The Egyptian art you see as a background for this page is not really "Egyptian", it is the result of three months of labor, I supervised the design of hieroglyphs and futuristic motifs you see here. Read the story below if you wish to learn more.

 

The Secrets of StarGate, a Sci-Fi Epic

In Gaza, Egypt, 1928, thousands of Arabs excavating ancient ruins unearth a momentous discovery, a huge metal ring of unknown origins.

In present day, Los Angeles, a group of scientist working for the army are determined to unlock the secret of this "gate" left behind by some alien civilization, a door to another dimension.

So begins StarGate, a 60,000-million film that is without a doubt the most expensive Sci-Fi movie of the century, and it shows.

The movie proposes the hypothesis that ancient Egypt and its culture and language are actually the inheritance of an alien, more advanced civilization. Hence, later on in the film you get to see the alien culture that originated our Egyptian one. The producers of the film had a great passion for ancient Egypt. The executive producer, Mario Kassar of Carolco is an avid collector of Egyptian art and he immediately identified with the project.

My involvement with StarGate initiated last year when I received a phone call from the Art Department of StarGate. Holger Gross and Peter Norton, the Production Designer and the Art Director for the movie, wanted me to join their creative team. My task, they said, was to design an atmosphere that was at once ancient and otherworldly, a world that would have the style of ancient Egypt, yet seem high-tech.

So, after the meeting was over I went home and dug out my dusty books on ancient Egypt and reacquainted myself with the way authentic ancient Egyptians communicated, I learned much I didn't know about their art and their language. Including the meaning of many of their hieroglyphs. I knew my designs would eventually become a crucial element in creating the atmosphere of the world behind the gate. My may concern was to make this world seem authentic yet foreign, the language of StarGate had to look like a legitimate language not just a bunch of mismatched hieroglyphs. So, in a way, you could say that I learned Egyptian grammar. Pretty soon I found myself writing entire sentences in a language that didn't exist, so obsessed I became with this new language that I would make sure that my assistants would follow the same "rules of grammar" I had created -a certain bird symbol had to face left always, etc. Regretfully, they neglected to follow my rules all the time so you may find some "misspellings" here and there in the language of StarGate, but, who is going to know besides myself? And I am not telling.

I chose Freehand as the main program to fulfill this task, but most of the hieroglyphs were drawn by hand before they were scanned and traced on the computer. I designed on paper then traced on Freehand, four to five hundred different graphic elements. Including several motifs that resemble the human figures and animals you see on Egyptian art.

Just the surface of Ra's spaceship, a flying pyramid, had so many different graphic elements that it would take several minutes to redraw on my Quadra 800 (and I had plenty of RAM). So, I opted to divide the surface of the pyramid into five different sections, each one saved as a separate Freehand document to be put assmbled later on. The volume of detail was tremendous, but even though you may not see it all, you get the sense of it, which you need to make it look convincing.

Of all the elements, the one that I am most proud of is the final design of Ra's flying pyramid. It was a lot of hard labor but it pays off on the big screen.

 

 This article was published on the December 1994 issue of LAMG MAGAZINE (Los Angeles Macintosh Group)

(Daniel Camejo is a freelance Art Director/Animator.)