We’re pleased to share this interview with Christian Pearce, concept at Weta, who talks with us about the making of the making of the concept art from Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium. You can find more artworks in the official book and it’s limited edition
IT’S ART – Can you speak about the genes of this project, when you’ve started to work on the movie ?
Christian Pearce – Movies take a long time to make! We started this one early in 2009. It was quite a different story back then, the script changed a lot before shooting started.
IA – Can you let’s know more about the discussion you’d with Neill Blomkamp during the creation of the first concept ?
CP – The first thing I did – I think it was the the very first image created for Elysium actually! – was a design for Kruger. He was a robot back in that early version of the film.
IA – There’re a lot of tech parts in the movie. Can you speak of the different kink of concept art you’ve made for the movie.
CP- I mainly worked on props, vehicles, droids and weapons. Everything we did was kind of based on real world technology but bumped ahead a few decades, we tried to reference recognizable forms and tech to try to ground them in reality and make them less distracting.
IA – What was in your opinion the most difficult to draw ? Why ?
CP – I find everything difficult to draw! The droids were probably the most work for me though. Trying to draw something functional that could be physically built here at Weta and worked from the inside-out while fulfilling the onscreen requirements was quite an involved process. Good fun though!
IA – Do you have an idea of the VFX that will be needed to convert your concepts into the movie when you create them ?
CP – We have a pretty good idea of the process having worked with Neill and other FX companies before. Weta Workshop has an on-set crew that is present during the shoot on these sort of films and they are a great source of information. Their input really informs our designs, they have a lot of experience of what will or will not work.
IA – What was your influences for creating the concept for the movie ?
CP – A whole lifetime of influences! Comics, music, documentaries, books, people I work with, messing around on the internet – all these things combine to create a whole broken-brain of half-remembered ideas that form weird shapes that hopefully look like objects that can be used in a movie.
