Art of the Title: So you've got the idea; you know that it's going to be a Dyson type sphere and you know it's going to light it. Where do you go from there?

Angus Wall: With the shape of the world determined, we started doing concept art, detailing what these places would look like given the fact that the world is round and they're made of wood and stone and they're of a certain size. We had several very talented concept artists working on this. At the same time we set up the world in previs and started blocking out the sequence. It seemed fruitless to do storyboards because they don't move and in my mind this whole sequence had to be really dynamic. The camera had to be moving the whole time, taking you on a journey. So we blocked the big moves, the moves from place to place, then focused on how we were revealing the different locations and how they were emerging from the surface of the map.

Godswood sketches (2 images)

As soon as we had final concept art, we pushed it to the model makers working in Maya. These guys were amazing, taking sketches and turning them into working objects, adding tons of their own inventive details in the process. These models in turn, got incorporated back into the previs. It's really too bad the sequence is only 90 seconds long, because there's so much detail we were not able to show. If you're going to create a world, in order for it to feel legit, you have to have this fractal sense of detail. There are dust motes in the air when you're passing through, and all the cogs have a logic to them. There are cogs actually under the surface of the map that you can barely see in the gaps between the model and the surfaces of the world itself. There's such an amazing amount of detail in the models.
It was a very organic process. It's basically going back and forth and whenever we had a new model we'd add it to the world and refine the previs accordingly. Kirk and his team worked incredibly hard to keep us on schedule. And eventually that previs became the blueprint for what was finally rendered out.

The Eyrie sketches to concept art (3 images)