The Purpose of Concept Art- Task 1

The Purpose Of Concept Art

By Taliah Lamont 

Concept art has always been a strong staple for planning any film or game since the creation of moving pictures themselves as it has always been a natural instinct for creators to plan their pieces meticulously before being made. 

The basic idea for concept art is to take the general first impressions and ideas for something that will be visual (countries, worlds, vehicles, monsters, people, or their accessories), and draw it up. From there its passed through each department that it concerns and scrutinised and discussed by everyone until either another design is drawn up, or its finalised. For example, in films a prop design would be discussed by producers, directors, writers, then draw up by an artist where it would be taken to the prop department to discuss the possibility of its being built, then the notes would be taken back to the producers/writers/directors where it would may be changed until they are all happy with the final design.

One of the best parts of concept artwork, in my opinion, is the ability to look through previous versions of concept art to see the evolution of the piece up until its final form. Additionally, from a creator’s point of view, it also allows you to make sure you aren’t throwing away any potentially better ideas and that the final product is exactly as you wanted. To illustrate this example, here is a character concept art evolution from the game Bioshock. This particular character is called ‘Big Daddy’ and he is a strong and intimidating enemy, who gets extremely aggravated when you get seen by his ward, the ‘Little Sister’. His head piece changes from shining yellow to shining red and he proceeds to charge at you until one of you has died.

 This is how the Big Daddy began. He is a lot more grotesque, very rough, generally more mutated to fit the games twisted science theme.

Eventually they became more like sea divers as they were given a more corporate and working image for their job of recycling corpses for Adam (a substance in the game).

 Although this is still a very refined (albeit a sea soaked) look for them, the final concept had them look a look a lot dirtier, rustier, and much more terrifying with a drill hand and large cage over their diving mask, and here is the image of their final concept:

  
Another example of why concept art is necessary is the ability to interchange different ideas to weed out the weaker or less desirable ideas or concepts. I will use Bioshock again as an example, as they have interesting concepts on the main mob enemies called ‘Splicers’. Splicers were once humans but as plasmids (DNA rewriting injections that gave the patient powers) became more popular, more people used them until their bodies had been so contaminated by the plasmids that they suffered psychological and physical deformation. The variations in their designs only changed through the colour scheme and patterns on their clothing, but this makes a massive difference to the game as it allows them to look like they are a more integrated part of the world as well as making them stand out from the background to prevent impromptu deaths for the player. Here are the female splicers variations compared to the final product:

 And here are the doctors clothing variations compared to the final product, although these variations are comparatively more drastic as the amount of wear, the colour of the outfit, and some accessories are changed:

Overall, concept art in any capacity is a necessary part of pre-production work, and as it has remained practically unchanged since visual storytelling began, it’s also a reliable and trusted method as well being able to allow everyone working on the project to view, discuss, and perfect the visual style and practicality of the world they work to create and communicate through.

Sources for art: bioshock.wikia.com
Still frames from Bioshock (PC) (2007)