Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546606
M A S T E R S O F T H E U N I V E R S E | P E R S P E C T I V E 5 3 From the beginning, I knew this was going to be an unusually ambitious undertaking. I had to immerse myself in the world of MOTU. And that began with looking backward. I went back through the cartoons, the comic books, the toys and the visual culture that had grown up around the property since the early 1980s. I wanted to understand not simply what the world looked like, but why those images had remained so powerful for so many people. What was it about the silhouettes, the colors, the strange collision of barbarian fantasy and futuristic technology that made MOTU immediately recognizable? The answer, I discovered, was that there was no single visual language to draw from. There was a collection of ideas, influences and memories that had accumulated over 40-plus years. The challenge for the film was to understand the DNA underneath all these past ideas and then create a world of our own. It was exciting to realize that after four decades of existing in the imagination through toys, animation, comics and a vivid visual mythology, Eternia was finally going to take physical form. Stone would be stone. Steel would be steel, and the impossible colors, creatures, machines and architecture of the universe would have to coexist within a believable physical world. I was brought on to the project by director Travis Knight, known for his incredible stop-motion animation, Kubo and the Two Strings, as well as his first feature film, Bumblebee. Travis is a very visual director, and we connected very quickly over the material, both growing up with the toys and watching animation as kids. We were both fans, but neither of us wanted to approach the film simply as an exercise in nostalgia. We wanted to take this universe that had long been accepted as kitsch and over the top and give it the weight of a real place. While I started the process of world-building, Travis asked me to take a first pass at the characters as well. Initially, this was intended to establish a visual blueprint for the costume designer and creature-effects team, but it quickly became something much more useful. It meant that we could develop the characters and their environments simultaneously, asking whether a costume belonged within a particular architectural space, whether a creature felt native to its environment, or whether the materials and colors of a vehicle belonged to the same civilization as the people who piloted them. The characters naturally fell into two visual groups. The heroes came predominantly from the light side of the hemisphere, while the villains inhabited the darker side. A. ETERNIA OVERVIEW BY GUY H. DYAS. 8.5" X 11" PENCIL SKETCH WITH WHITE PASTEL FOR DISCUSSION WITH TRAVIS KNIGHT. B. CHARACTER STUDY OF HE-MAN BY CHRISTOPHER BRÄNDSTRÖM. DIGITAL ARTWORK DEVELOPMENT OF MODERNIZED COSTUME AND HAIR. C. CHARACTER STUDY OF SKELETOR BY ARTHUR RIPERT. DIGITAL ARTWORK EXPLORING COSTUME, SKULL AND MUSCLE STRUCTURE. D. CHARACTER STUDY OF PIG BOY BY ARTHUR RIPERT. DIGITAL ARTWORK DEVELOPMENT OF MODERNIZED CHARACTER AND COSTUME. E. CHARACTER STUDY OF GOATMAN BY ARTHUR RIPERT. DIGITAL ARTWORK DEVELOPMENT OF CHARACTER AND COSTUME. B B C D E