role in the design of the Ironman Mk3 suit. You can check it out here.

My brand-new blog...

2007-12-17T17:38:00.000-08:00

Okay, for those of you who know me, you know that I haven't updated my website in a gazillion years. Reason being, I designed the damn thing myself, which means that it's a fr^&%$kin' pain in the ass to update. So I have about 5 years worth of images and stuff to put out there, and until I get my site redesigned, THIS IS IT!

So there you go. More to come.