Artist Reveals the Previs Process Behind Spaceship in Project Hail Mary

Could you please introduce yourself to our readers and tell us a bit about your background in art and 3D art?

I started off as a car designer. In high school, I thought that was going to be the coolest thing ever, and I ended up going to the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan, here in the US. In that time period I was there, I realized that the world of automotive design is rather limiting, and the aspect of design I like the most is right at the front end, when anything is possible, and you can be the most creative. That was the most fun part for me. That transition moved me into more general industrial design. I started working on cell phones, motorcycles, and shoes, all things I had been interested in before and hadn't appreciated the complexity and interest because when you're a little kid, you get focused on things; fast cars seemed the coolest thing in the world to me, and so, that's why I thought designing cars could be the coolest thing.

But that was before I realized that it took people to make video games, and as I slowly came around to the understanding of what concept art was, I started to slowly fill my portfolio with small personal projects as I was continuing to do industrial design work. And so I made a very gradual transition to concept art, I'd say over the course of about 15 years. I started with 90% industrial design, 10% concept art. For the last decade, I've been a full-time concept artist. I've been a consultant, a full-time employee, and I've gotten a chance to work with some fun brands.

When I started, my end-all goal would be to work on Halo, which was my favorite game as a kid growing up, and I got to do that in 2022: I was one of the concept artists on Halo Infinite. I was there for two and a half years, which was such a cool experience. Before that, I worked on projects for Ubisoft and Treyarch. There were small consulting projects here and there. I worked with Lucid Games in the UK for a while on Destruction AllStars, which was a fun project. It was a small game, but I was able to design all the vehicles for it.

And then, for the last 2 and a half years now, I have been a Senior Concept Artist and Art Manager for Echo Lima, and we are an outsourcing studio. We work with game development studios like Treyarch and Tencent on Call of Duty: Mobile and Call of Duty Black Ops. We have a few projects going on internally. We're in the process of expanding our offerings to our clients – starting to do more vehicle work, more prop work, more world-building assets, and leaning into the experience that we have on staff to be more of an all-abilities space as opposed to just building what a client gives us. So, we're solving problems, being more of a strategic partner as opposed to being an action item on a studio's list, just because there's so much competition for studios that can make something that looks cool. What we're trying to do is build something that has a life outside of itself and has more of a functional thought process behind it to make ourselves a little bit more indispensable.

Thank you for such a detailed background – it's very impressive, especially the part about industrial design. It makes a lot of sense that you chose to work on something as complex as an alien spaceship. You mentioned this briefly on ArtStation – could you elaborate on how the collaboration with Lord Miller Productions came about? And what brief were you given for the rocket ship prop?

The studio contacted me. I can't point to which project I had done previously that led them to reach out. I had done some sci-fi work for Starlink, which was an Ubisoft game that had to do with some world-building alien assets; that might have been what it was. But I do think that what they were interested in was someone with a deep process for conceptual development of something rather obscure. At least that's what I remember when we had our initial consultation.

This was before the script was even written for the movie, so it was very, very open-ended. Andy Weir was still finishing the book. I was given a few pages that specifically explained what Rocky's ship looked like. And if you're familiar with Andy Weir's work, he also wrote The Martian, which is such a great movie; it was a great book, and he's very descriptive in his writing. But even with the most descriptive explanation of what an object looks like, depending on the artist or the person taking that information in, you'll always get a different result. You can explain something over the course of a whole book, and two people could come away with wildly different mental images of what that object is.

It was an exciting and fulfilling journey to go down, where I took the literal explanation of what the ship looked like, and Rocky's physiology was meant to always be visually interpreted through his ship; it's a representation of who he is, of his culture, of where he comes from. And in the same way that you look at the space station, and if you boil it down, you could make some assumptions about what humans look like – their rough size, the kind of hands we have because of the kind of shapes there are to grab onto on the outside of a ship; thinking about that kind of stuff was really exciting, but also very difficult because it was so open-ended.

In the initial set of sketches, I was a bit more conservative because I was trying to put guard rails down for myself mentally about the rough shape of the ship, making sure it doesn't look like a Star Destroyer. That was a big concern because I think the way the ship is described in the book is what a lot of people think of, because it's stuck in all of our brains that that's what a big imposing ship looks like, a Star Destroyer.

From there, it was a very enjoyable project to then send the sketches back to Lord Miller and then Andy Weir, and then Phil Lord and Chris Miller also weighed in on the direction they thought it should go. That was very illuminating because they knew what would be most impactful on the screen. I think when Andy wrote the book, and I've listened to quite a few interviews of his since the book and the movie came out, he doesn't cherish the idea he initially had. He said that once he saw the movie, in his mind, that's what it had always looked like. He was very open to differences in opinion about what it could look like, and it was a very flowing, fluid, explorative process, which was really, really fun to be a part of.

It's very exciting that you worked not only with the filmmakers but also with the author of the original book. You also made a very interesting observation that the ship reflects the physiology of the creature that operates it. Did your background in industrial design specifically help in creating Rocky's ship? Did you draw on any previous projects – sketches or lessons learned from that period?

