Artist Guest of Honour
Eric Chu
Born in Hong Kong Eric Chu is a Vancouver-based concept designer, storyboard artist, illustrator, and filmmaker whose career has moved freely between hand-drawn animation, live-action production, computer graphics, and the gleefully weird corners where those disciplines meet. Best known to science-fiction audiences for his concept work on the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, Chu helped establish the visual language of the series’ Cylon technology and spacecraft—including the Galactica, Raiders, Basestars, and the Cylon Centurion.
Chu began studying animation at Emily Carr College of Art in Vancouver in 1982, before computer animation had become the industry default. The timing gave him a grounding in classical drawing and design, and he entered the animation business as a storyboard artist in 1985. His early work included Nelvana’s Star Wars: Droids, followed by projects such as Beetlejuice and Captain Power. He later spent time in Asia, co-founding Fisheye Films and serving as creative director on television commercials. That experience in live-action production, combined with his animation background, became an important part of the visual problem-solving he brought home to Vancouver.
For Chu, design is never merely decoration. He has argued that good design supports story, gives a fictional world credibility, and gains strength from the discipline of continual practice. He is equally at home with pencil and pixels, and has cautioned against letting software do the thinking: traditional and digital methods, in his view, are tools to be combined in service of the idea.
Chu founded Vancouver creative studio Paranoid Delusions Inc. in 1985. Its suitably unrestrained mission is to incubate ideas until they are ready to “wreak mutant havoc on the world.” Through the studio, he has worked across design, illustration, animation, live action, modelling, toy design, and original development. His later projects have included work connected with Gerry Anderson’s puppet-based SF series Firestorm—a fitting continuation of a career built on robots, spaceships, visual storytelling, and a healthy respect for the spectacular.
Eric is also the illustrator of the VCON 44 poster art.
Find him at www.facebook.com/Gakchat/