Concept Art Round-Up: Pacific Rim’s Monsters And Elysium’s Aircraft
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One of the great things about science fiction in TV, film, or games is that there is inevitably tons of cool behind-the-scenes stuff to dive into. If you want to learn every little detail of how the movie was made, chances are you can do just that thanks to Blu-rays and the Internet. One of my favorite elements to pore over is concept art. It’s always fascinating to see the ways various elements of a property evolved as the story was being realized, both the dead ends and the ideas that made it all the way to the final product in one form or another. Today we’ve got a ton of cool concept art from two of the summer’s big science fiction releases: Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim and Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium.
First up, some early designs for Pacific Rim’s Kaiju — the giant critters who emerge from an interdimensional rift at the bottom of the Pacific. The movie’s tagline was “To fight monsters, we created monsters,” and artist Guy Davis was one of the people helping to create the film’s monsters. What’s cool to me about his work is that you can see ones that very obviously were approaching the final “style” for Pac Rim’s Kaiju, but there are also quite a few designs that don’t look anything like what we got in the movie. I particularly like the centipede-looking thing with the four tentacles around its mouth (at the top of this story). You can also read an interview with Davis about working on Pacific Rim over on Legendary’s website.
Then we’ve got some very cool work by Elysium artist Christian Pearce, who has also worked on films such as Man of Steel, Avatar, and Blomkamp’s District 9. His work here is for the various air/space craft which play a major role in Elysium, especially its action sequences. Check out his work below, along with his captions identifying to craft.
“The top two are smuggler’s shuttles, there was a pre-existing physical set built that these designs had to fit around.”
“Next one down is a not-quite-final design of Carlyle’s Veyron-inspired shuttle and a look at his pimp-esque chillin’ chair. Was pretty cool that the Bugatti guys did a final pass on it.”
“After that is an early-ish sketch for the deportation shuttle and then the final design with a couple of paint options, was really pleased with how that came out.”
