The Magicians
The Magicians is based off Lev Grossman’s New York Times best-selling fantasy trilogy and is hailed by Michael London’s Groundswell Productions, Universal Cable Productions and writers John McNamara (Aquarius) and Sera Gamble (Supernatural).
The Magicians follows grad student Quentin Goldwater (Jason Ralph) and his peers at New York’s secret exclusive Brakebills University for Magical Pedagogy, “an exclusive graduate school for magicians” where he and his friends discover that the magical fantasy world poses a danger to humanity.
Credits
- Client: NBCUniversal | Syfy
- Creative Director: Shea Pepper
- VP Design: Calvin Chu
- Writer/ Producter: Mike DiRienzo
- Art Direction: Bobby Ushiro
- Designer/ Animator: Bobby Ushiro
Stills
The focus of these stills was to use the ‘Magicians’ as a keyhole as the school crest resolves in. The idea was to highlight the amorphous nature of some supernatural protagonists amidst what is essentially a privileged Harvard for Magicians – a grown up version of Harry Potter. Moths were also another predominant element within the show, so those were animated fluttering around to foreshadow the importance of the Moths.
Purple Option
Another version but with a purple/blue-ish color palette.
Blue Version
The best pre-production always starts with pen on paper. I always sketch down various ideas and notes throughout the process.
Afterthoughts
I provided some macro-renders to the design team at Syfy, where they turned these into title-cards. These renders were done using native Cinema4D, because I didn’t have any fancy third-party render engines available at the time so I just made do with what was available.
