There is a fine line between a handcrafted look and a look that is "too sci-fi," or "too design-ey." I think that you get that "too sci-fi" look when you use present-day aesthetics and try to project it forward into a foreign world without the history to back it up. As a result these designs date very quickly. To get around this, I've found that you should avoid making things up without anchoring them to a strong foundation based in world history.
A sample from Doug Chiang's non-Episode I portfolio.
I took early 1950's American car design as a starting point for some of the space fighters, for chrome and sleek streamlining. For another culture in the film I drew on traditional African art stylization to get the look of their vehicles, their aesthetic. I combined that with hints of animal forms, and this invested the designs with personality, which is one of the hardest things to do.
George is always very directly involved. He is a fantastic designer! Sometimes he will make very specific requests while other times he will just ask to see something different and fresh. In fact he will often ask for combinations of forms that, at first, don't seem to fit together. But that is where George's design genius lies, in the odd juxtaposition of unrelated images. It took me awhile to adjust to this. But this kind of direction takes the art into new areas, and we have ended up with some of our best designs by wrestling with direction that seemed impossible.
A sample from Doug Chiang's non-Episode I portfolio.
