From Star Wars to Superman, how Industrial Light & Magic's art team pictures possibilities on screen

I went to Falmouth School of Art [now Falmouth University] for two years, and at the time they were illustration courses with the idea that the artists on them would end up becoming book illustrators. I didn’t realise that this would be an avenue into a film career. I hadn’t planned on that.

I’ve been doing this now since the mid-90s. I started off by working at Disney when they were still doing traditional animation movies, and later transitioned across into various live-action films and TV.

We’re always doing so much in an art department that’s working on multiple projects at the same time. Often, we’ll work on projects and maybe will only be on it for a couple of weeks, then move on to something else.

Compared to the VFX side of ILM, which is more post-production, we literally work in two phases: there’s that early phase of getting stuff going, and then once a project’s greenlit, we’ll then carry on designing for the actual show, whether it’s TV or film release.

After that, we go through a phase of a few months of pre-production development and then it will be filmed. They’ll film it all on location and on sets, and that footage comes back to ILM. The actual VFX work starts at that point; that’s when we’ll then come back on to the project and carry on designing all of the visual effects as well. As a department, we’re probably working on any given film the longest in that respect.

Often, in those really early stages, the scripts will go through many revisions, so when we see a script in those early days, it’s often quite thin and needs fleshing out. Over those early months of a show, up until the filming starts, a script goes through many changes. So, when we’re on that really early stage and we start designing, we’ll be doing everything from the characters to environments to props, to whole world-building ideas.

A lot of the time, we’ll create a design and the director or the production designer will see something in one of our concepts that will influence the script. They may see something and say, “Oh, we really love this character!” even though it’s just a sketch of a character that’s been put to one side.

In that case, we might go back and flesh that design out, and It’s great to still have those traditional skills like drawing, posing, colour and light posing, colour and light then it becomes a bit more prominent within the final script.

We often work with the production designer in the pre-production stage, before they go on to creating the sets that they’re going to be filming on. Because we work at ILM and it’s a VFX facility, we can bridge that gap.

Our team can work with the production designer to help design a set, but also inform where they stop building a practical set and let VFX take over.

Because there are lots of shortcuts and advantages now, especially speed-wise with 3D, there are so many things that you can use to speed up process. It’s great to still have the traditional skills, such as the fundamentals of drawing, posing, colour and light. Having that basis to work from is really helpful.

I like the late 1800s; that's an era of painting that came a little bit before the Impressionists, when you had artists such as John Singer Sargent and John William Waterhouse. You had Joaquin Sorolla, who was a Spanish painter.

You had these amazing artists and they got to a peak of knowledge about colour and light – it was amazing. I always head for this era of painting. It’s the pinnacle, and those artists were economic in their level of detail; literally, a brush stroke was the right shade, the right colour or the right tone.

It’s incredible to see that in a traditional painting. Whenever you see that kind of thing, it’s not only very inspiring, but that knowledge also sinks in. Whenever I’m doing a piece of concept art, even though it’s digital now, I’m always thinking back to traditional paintings.

Yes. I’m going to deliver a couple of courses this year on life-painting. One will be in acrylics and one will be oils. We’ll get a live model in, and we’ll get some nice lighting set up. That’s good because it’ll be traditional painting, and even though we work digitally, people want to learn and have this experience.

I’ve been doing it a while, so if somebody in the department doesn’t really have the same level of traditional painting, I’ll be passing on the knowledge to them. But then some of the younger members of the team, they’ve got knowledge that I don’t have, perhaps in terms of modelling with ZBrush, so they’re going to be passing on that knowledge to me and to other people.

Everyone on the team has a solid skill set that they can share with others. It’s a great opportunity to work with other people who can pass on that sort of knowledge.

Because I’m fundamentally an artist, I don’t ever want to lose that part of the work, so I’m hands-on pretty much all the time.

Yes, I supervise the department as a whole, but then I’m also working on various projects just like the rest of the team. I really enjoy creating and painting.

One of my favourite projects to work in recent years was Moon Knight, the Marvel television series based around the Egyptian gods. I worked with the production designer for a long time in pre-production, crafting all the sets they built for that show. I particularly enjoyed that; it’s amazing when you’re designing something and then see it built.

There’s something interesting, actually, because the main stage I built in 3D – and I remember some of the Egyptian statues that I built – there were some errors in the sculpt. I knew they were a little bit hidden, so it didn’t really matter and I left them there. But when they built all those sets for real, they included those details. So literally everything you do, they match exactly. It’s really interesting when you see those sets built and then lit properly.

There are so many tools you can use that are simply amazing in terms of 3D modelling and painting. If you rely on these tools, they’ll get you so far and you’ll get some incredible results. But if you have fundamental art skills, you can take that knowledge and push certain elements further.

We do things in 3D and you can tell the computer to render out the scene. It will look amazing, but if you don’t have the art fundamentals – about drawing, painting, light and colour – you can’t then take that scene and say, “Well, I’m going to change the lighting here and I’m going to increase some colour in the foreground, or play around with the scene.” It’s really beneficial to have those skill sets as your basis.

It’s a really nice global melting pot. I know a lot of people who wonder whether they’ll be a freelancer or work within a studio when they’re leaving art school. One of the great things about working in a studio is that you learn from each other. When you’re freelance, it can be a little solitary.

You might freelance for a company, but you’re not necessarily working within a team. I like the fact that in the VFX house, we’ve got an art department, we’ve got a team, and we can help each other. Everyone has a different set of skills and everyone brings a different background to the studio.

One of the major advantages of being at ILM is that we have a global team who bring together those different ideas to share; you can see that coming through all the time. Sometimes you can forget how amazing a job like this is because you’re doing it every day.