Art Dept Archive | Industrial Light & Magic

Wicked: Concept Art

Ella Greig — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 01:12:12 +0000

Jon Chu’s vibrant vision for Wicked required the design and realization of numerous characters, environments and props that would fill the lush continent of Oz. The ILM Art Department played a vital role supporting the VFX of the film by creating imagery to help visualize this vast world.

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Alien Romulus: Concept Art

Ella Greig — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 18:56:09 +0000

From Xenomorphs and Facehuggers to spacecraft and enviroments, explore the concept art that the ILM art department brought to Alien: Romulus.

ILM Art department: Aaron McBride, Amy Beth Christenson, Alexander Jaeger, Fred Palacio, Igor Staritsin, Mathilde Marion.

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Transformers One: Concept Art

Ella Greig — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 19:10:12 +0000

For Transformers one, the art department aimed to create shapes and silhouettes that appeared clean and simple from a distance, yet included intricate, purposeful details up-close, such as cut lines in the panels, smaller inset geometry, and layered panel work. Given that iconic Transformer designs often stem from their helmet shapes, the art department worked to seamlessly integrate faces into the helmets, enhancing their expressiveness while maintaining a mechanical, rigid aesthetic.

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The Acolyte: A Design Case Study

Ella Greig — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 17:20:51 +0000

From lightsabers and starships to alien creatures and ancient temples take a look at more than a dozen conceptual artworks and designs made by ILM’s team of artists in collaboration with Lucasfilm.

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The Creator: A Design Case Study

Ella Greig — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 15:07:19 +0000

The world of the creator is full of wondrous life far beyond the story going on in the foreground. Director Gareth Edwards, having come from a visual effects background, had the vision to trust that ILM would build the world of the creator into his footage. Early location footage was painted over with various levels of world elements in concept art and presented to ILM to do a few test shots. The reality was then extended to the characters. This allowed the actors’ performances to be real and in camera while enhancing them with either robotic portions or entire heads.

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Transformers One: A Design Case Study

Ella Greig — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 18:38:23 +0000

How do Transformers emote? That’s the challenge that the ILM Art Department had to design. Working with Director Josh Cooley and Production Designer Jason Scheier, the team decided to embrace the clean and simple charm of the 1980s animated characters. To accomplish this, artists created faces free of panel breakups and used mechanical details that allowed their performances, emotions, and expressions to shine through. Each character had to be unique in their design and also needed to visually evolve throughout the course of the film. The results were them looking cohesive as a group, while also looking like they belonged together in the world of Transformers One.

Explore the Transformers One Character Models

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The Force Awakens Portfolio

John Hannon — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 22:48:43 +0000

Since Industrial Light & Magic’s inception in 1975, every idea dreamt into existence found its genesis within the ILM Art Department. Forty years ago, legendary concept designers like Ralph McQuarrie and Joe Johnston brought George Lucas’s brainchild of an asymmetrical Star Wars “used universe” to life, imagining fantastic worlds bursting with iconic heroes, villains, spaceships, and aliens. The ILM Art Department continues to revolutionize film design today, coupling classical technique with the very bleeding edge of technology. Acclaimed directors like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, and J.J. Abrams work hand-in-hand with the best art directors and artists in the film industry, exploring ideas and iterating on those ideas until their vision is realized, making the unreal real and the impossible possible.

“Each artist began to explore his individual response, and collectively, we began to answer, with our words and art. Out of our brainstorming sessions emerged visual imagery of where we might want to go and what it would look like when we got there. We were not merely illustrating scenes that already existed: we were initiating storytelling concepts through the visual images themselves.”

– Rick Carter, co-production designer, Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) Lucasfilm

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Post Visual Development in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

John Hannon — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 22:48:43 +0000

Movie fans know the term concept art as one of the earliest stages of filmmaking. Directors and writers collaborate with the ILM Art Department to visualize story beats, characters, design creatures, vehicles, and define a film’s tone and mood. But, even after the cameras have rolled, the ILM Art Department plays a critical role in finishing the film.

John Knoll, ILM’s Chief Creative Officer and Executive Producer of Rogue One, said it best, “What we do is art. It should be no surprise art direction and design are things we do throughout production and post. Strong support from the ILM Art Department is critical to the success of the film.”

Rogue One’s Senior VFX Art Director, Yanick Dusseault, describes the role of the ILM Art Department in Post Visual Development below:

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Bumblebee: Developing an Epic Set Piece

John Hannon — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 22:48:43 +0000

Today, ILM Art Department’s Steven Zavala, Alex Jaeger, and Alexander Gustaveson break down the development of their concept art for the Cybertron sequence in Paramount’s Bumblebee.

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STAR WARS: The Rise of Skywalker – A Design Case Study

John Hannon — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 22:48:43 +0000

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