The Tomorrow War - White Spikes Design

I had the great pleasure to design the vicious White Spikes for 'The Tomorrow War'. (Watch it on Amazon Prime Video)

Back in early 2019, I worked a few weeks with director Chris McKay and production designer Peter Wenham on the film. To my surprise, I was told at the very end that other designers already had worked separately on different alien designs and that ultimately my design had been selected for the film. My concepts were then brought to life by the skilled teams at Weta Digital, Luma Pictures, Framestore, Method Studios and Spectral Motion.

The White Spikes had to be a powerful enemy. Director Chris McKay described the White Spikes to me as vicious creatures that attack and eat everything in sight. He asked for a compelling design that conveyed the hunger and intelligence of these creatures. Additionally, the White Spikes needed to have different abilities such as fast swimming and flying. It was important that they were agile and able to move extremely fast. It was my job to translate all this information into one cohesive design.

Because there was no clear description of the White Spikes, I gave Chris a few different options to choose from in the beginning. In this early stage, it was all about brainstorming and coming up with interesting ideas.

In order to make them more threatening, Chris felt they needed to have some kind of an offensive weapon, and asked for a plausible way of how the White Spikes could shoot at their targets. I came up with the idea of spike-shooting-tentacles and presented the idea in a sketch. Chris loved that idea and wanted me to develop that particular design further. I think it became one of the more memorable features of the design.

After that sketch got approved, I created a 3D model and a few renderings that were presented to the studio.

Read more about my design-process and inspirations: https://www.behance.net/gallery/124512441/THE-TOMORROW-WAR-Designing-the-White-Spikes
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