I don't want to overstate the amount that I got to; I know that Andy, Phil, and Chris were reviewing the work, and I would get feedback from the producers who worked with them. I would have loved to be able to have conversations with them, honestly, like, I've been such a huge fan of sci-fi for so long that it's always been a dream of mine to help bring a book that I love to life through film. Our interactions were not as in-depth as I would have liked, but it was really enjoyable to have them give feedback just because of who they are.

In terms of my industrial design background, I'd say less so. I didn't rely on anything that I had done previously, but if I had to point to something that was derivative of my industrial design education, it would be an understanding of how an object is formed, especially a complex object like a spaceship. You can see a bit on ArtStation, the things that I was referencing, in the same way that if you look at a cast piece of metal for like a tractor, per se, you can start to work backwards from what that cast steel came from.

I always grew up watching those how it's made videos where they go to a factory, and there's metal being poured into a form, and it has to be cooled, and then it gets shaped by six more processes. I think my understanding of how things are designed, especially complex objects – an iPhone goes through probably 10,000 different stages before it's built, and if you go all the way back to the raw material, the silica, the lithium, the steel, the aluminum, the plastic that it takes to make that object – it's a really tall order to do all of that mental calculation for something that came from a completely different planet.

The biggest thing that I took from it was probably giving myself the perspective to play with building something like a spaceship out of more organic or naturally grown forms,  or something that feels a bit more like what you can see in my reference page – what if microscopic cells or atoms or viruses were the size of a car or a tree, and that's what was harvested to build parts of the spaceship. That aspect of it was probably the most strongly influenced by my education, if that makes sense.

That's fascinating – it's great that this project builds so naturally on your previous experience. If I understand correctly, you started with traditional pencil and paper sketches. Which technical tools did you use from there when developing the design?

I love to draw. I have two boys, five and three, and I used to go through about a sketchbook a year, and I think I'm at three and a half years per sketchbook now. So, my ability to draw in an analog style has dropped off. But I do like my digital drawings to feel and appear analog. I think seeing the artists or the designers, visual fingerprint has always been a thing for me, the artists that I feel most influenced by are artists like Jake Parker, Christian Pearce, and Aaron Beck – they're all very strong design-minded people with a lot of line work that defines the forms. And line work has always been at the core of how I express my thought process. I love to render and build in 3D, but line drawings and the ability to get them across quickly have always been a cornerstone of my communication between my mind and what I actually put to paper.

I have worked digitally 99% of the time professionally for my entire concept art career, unless I'm stuck on a plane or waiting, I just move so much quicker in digital means. It's so nice to start a sketch and then have an idea for it to branch off in another way, and then just copy and paste it. And then now I have two sketches to work on. So I do my best to be as efficient as possible. And there's really no world where drawing in a sketchbook is more efficient than drawing on my Cintiq.

What struck me about your artwork is that the digital version has the feel of an analog sketch – that traditional style always draws the eye. Looking back, is there a specific piece of feedback you remember most – a comment from the filmmakers or the writer about the ship's shape, or some other detail that stuck with you?

I think the aspect that, as I have gotten older in my career, I have had to become more discerning about art direction, which I think is a natural path for most people to be on. And I think looking back on this project, where it started to open up and become interesting, is when they pushed me to add complexity to the design. Complexity is not always a good idea just because more doesn't always equal more in terms of the quality of the design, but I generally like to build objects such as vehicles, weapons, props, etc., which are more easily set in a small space; it's something you could wrap your hands around or get inside. I think the scale of the object deserved more complexity and small details than what I was internally designing on my own, so I think that their push and understanding of its final output like what the ship would look like on screen was what was most beneficial for me as the artist working on the project is that perspective that I did not have or couldn't conceive of on my own.

The film has been a huge success. It's been quite a journey to get here – how does it feel to finally see your work as part of such a large-scale project? And were there any moments in the final version that surprised you?

I was overjoyed when I finally got to go see the movie with my wife. We sat through the credits, and seeing my name on a movie that I was excited to see and enjoyed was one of the heights of my professional career. And just knowing that other people were enjoying the film – and that it was such a big, complex undertaking – just to be a small part of the previsualization was also exciting. You can see some echoes of the work that I had done in the final direction, but you can see that it's significantly different. But I think that aspect of creating a movie is something that I still really enjoy. I think maybe earlier on in my career, I might have been disappointed that it didn't look one-to-one like what I had created, but your addition to the movie is never going to be a one-to-one; this is what I turned in, this is what they showed the world. But I think that's the nature of all good work, that is not something done by a renowned singular artist. I think the world of design and commerce, creating something as complex as a movie, inherently is always going to take thousands and thousands of people.

So the fact that I was able to be a part of something that was commercially successful is great, but there was something about it being so highly regarded and so high-quality that made me really emotionally happy, because I think a lot of concept artists know the feeling all too well of making a game that is visually stunning and is just not a great game. It's very rarely the artist's fault. Games themselves are also very complex, and there are a million ways they can be successful, and there are as many ways, if not more, that they can fail. I have been a part of games, where I was so proud of the work I had done, but the game, for whatever reason, was not critically acclaimed the way you might want it to be, so being a part of such a good movie felt amazing.