Superman "Flyby"

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

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

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!!

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

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

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...

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.