I have been super productive and super unproductive at the same time. Productive in the sense that I have produced a lot of sketches concepts, illustrations. Unproductive in the sense that all that work didn’t result in usable output. So essentially I’ve been wasting time as I’ve never wasted before. I designed the exterior and interior of the Pon Kho 2 over and over. Here are a few sketches and concepts I worked on recently…

Then when I was almost ready to have the Pon Kho 2 design fixed my wife and my son made some comments that made it clear the ship reminds them quite a bit of Boba Fett’s “Slave I” (Star Wars). This was entirely unintentional, but from that moment it was ingrained in my brain. I had to change it. And change it I did. I’ll post the results of that redesign in the July update since it’s not finalised yet. The interior will mostly stay the same (see below).

For the first design (the white version with three engines), I even made illustrations of all the walls inside the ship, placed them in 3D space in Apple Motion to figure out how large this ship needs to be and what the floor layout would actually look like, all just to bin it days later. It’s nice though that you can place actual lights into those rooms and have real shadows and light cones that can set and/or change the mood of the scene considerably.

The Groovy Ship

In my latest sketches I was thinking whether there was a concept for the whole ship and since the Pon Kho 2 is a vintage, legendary ship, I thought maybe a 70s vibe might be the right way to go, at least for the cockpit, mess hall and crew cabins.

The reason I’m so indecisive about this ship and its layout is of course because I’ll be using it for quite a while. This will be the “workhorse” for my protagonists, so I want to make sure that as a location it’ll be interesting versatile and provide enough material itself for some of the episodes, which I haven’t written yet, but kinda conceptualised in my head.

Nantuk Ro & Station

In my script Nantuk Ro was always only mentioned as a planet, yet somehow in my mind I always envisioned it as a space station orbiting the planet Nantuk Ro. Since I only need a place where Phungus & Mowld can land and quickly and buy a new ship, I decided to fix the discrepancy between planet ←→ station by making the station orbiting Nantuk Ro the used spaceship dealer’s “shop”. I’ll need to fill the place with a few more exotic ships, but the station so far is mostly fixed.

So it’ll be at least another month before I can finalise this first episode. Once I’ve got all the backgrounds together the animation should be done soon. There’s not so much of the story left to tell for the pilot episode.

Over and out.