James Clyne, Concept Design
www.jamesclyne.com

James Clyne was born in San Francisco and soon relocated to Oregon, spending much of his time indoors doodling and drawing everything from futuristic spaceships to imaginary environments. The “Star Wars” films undoubtedly influenced his early fascination with science fiction and dark imaginary worlds, as did the stories of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, all of which fed his vivid imagination.

As a young teenager, James and his family moved to Southern California where he was drawn outdoors and spent endless hours surfing the local beaches.

Unable to ignore his creativity any longer, Clyne attended the University of California at Santa Barbara where he studied Fine Art and Painting, realizing that art and design were an inescapable profession. Eager to focus on design, he attended Art Center College of Design as an Industrial Design major focusing on transportation design, product design, and entertainment
design.

After earning his Bachelor of Science and graduating with honors in 1996, Clyne began his professional career designing creatures, characters, and environments for interactive gaming companies such as Sega, Activision, and Pulse Entertainment. Wanting to expand his work in entertainment design further, James began consulting as a concept artist and storyboard artist for special effects houses such as Digital Domain and Rhythm and Hues; providing conceptual designs for clients including Nike, Disney and Intel.

Since 1998, Clyne has been working in feature films, which he enjoys immensely. He has been continually challenged by the task of translating a story or script into visual environments and he enjoys the collaboration and variety of work that the film industry provides. Given the fast pace of the industry, Clyne has been constantly exploring different techniques in communicating visually and has found that the computer, and more specifically Photoshop, is the single most important tool. His early work in film began with Terry Gilliam’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” Soon to follow were “Instinct,” “Titan A.E.,” “Mission to Mars,” “Galaxy Quest” and “Mystery Men” for which he provided the conceptual designs for environments, sets, props, matte paintings, and vehicles.

All of this work was created with sketches, gouache paintings, and marker renderings, using the computer only minimally. His later work on Steven Spielberg's “A.I.-Artificial Intelligence” and “Minority Report” was rendered completely in Photoshop. He has been working almost exclusively with the computer since, using both Photoshop and a scanner to combine sketching, painting, texture mapping and image compositing. While the computer has been indispensable in his professional work, he looks forward to setting it aside one day topursue personal projects that allow him to revisit his neglected passion for oil painting.