Behind The Concept Art For Mysterious Location

A some time ago we published this concept art picture that we named as “Concept Art for Mysterious Location”.


I thought you would be interested in to know what’s behind this beautiful picture and how it was made. However, as its name implies, we have to keep it a bit mysterious until the movie is released in order to not spoil the movie magic.

Thesis of Evil concept artist Kim Haataja tells more:

What about the picture?
This pic is an overview of a location for a Thesis of Evil scene. The location won’t be shown from this angle in the movie itself. This particular picture was born when I wanted to pull the camera backwards and take a wider shot of this place to show how detailed it is. Basically this isn’t concept art in the term’s traditional meaning (when the concept art is made before the movie), but it shows the feeling of the place and all the elements that I designed for it.

Tell about the process and how long did it take to make it?

Usually, when I design something, I like to add small unique details to keep things interesting. With this picture I wanted to try something different: I wanted to use same elements throughout the picture to make the process faster but still in the way that it would look as good as possible.

First I designed the location, it was quite fast. Then I modeled it with 3D software and did the backgrounds to the whole scene, which took approximately one and half weeks. It took time to adjust the cameras for to get the pictures from the right angles. After this was done, it was fast to create this picture. I just placed the camera to this angle, rendered and pimped it in Photoshop by adding mist, light glows and textures. This part took only something like five hours. But of course, as always, fine tuning would be endless.. You have to put an end to it at some point.

What does the picture tell about the location and its owner?
The location is an underground production facility. My meaning was to show the concrete-like hall, that it has been dug under the ground and that someone chose to make a production factory there.

The location elements in the picture
The picture shows that everything in the location is old, worn-out and oxidized. Without revealing too much, the location contains electrical center, robot grabs, control panels and on the wall you can see a rack system with truck-lifted pallets filled with various stuff. We wanted to put a massive fan into the location: it isn’t very realistic but it creates some atmosphere and sure looks cool! Same goes for the grabs.

A demo picture depicting two of the many phases of 3D graphics design. On the right, wireframed, are the massive fan, some pipes and building support elements. On the left, shaded, robot grabs and more building elements.

Tell more about the colours!
The Evil art masterminds Jukka and Juuso wished that the location would be dark and the colour would be green. They wanted to create a feeling of a mysterious, dark place. For this concept art picture I exposed a bit more but in the scene it is quite dark.

A screenshot from the movie where Dr Professor is in this mysterious location

More about Kim
Kim is master of arts graduated from Tokai University in Japan and an industrial designer graduated from the University of Lapland. He’s always looking for interesting opportunities on game and science fiction movie design. See more of Kim’s designs in Thesis of Evil gallery.