The Planet - The Beast

A blog dealing with giant movie monsters got in contact with us recently. They wanted to feature a big spanky image of the main 'god' monster from the film. Mark Stirton, director bloke, asked me to fluff up an image of the beast for inclusion in the site - so I did.

I won't post it here as it's a bit spoilery, but if you really want to look it's on this site Undead Backbrain. The beast is rendered from the original model Mark animated in the movie, this version was rendered in Vue 6, as was the background. The wee chaps are purely for scale - or comedy effect.

The Planet - The Planet

I've put quite a few bits of design work for the movie up recently, so I thought is was about time to feature the star of the film - the planet, himself (I'm sure it's a bloke).

The design work for the planet came very early on, literally as soon as Mark had the title I started hammering out various planets - some were comically wrong. All of the designs were created in photoshop then mapped on spheres in Cinema 4D (planet, clouds, atmosphere). The final photoshop files were created mainly from satellite photos of south western Australia, taken from this site here. Final file size came to about 280meg for the 4 maps making up the planet (image, diffusion, speculative, bump), with a further 70meg for the 3 cloud maps.

The detail was necessary as it meant the planet could be viewed from all angles and could stand up in close up work. As the movie was done at PAL resolution (720x576 pixels) there was a bit of lee way with the shots, but the detail was there if we needed poster work and publicity shots.

For anyone that has seen the film you'll know how far off the mark the original design was: even though the survivors may be thousands of miles from the sea, the audience will wonder why they're moaning about no water. Best to make it a sandy hell-hole.

The Planet - Unseen Design Work

As The Planet is going to be released soon in the US, I thought I'd put up some of the concept artwork that went into the design of the film. Attached are a few of the designs and visuals that never made it to the finished movie and a nice shot of the hero ship too.

I'm responsible for the comically huge battleship, Kerwin Robertson designed and built the actual ship used and the e-pod. Tech info. Most of the modelling and rendering was done using Maxon Cinema 4D, with post work in photoshop. Kerwin used Autocad for modelling the main ship model with later additions and texturing in Cinema 4. Other design work from the movie can be found using the links on the sidebar, under 'The Planet.'

I'll track down some more of the less seen or unused work for the next post.

The Planet - US Release Update

Fun news this week from the company releasing 'The Planet,' in the US. MTI Home Video have set the date of June 10th, for the DVD release day.

They have produced a spanky Hollywood type poster for the release: at the moment the artwork still has to be finalised, but hopefully they will keep the elements we sent over. The new dvd has the original making of feature and also some new bios and Spanish subtitles. Scorchio! A press release can be downloaded from the MTI publicity page.

It will hopefully be for sale on Amazon, so we'll get that linked up to the IMDB page soon. CEO of Stirton Towers, Mark Stirton, has more on his blog, here.

The Japanese release info should be with us soon, so keep checking for updates.

Last of the snaps

Here are the last of the holiday photos before I start boring myself. I'd just like to say a huge thanks to Actoman for dragging me over to Lewis and forcing his nice parents to feed me for a week. It was much appreciated. Top photo show a group of traditional 'black houses,' used by the islanders before electricity and sense was introduced to the island. Half of the hobbit house was filled with the animals, what fun on bath day.

View facing west, next stop Labrador - North America

Leaving Stornaway on ferry at 7.20 am

Arriving on mainland at 10am, yes am. It got sunny as soon as we left the ferry.