Cool District 9 Concept Art

With the District 9 DVD and Blu Ray coming out this month (Dec. 29th to be specific) I figured I'd share some cool concept art from the movie. I'm a big art fan and seeing early concept art of what the people behind the movie had in mind is a pretty cool privilege. Thanks to io9.com we have a bunch of concept artwork. As always click on an image to see it full size.



io9 has also interviewed David Meng from Weta. Weta is the design company behind all of the aliens, vehicles, outfits, guns, etc. When asked about why the early designs were rejected Meng says:

Those designs weren't necessarily rejected outright, we just evolved away from them. A huge amount of work was done designing these things. There were so many iterations, by the time the final design was nailed down, these early images were out of sight and out of mind. The technical approach to realizing the creatures was always in flux, so that affected the look.

Meng goes on to say that at first they wanted to use actors in suits and makeup because they thought the budget would not allow or straight CGI aliens. I was blown away by how real the aliens looked in the film. So their very small 30 million budget seemed to not be a factor in making the aliens look realistic. Also the amount of emotion conveyed by the aliens was something that we do not see much in movies involving aliens with very little human characteristics. This gave a familiarity to the aliens which allowed the audience to really get a sense of what these foreign creatures were feeling.

When asked about how they approached the problem of emoting the aliens Meng says:

That credit should mainly go to the animators and Neill Blomkamp. They solved how this thing we designed should move and emote. But from a design standpoint, it would go back to the eyes. Throughout most of the design process, the aliens had mammalian eyes with pupils and sclera, etc., so we always knew they would be able to emote warm-blooded emotions. Neill didn't go with our versions of the eyes as solid black or cephalapod pupils, so they retained a relatable humanity to them.

You can see more of the concept are here and you can read the whole interview with Meng here. You can also check out our spoiler-free review of District 9 here which also includes a great video interview with director Neill Blomkamp which gives even more insight into the making of the movie.