Behind the Scenes: Guardians of the Galaxy

It's been a while since I went to the movies and the latest Guardians of the Galaxy 3 was a great opportunity to find some time and go. Since I've been doing my pop-culture inspired 3d designs, I always go with excitement, ready to absorb every little detail and find some new inspiration.

And this was quite dense. They really outdid themselves with different environments and biomes, going from colorful bio-technology environments all the way to cyberpunk vibe streets. The latter is mostly visible on the now Guardian's home base of Knowhere. It was first introduced in the 2022 holiday special, but now they fletched it out even more and gave attention to more details and we got to see more spaces.

Even though some of the other scenes were quite intriguing, I really wanted to give the Knowhere a first spin.

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Getting some good reference wasn't easy, because most of the footage online is repeated quite a lot and comes mostly from PR shots and trailer moments. As the movie was available only in the cinema, you can't get your hands on too much visual content.

Luckily, the combination of the movie material and some shots from previous (and most importantly digital) release of the holiday special gave me quite enough to work with. Of course, it was still scarce, but most of the time, I'm not interested in a perfect 1:1 copy of the scene. My main goal is to deliver the overall look and feel, to replicate my visual experience and translate it into isolated diorama.

A lot of times, this means taking a lot of liberties with the layout. That's why I always do a sketch first, to see if the layout and the composition works. For example, you won't find this particular building attached to a staircase that leads to the floor in the movie. You will see parts of the building. Or you can see some scenes with the orange railing going across the street (the scene with Mantis and Drax talking). 

So I basically note and catalog all the details and different objects I like in a similar shots and then try to come up with a composition on paper, that combines all of those in a similar ways and is pleasing to look at.

The untrained eye might just pass these irregularities altogether and see exactly what they saw in the movie. If that happens, it's a success, because that would mean I delivered the experience and the vibes I was going for.

You can watch the process video on Youtube