Lucy is a wild movie, filled with weird ideas and some impossible physics. But having the idea of a super-powered drug mule and her resultant powers in your head is a concept that could only be sold with some solid art to illustrate such a film. Fortunately, such art was indeed on hand.
Concept artist Ben Mauro helped shape the look of Lucy, as he worked off of ideas from director Luc Besson to show Scarlett Johansson’s evolving palette of powers. “Luc had pretty specific ideas for how he wanted everything to look but also left room for me to explore, so a lot of the job for me was to do some extensive research and have fun trying to hit the target he set for me while combining things in interesting ways,” Mauro told io9.
Most of the basis for what he was after came from natural forms/structures/designs with a slight twist to push it into something more sci-fi. One of the others things that was fun to visualize was how Lucy sees the world once she is further along in her metamorphosis, there was a scene that ended up being cut towards the end where she looked at a scientist and we see the world through her eyes as she is looking at him before diving into his memories about his daughter.
Luc wanted this to be the equivalent to the moment in the Matrix where Neo can now see the code of the digital world around him, but what if LUCY could see the natural/real world at an even deeper level and understand and feel everything around her at a micro and macro scale, what if she could see the atomic/cellular activity of a human being, the magnetic fields/waves/energies that pulse and flow around/in/out of us and connect us to others, the cellular and radio waves in the air, everything…………..what would THAT look like?
“Various sequence designs for the film, helping luc visualize how to go from a girl in a chair on earth, backwards and forwards in time to the farthest reaches of space to the big bang and back to a single cell,” Mauro explained on his site:
This was the sequence of the drugs bursting in Lucy’s stomach, and then the visualization of the drug through her veins, pretty cool to see the final look like these early illustrations.
First image in this sequence of the empty stomach was by Eduardo Pena, i had to do the sequence of the drug going through her veins over top.
There’s a lot, lot more on Mauro’s website. It’s a tad spoilerriffic however, so consider yourself warned. If you have seen the film however, I highly recommend giving it a look.