ILM.com continues to showcase artwork specially chosen by members of the ILM Art Department, with the current instalment looking at the 2025 Disney production of Lilo & Stitch featuring work from artists working in San Francisco, Vancouver, London, and Sydney.
Art Director Cody Gramstad
Gramstad: This concept was tackling two key problems for this scene. What should our balance be between Chris Sanders’s soriginal visual style and the limitations of live action expectations? At the same time, we could use this image to give practical design guidance for the environment team on how to stage the podium space so that the window both frames and provides value contrast to the Grand Councilwoman’s head for our primary focal point.
The iteration process for this concept was an evolution of a pre-existing previs set. From the original film we knew key staging, camera placement, and expected lighting direction. The iterations came in adjusting the environmental elements around the figures, exploring different shape languages and materials, and experiments in color and saturation to find a balance that maintains the personality of the original animated film but could exist in the lighting and material context of a more dimensional rendering approach.
My favorite part of this piece is the simplified value shape language. When this composition is refined down to its most basic fundamental art skills, it creates a graphic shape language that feels in character to the original film, while at the same time allows for a clear read of the primary focal point.
Senior Visual Effects Art Director Alex Jaeger
Jaeger: The main brief for Lilo & Stitch was to try out some ideas to pull it away from looking like an animated feature and make it feel more realistic while keeping all the main structures from the original film the same.
The work on this piece was done as part of a push to complete a set of shots early for the trailer. As part of the process it was also done in an effort to gain a bit more realism in this sequence and offer up some new suggestions and options for detail and lighting. So, after looking at the existing sequence, I found that the textures overall were soft and that a few indications of hard reflections might help.
One of the challenges was to not alter any of the models, but rather keep my alterations to lighting and texture. So I added more fall-off and texture to the spot lights, added a metallic line element to the platform railing and floor. I also added a more metallic glint to the threads in the banners. The hardest part was finding spots to add metallic elements that would be most effective for the added realism that the client requested, without altering major elements.
Concept Artist Mathilde Marion
Marion: After his trial, Stitch is sent to a lab room where he is being tested upon, and from where he escapes. We needed to start from the client’s design of the room, and in the same spirit, expand a workstation into a DNA reading machine. We came up with a few variations of designs and how it would work, based on the client’s storyboards. This one is, in my opinion, the most successful.
This is a frame of the overall design, but it was actually designed and sent to the client as a series of close-up shots where we can see Stitch’s hair being processed and tested by the machine. There were primarily two challenges: designing a machine in the spirit of the original animated feature, all the while showing a sequence of mechanical events that are somewhat logical. Because the movie isn’t meant to be realistic, we had a bit of leeway, but it still needed to work within the chosen design and make sense story-wise.
I took inspiration from Chris Sanders’s original designs, and the original movie’s assets and weapons. I made a goal to try and match another artist’s style, which is not the easiest thing to do. My style is usually not as cartoony, and it was important for the story that everything was sitting in the right visual universe. A stylized-type of drawing is really tough, as it requires a perfect understanding of the basic shapes, values, and color relationship. You can’t hide behind details or processing in your image. I found that very interesting and had to challenge myself.
Senior Concept Artist Brett Northcutt
Northcutt: I worked on this piece late in the schedule trying to help with lighting and reality cues to improve the look of the shot.
This shot was originally front lit against space and I thought it looked a bit flat. I reversed the lighting to make it back lit, which really helped the mother ship look more imposing. With the ship now pretty dark, adding a nebulous background really helped to make it pop and also added visual interest. Finally, adding a planet to the lower right justified adding some unusual light reflection to the dark side.
Read the story in full at ILM.com, and stream Lilo & Stitch on Disney+ now.
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