Visual development/Concept art

The visual development/concept art side to producing an animation is key to getting a feel for what the piece is going to look like, it takes a number of talented artists, illustrators, painters, model makers etc... to produce some basic ideas of how the painting will look and feel. This information can then be taken and later defined in other stages. Naturally this stage of the process is extremely visually driven and as such it is important to have highly skilled and creative people working on it. Whilst it is no where near the longest section of the pipeline, there should be copious amounts of effort put in, as it is often these images that are shown to the customer etc... As a marker for what the film will look like, it is there first introduction to the piece that they have commissioned and it is important to get these right to make for a successful piece. The examples surrounding this are brilliant examples of concept art/visual development. The sketch above, albeit fairly loose and rough shows real character and gives us, even at a glance, the idea of the kind of characters that they're going for. Obviously these initial sketches can be developed into full blown characters, or more artistic pieces like the one below. Whilst this image may never be seen in the actual animation, it gives us a real feel for what they're going for. An ancient city in ruins, maybe in the depth of the jungles and then we have the creature standing on the rock. Whilst there's very little detail on it, we get the sense that it's probably an evil and intimidating creature. 


It is this kind of impression that the concept art/visual development stage should give. An example of a great concept artist is Matt Gaser, having studied at CalArts and various other art schools Matt got a job at Stormfront Studios working as a concept artist on games such as Lord of The Rings - The Two Towers. After moving away from video game design he worked at Lucas Arts doing projects for the Clone Wars T.V. series. Matt then moved back into gaming, this time progressing into the role of Art director. Some examples of Matt's work can be seen below, it is clear, as Matt shows, that by starting out in illustration, getting some experience with storyboarding etc... Then progressing into concept design can lead to more important roles in the designing stage of the process such as Art Director.