Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546606
a large plateau. There wasn't much to reference from the source material, in many ways, Eternia had to be designed from scratch. Eternia was logistically planned and divided into some backlot sets, stages, locations and visual effects extensions. For the locations, Travis and I scouted extensively around Ireland and England and settled on Wells Cathedral. It's a fantastic location for the Grand Hall of Eternia. The Early English Gothic Cathedral was built in a beautiful golden limestone and offered many unique architectural features. Travis was particularly taken with the unique scissor arches which sit at the crossing between the nave and transept. As well as shooting Wells, we reused the scissor- arch as a design motif. We wanted to establish a coherent architectural language for Eternia, one shaped by centuries of history. The courtyard, introduced as a training school in the film, had walls that reached twelve meters high, with intricate stained glass windows. This allowed Travis and the crew to achieve 360-degree shots without needing any visual effects enhancements. Not every design in the script had a visual reference from the animation. One such environment was the hidden city of Subternia, which in the script was briefly described as a subterranean environment that Teela's ship enters. We wanted to come up with a design that felt as memorable as Snake Mountain or Castle Grayskull and had the scale to house a city's population. During early location scouts, we looked at several impressive caves both in the south of England and Iceland. I couldn't get these fascinating structures out of my mind. On my return from the scout, I went through my photographs and started sketching them, and over time, came up with the idea of gigantic stalactites housing the remaining population of Eternia. There would be no way to land a spacecraft and enter the structure unless you had a circular landing platform surrounding and attached to the natural cone shape. After sketching this out and presenting it to Travis, our lead sculptor, Jason Denman, created a scale model, which F. THE HIDDEN CITY OF SUBTERNIA BY BART TCHORZEWSKI. DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION OF THE LANDING DOCK AND PLATFORM-RING.. G. EARLY CONCEPT SKETCH OF SUBTERNIA BY GUY H. DYAS. PENCIL SKETCH OF STALACTITE IDEA WITH PATH OF ESCAPE. H. SUBTERNIA LANDING PLATFORM AND WALKWAY TO LOADING DOCK. MODEL MADE BY JEANIE KING, FILIPE MIRANDA AND FRANCESCA TESEI. D E G F H