ILM Art Challenge - Star Wars

Hi all,

In March of this year, a good friend of mine thought it'd be cool to join 'The ILM Art challenge' over at Artstation.com, issued by VFX studio ILM, based around the IP of Star Wars. 'Only' about 3500 other contestants had already registered, so we didn't really get our hopes up haha :)

With a knockout system in place, the art challenge existed of 3 rounds, namely 'The Moment', 'The Ride', and 'The Job'. To my surprise I made it through to the 2nd round, and a few weeks later even made it to the 3rd and final round. What started as something I thought would be over in a week, turned into a 2 month challenge where I eventually was working 14 hours a day to get all the work done.

The biggest challenge was to keep the realistic look they asked for (based on the original Star Wars trilogy), and stay away from my usual, more stylised way of working. It definitely was a great ride; doing stylized work during the day (currently on 'Despicable Me 3'), and doing realistic vehicle designs for Star Wars during the night. I eventually didn't win (check out the winner's work here), but I walked away with a ton of new work and a newfound love of doing design work for feature film!

Above all the Keyframes I did for the challenge, so glad to finally be able to show it to all of you! For the initial sketches and work in progress images, please click the 'Design Film' tab on my website (above). I'll definitely be doing more of this type of work in the future, so stay tuned. This past year I've also been working on a personal IP (who doesn't these days haha), for which I'll start sharing artwork soon aswell. Keep an eye on my instagram and Facebook for future updates, look forward seeing you there! All the best, -Edwin