Revealing ELYSIUM Concept Art by Ben Mauro

Check out Elysium concept art by Ben Mauro!

Elysium is a popular film, but it went through many revisions and script changes. One of the concept artists involved, Ben Mauro, has shared a ton of great concept art on his site that gives us insight into some of the changes Elysium went through.

Mauro is a professional concept artist who's worked on blockbuster movies like Man of Steel (2013) and  The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014).

Check out the rest of the images after the jump (click to enlarge).
Here's a sample of the illustrations on his site along with descriptions he gives there.

"Had the pleasure of working on this film for around 3 years (2009-2011) alongside my incredible co-workers Aaron Beck, Christian Pearce and Leri Greer. Was one of the first films I worked on right out of design school so it was a huge learning experience for me trying to keep up with guys who had just come off working on District 9 and AVATAR... intimidating to say the least! It has been a really incredible experience seeing this go from words on a page back in 2009, to the finished product nearly 4 years later. My co-workers really set the tone and feel for the world we created in the film,  I learned and grew heaps over that time, it was by far the best experience I have had working on a film to date!"

"Kruger was initially going to get killed and have his brain transplanted into this horrible killer robot that terrorized and murdered all the gangsters invading ELYSIUM. As with many things this all got cut and he just got fitted with a more advanced Exo-Skeleton to have an epic showdown with Max."

"Another one from 2010. The film was originally going to be done on a much smaller budget, so some of the early solutions for the droids in the movie needed to be done as humans with a simple prosthetic on their face. This started as a concept painting that was then approved and manufactured at Weta Workshop, but ultimately scrapped for the much cooler full CG robots seen in the final film kicking a** (though we also built heaps of practical versions of those for the actors to interact with as well) that Christian Pearce's ninja hands designed in a matter of seconds!"

"The head was manufactured at this point but the budget expanded to do full CG robot body and Neill liked this head design so I had to turn it into a fully robotic version and put it onto the current body which was designed by a combination of designers at the workshop, so just the head was designed by me, you can see the full body in the 'Art Of' book. In the end this design was ultimately scrapped, I think the only vague similarities that made it into the final bot would be the sort of canister mouth (final bot had a rad dual canister mouth)."

"Early image done to sell the studio and Matt Damon on what he would look like with the exo skeleton and tattoo, luckily it went over well! The Exo/tattoo designs and things were all from Aaron Beck on this, I had to illustrate what this would look like for the meeting."

"Earlier high tech version of Kruger"

"An earlier scene that was cut, Kruger was going to hunt down Max and drag him out of a prison....murdering everything in his path."

"This was an extra image I did for fun while working on the hunt scene, I thought it would be cool if max was in some advanced holding cell with a few other heavily modified gangsters, maybe some of them had some really invasive older versions of the exo technology."

"Early exploration for the Citizens of ELYSIUM and other high end robots and bodies. The idea was that they could style their skin with patterns and designs for fashion.....we did hundreds of these. Some skin modifications for the rich living on the tourus, thought it would be cool if they were so guadi that they started to put gold or other expensive metals into their appearance, literally wearing and displaying their wealth on them. Trying to echo powerful geometric forms to make it look ancient but powerful."

This is an extremely small sample, so see more of Ben Mauro's work on the film at artofben.com/ELYSIUM

Click on the links if you want to see more of Ben Mauro's concept art and Elysium on my blog.

What do you think of the concept art? If you've seen Elysium what did you think?
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Write by: Arek - Tuesday, September 10, 2013