Decrepit City

A related image I made for ConceptArt.org of a city in the distant future, inspired by romanticist paintings of Roman ruins.

Robot Variations

Some variations on the robot design that I played with as an experiment suggested by Noah Klocek.

Views of Metropolis

Views of Metropolis

I've been working on the best way to visualize cities using Photoshop. I've learned it helps to be somewhat impressionistic when creating concepts of large urban cities, or else it's easy to get bogged down in putting detailed fenestration and whatnot into individual buildings.

Robot as Maria

Rotwang kidnaps Maria in order to transform the Machinenmensch into her likeness. Maria's doppelganger seduces the upper class and leads the lower class to their own destruction. Once I had settled on a design for both the robot and Maria, I overlapped their figures to ensure that the robot could convincingly take Maria's form.

Maria

Maria is the love interest of the film and one of the heroines. She is a member of the lower class who tries to convince her brethren to follow her example and be peaceful in their wait for their savior.

She originally wears a sort of dirndl-like peasant dress and appears to be blond and blue-eyed. I re-envision her as a more exotic, dark woman not unlike the "gastarbeiters" from Turkey in modern day Germany. This visually separates the different classes and introduces some racial undertones to the class struggle. I also used references of Dorothea Lange subjects in the Great Depression as inspiration for her dress.

Rotwang

I next worked into the next most interesting character in the film, the villain, Rotwang. Rotwang is part man and part machine, possessing a mechanical hand that visually connects him to his creation, the Machinenmensch. For the purposes of creating a well rounded concept art portfolio, I decided to design the film and its elements for a CGI feature. Therefore, building the facial features and body types of the characters becomes important. For Rotwang's costume I borrowed from the original design with an influence of the dress of Nazi SS Officers in black leather.