Hollywood Concept Design with Drew Leung, Motion Media Client

Andrew H. Leung is a concept designer and artist working out of Los Angeles on the biggest movies around. And he’s been a client at Motion Media for 8 years. Here’ what he says about his work on Black Panther and other cool projects.

My Origin Story

I grew up in Oregon and went to school in San Francisco. I started in the industry 15 years ago at a company called Riot Pictures (no relation to the game company) as a matte painter. There, besides painting, I also did animation and compositing. It was fun getting to wear a lot of different hats in a small VFX house.

Then one day a friend called, asking to join him over at Blue Sky Studios in New York. I ran their animatics group in the story department for about four years and got to learn a lot from being embedded in that early stage of moviemaking.

I feel like my career has been marked by gradually moving from the end of the movie (VFX post-production) to the beginning of the movie (story and art department). I eventually joined the Art Directors Guild 8 years ago and had my start as a concept artist on REAL STEEL.

And then came BLACK PANTHER
With BLACK PANTHER, I got brought on to help develop a look for Wakanda working with Hannah Beachler . She’s an amazing production designer and some of her work includes MOONLIGHT, Beyonce’s “Lemonade” video, CREED and more. I helped her create the look and the interiors for Golden City. If you haven’t seen the movie, Wakanda is a secretive hidden country in Africa where Black Panther comes from.

This was a lot of fun because most movies these days are based on already developed worlds and are beholden to pre-existing ideas of futurism. On BLACK PANTHER, I was excited to build the world from scratch. The comic books did provide some ideas, but it was refreshing to be a part of creating something entirely new in the age of sequels.

Our first steps to create the world of BLACK PANTHER
I did not want to go with the obvious direction of what I would call “Afro Tech.” The challenge was to envision an African country that was free of any colonialism and had developed entirely on its own with amazing advances in technology.

I looked at other set design examples for reference. One of my favorite TV shows is “Mr. Robot” and their production design is great because they use New York for New York. And it’s really great for that, reason especially for someone who has lived in Manhattan. But one episode was set at an embassy in China, and they found this location that had a Jacobean Pattern, hung a bunch of Chinese lanterns, and called that China. It looked really cheap and came off like a takeout restaurant. By avoiding “Afro-tech” it was a conscious decision on our part to avoid making the same mistake.

Instead, I looked at a lot of modern cities to understand how they’re designed and how they complimented the surrounding areas. One of my favorite cities I used as a reference frequently is Brasilia, the capital of Brazil. Look at it from Google Maps and you see it’s designed like a bird.

I also studied the city of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and the work of Roberto Burle Marx, the famous landscape architect that introduced modernist landscape architecture to Brazil. Early Rio fell victim to colonialism, regarding the local flora as mere weeds. In contrast, Roberto Burle Marx‘s designs were inspired by the indigenous plants of Brazil. Marx’s approach to synthesizing from the surrounding area and the progressive culture of its people is the approach we took to the Golden City.

Some of our work on BLACK PANTHER was inspired by Zaha Hadid and even Santiago Calatrava a little bit. But, we didn’t want to follow them so closely that it was at risk of becoming a rip-off. We wanted something distinct to this new African culture.

Personally, I was tasked with the Wakandan Royal interiors. A lot of my time was spent concepting what heritage luxury might be in Wakanda, especially considering the impact of Vibranium which enables sweeping visions of architecture. I was designing how generations of the royal family lived and the idiosyncrasies that develop was avoiding a nouveau riche style, such as covering everything in gold or covering the surfaces in marble. It wasn’t ostentatious. Instead, it was toned down to what I would call Afro-Minimalism. And I’m happy that about 75 percent of what I designed made it through to the actual movie.

My software toolkit for BLACK PANTHER
I used  Maya and V-Ray Maya. And Fusion 360. That’s a great modeler. We were doing lots of complicated designs. And what’s great about Fusion 360 is that thing will boolean for days. You can literally cut shapes out of shapes out of shapes.

Maya is the standard for the VFX industry. But not surprisingly, it’s also a tool that Zaha Hadid’s team uses to conceptualize architecture. Combined with V-Ray, we could concept out photorealistic interiors of Wakanda in which would have been a traditionally longer process.

In the last seven-eight months I’ve been using a lot of Unreal. We’re now doing a lot of real-time rendering, real-time design, which is great. We didn’t really have it available when we were working on BLACK PANTHER about a couple years ago, but I probably would have started designing everything in Unreal and using Redshift because of all the advancements in real-time technology. It’s just fantastic. It significantly cuts down on iteration time so we can get to design solutions faster.

People always ask if I knew it was gonna be a hit…
Nope. Nobody really knew! My main draw to the film was designing something that hadn’t been designed before. And the thing is, with most of the movies I’ve worked work on, you never really know how well they’ll do. Some you think will be a success and it turns out to be a complete failure. And vice-versa. You really can’t tell.

An example of this was when I worked on LA LA LAND and at the time, it was a small indie movie. They had this warehouse in Glendale and a few stages at Paramount and I was like, “That’s cool. The director of this little movie WHIPLASH has a bit more money and is making this indie musical.” No one had ANY idea it would BLOW UP to be the success that it is.

For me, it’s not about whether or not I think the movie will be a success. It’s about working with friends and decent people on projects with some potential.

The Future of Design
At the moment I’m working over at the Fox VFX lab on a virtual production project. Like most projects, it’s wrapped up in an NDA so I can’t really say more about that. But it’s really exciting. This is my second project with these guys in the last year and they’re really pushing the Virtual Production technology forward.

I expect within two years almost everything will go real-time and a lot of it will involve VR. I mean, they’ve been talking about it for the last eight years. I think in the next year or so, every large production is going to ask for people who are good with Unity or Unreal from the game world to make a lot of this stuff work. I’m happy to be part of this new frontier.

The real scoop on Motion Media
To be honest, when I was first using the software, I usually got it from “other means” and resisted the official channels. The barrier to purchase it in a short amount of time was too great. But it was wonderful when one day I tried Motion Media and getting to talk to ONE person who understood all the intricacies of every license and can work with my situation. On top of that, (and I tell this to all my friends in the business) you get a much better value, support, and understanding than you would normally get by any other means.

Additionally, it’s been helpful for people like me who are a company of one. I am a concept artist that requires visual effects tools to provide high-quality concept work. But I’m not a big company, so I don’t need 50 licenses of Maya. Motion Media really understands this and offers pricing options that are totally reasonable and unique to me.

Brad is the guy I’ve talked to there and it’s been a great relationship for eight years. I tell all my colleagues just call Brad or anybody there and tell them what you need; they’ll help you figure it out and get it to you quickly.

Even better is that Motion Media is available for support and information during normal hours. Some of these software companies are all the way in Bulgaria. I’m here in LA and it’s great when I can get help and can scale up quickly even while everyone’s asleep in Bulgaria.

I feel like Motion Media has been my great little secret. Although, maybe not anymore!

About Motion Media
Motion Media, LLC is a reseller of 3D animation, visual fx, graphics, and creative finishing, software, and hardware solutions. Industry leaders such as Autodesk, AJA, HP, Adobe, Blackmagic Design, Next Limit Technologies, Seagate, G-Technology, Chaos Group, and Pixologic are just a few of the name brands in our portfolio of proven, professional grade, product offerings.