Friday 26 June 2015

Friday 23 January 2015

Alien:Isolation (Easter Egg with spoilers)

Mike Tanaka is a hidden 'Easter Egg' within Creative Assembly's Alien:Isolation.
A twitter feed was launched to diary his experinces in the game world months before game release.
Warning, contains spoilers!



Mike is a family man and an amateur artist, so I was tasked with creating the sketches
for his journal. Family, collegues... Xenomorphs....
Sketchbook Pro. 2013.







It was great getting inside the mind of Mike, particularly the Alien sketches...
how would draw if I were scared to death and mortally wounded.................?



Alien: Isolation TM & © 2014 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.

Thursday 15 January 2015

ALIEN:Isolation (extras)

Alien:Isolation in game assets. 2012
I don't think any of these made it to the final game.
The excellent posters that you do see in game were not designed by myself.
Anyway, the idea was to create depth and a history for the world, so
these included posters, newspaper clippings, Adult magazines - not used ;) etc
Here are a couple of my faves.



Alien: Isolation TM & © 2014 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.


Monday 5 January 2015

ALIEN: Isolation (part 4)

Quick and small (originals 400 x 720) frames to illustrate key narrative moments.
Greyscale work in Sketchbook Pro, coloured in Photoshop. Two days work for all.
I used my triangle brush here, back in SBPro 5, so it was kind of chunky and bit-mapped.
Look pretty rough now.... from 2011.










Alien: Isolation TM & © 2014 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.

Wednesday 17 December 2014

ALIEN:Isolation (Part 3)

Early material renders for Alien:Isolation's Amanda Ripley. 2011.
These concepts were created to explore clothing variations. We decided
to go with full color painted work to help explore color and texture.

https://sites.google.com/site/cawartdepartment/ripley_03.jpg?attredirects=0

We also needed to see how the actress playing Ripley would look in all the gear.
So here, the face you see is a photo-bash on top of my painted work.
This was the first time I had used the technique and felt a little uneasy. There is also
photo texture work applied throughout to give that extre sense of reality and fidelity to the materials.

https://sites.google.com/site/cawartdepartment/ripley_01.jpg?attredirects=0

https://sites.google.com/site/cawartdepartment/ripley_02.jpg?attredirects=0


The last two sketches here lift directly from Moebius, a couple of the unused concepts he created for the original film.

I apologise now for the bare midriff and underwear versions, it seemed like a good idea to explore
that at the time. I'm really glad they went with the final suit that was designed much later on after my work was finished there.


https://sites.google.com/site/cawartdepartment/ai_ripley_concept_04.jpg?attredirects=0

Ripley's backpack explorations.

https://sites.google.com/site/cawartdepartment/ai_ripley_concept_05.jpg?attredirects=0

Ripley, full load-out. The accessories and equipment evolved
further from those here.


A line up of generic NPC's (and an early iteration of the Android). Using color and component swaps to give a variety of 'unique' looking characters.

https://sites.google.com/site/cawartdepartment/ai_ripley_concept_07.jpg?attredirects=0

Alien: Isolation TM & © 2014 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.

Friday 5 December 2014

ALIEN:Isolation (part 2)

The first batch of character work for Creative Assembly's ALIEN:Isolation. 2011.
As mentioned previously, the majority of this works owes a debt to John Mollo and
Moebius. Their original work on the film has lasted the decades and still stands as
the benchmark for serious scifi work today.

All in game mesh work (as far as I know) is based off scanned actors, so I feel my role here was more of costume designer than character designer, but it's always nice to reflect some of the personality in pose, attitude and accessories.







Originally the Alien was as it appears in the film (bipedal legs), but this wouldn't allow for the degree of agility required, hence the 'dog' leg final version.



We created these for the Nostromo Edition. I'm really shit at likenesses.

Alien: Isolation TM & © 2014 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.

Monday 24 November 2014

ALIEN:Isolation (part 1)

Here is the first post of ALIEN:Isolation work.
In 2011, I worked for Creative Assembly/SEGA for around six months on the pre-production of 
the project. It was a joy and a treat to work on the project and I want to thank Jude Bond and
Alistair Hope for their great artistic and creative direction, thanks chaps!

The source material is of course the best you can get: Ron Cobb,
Chris Foss, Moebius and Geiger (not to mention Scott, O'Bannon , Bower et al!). It was a joy to dip into their material and in a tiny way contribute to the world of ALIEN.

I will post more soon regarding the character work, which if I'm honest, my part owes 95% of
the work to Moebius and amazing John Mollo
(who an entire generation of concept artists owe a debt to how we approach sci-fi costuming).

But for now: storyboards. These were created as part of an animatic, essentially an 'animated' storyboard. I was using my triangle brush in Sketchbook Pro for theses, later exported in layers to
be animated in After Effects.




































Alien: Isolation TM & © 2014 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.