From Doctor Who to Star Wars, how artist Matthew Savage has shaped striking on-screen worlds

I graduated from University of Wales in Newport with a degree in design futures. It was basically product design and multimedia, as we called it back then, using software like Flash and Macromedia Director. After that, my route into the industry was through film and TV.

Like most people, I started with no contacts. I didn’t have any way in and so I felt like I had to claw my way in. And my way in – which is probably a traditional way into the UK film industry, and it might feel a bit old fashioned – was that I came into the art department through being a runner and art department assistant, which is the entry level.

That’s a tea and coffee and running-around-the studio job, and I was delivering drawings to departments on Thunderbirds and then Batman Begins. The really useful part of this was that I met everyone: the carpenters, the plasterers, the electricians, the director of photography.

Basically, I got a little glimpse of every department. I really enjoyed it and I was fortunate enough to go on and do Doctor Who for BBC Wales in 2004 for the reboot. As a big fan, that was a huge deal. It was poorly paid, but incredibly well paid in terms of the experience and working on things I had loved.

Doctor Who was very good because it was period, sci-fi and contemporary; a bit of everything, on a modest budget and so it was a very strategic job in terms of how you make things work. So that was the first two or three years: making tea and coffee, drawing Daleks and then on into movies.

If the audience is going to be able to relate to the thing on screen in any way, it has to have a real-world footing. The number of times I’ve had people say, “I want you to design something we’ve never seen before.” Well, I can do that, but it will be so abstract because that’s the only way you can do that.

If the audience needs to know it’s a spaceship or a digger, it has to be grounded in something you can relate to. In industrial design and product design, pre-iPhone, the rule is form follows function.

That’s your base level, your first lesson. So, to make anything relatable you have to follow those basic rules. That gives you a very basic function of design and then you’re off. You have your basic shapes and you can elaborate or test as much as you want within that.

I have this conversation with all of my concept buddies about how, in all of these universes, there are parallels but there are differences. Star Trek being the most fantastical of that group. 2001: A Space Odyssey being the most grounded. Star Wars feels somewhere in the middle.

When you look at Ron Cobb’s work on Alien, every door is slightly different; every one has a slightly different thickness because he’s considering the very slightly different pressures on them. They all look super-cool, and they’re all slightly different for a reason: that they’re the function of what’s going on.

And corridors are small because it’s so expensive to put anything into space and so you have to keep space to a minimum. In something like Star Trek, however, where it’s more fanciful, you can have bigger spaces.

The production can lean on you a bit for that kind of guidance sometimes. One example of this would be the very final act of Alien: Romulus: originally, the sandhopper under the ship was going to open like a skip and drop the alien out at the end.

For whatever reason, that hadn’t worked and so the production designer very early on had requested we make the ship a bit like a sky crane, which would pick things up. Someone had made the decision that we could jettison the sandhopper. That wasn’t in the script and the design semi-led the decision to do that. It’s quite nice to have any kind of influence on how things go.

The more 3D you use – and I really enjoy using Blender now – the more you can get involved in postproduction. If the director really likes your design, then pre-vis can plug it into their work and there’s less room for people down the line to change things. If the director likes your design, it gets locked in.

When I worked on props on Star Wars: The Force Awakens, that job ended when the cameras rolled. But on Alien: Romulus and the TV series Halo, I got so locked into certain designs that they carried on into postproduction.

At some point you stop coming out of the art department budget and then VFX begins to pay for you and you can carry on. The production designer can then have more say through you.

Often, and wrongly, their job ends when they finish shooting and I feel that if there’s a lot of post design-work, the production designer should carry through.

Last year, I worked on the forthcoming new movie, Project Hail Mary. I’m really excited about that one. It’s really nice to work on an original science fiction movie. I’m very keen in 2026 to go back into movies.

Movies are my first love and are the thing that gives me the biggest satisfying feeling. But, I have enjoyed working on two video games this year. It’s the same job as working in movies, but with slightly different workflows.

In terms of dream jobs, I spent about eight weeks developing, with Ridley Scott, the Blade Runner TV show; working to develop a pitch document with him and his team. To get to talk to him about Blade Runner and have my work looked at and critiqued and made way better by his input was a joy.

Everyone wants you to jump straight into the images, but Ridley was interested in architecture, lighting and photography. In the best possible way, he didn’t want to see anything finished for a couple of weeks. It was research and tone and he had his own mood-boards and things that he wanted in the pitch.

You have to work very fast, but process-wise he’s very good for slowing it down and making you think and getting into his headspace. And he’s very good – he started as an art director – about making you think about giving the production finished images right away.

Traditionally, the advice I would give, aside from the obvious – staying on top of software, doing life drawing – is to get as much life experience outside of concept art: theatre, cinema, travel. All of those things that really enrich you as a person, you hope will filter into your work.

There are so many people doing concept work now and we are all using similar packages, and so the thing that’s really going to make you stand out is your own specific voice. Find ways that make you able to talk to a director or a production designer on a slightly more interesting level.

You don’t have to necessarily be the strongest with all of the software packages, if you’re more interesting as a person culturally. I think that really benefits you.

I always do my own research, so I’ll make some mood boards. This is how we did the two ships in Alien: Romulus – the Echo and the Corbelan. I send the mood boards off with the sketches because it’s good for production to see what you’re thinking. They might approve or disapprove, but it’s good to know that either way.

This is followed by a volley of sketches and silhouettes; finding, more for my benefit, the nicest, simplest read and then doing maybe four or five pretty decent iterations of sketches. That might be a 3D blockout. I block in Blender and sketch over the top. You can get four or five quite good blocky sketches done in a day.

Assuming the art director or the production designer likes one of those, then I’ll work on one or two of them. It’s like a funnelling down of scattergun reference sketches.

Sometimes productions like you to go to colour with a design. But sometimes they like you to keep in black and white because colour might come later on with a different department. I love it if I can do the whole thing.

My ideal handover is a solid 3D model with colour and texture. But they might not want you to go that far. On Alien: Romulus, I tried to nod to the way it was originally done, and Fede [Álvarez, director] was keen to honour those methods, and so it made sense to start the process on paper.

That was nice to do, and then move into 3D. You have to work in 3D if you want to be part of the pipeline. In terms of a percentage of time, it’s probably five to 10 per cent tops on paper, and then you’re into 3D or Photoshop.”