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(written from a Production point of view)

Ryan Michael Church (born 18 July 1971; age 52) is a Hollywood film concept artist who worked on Star Trek. As the film's concept designer, Church was the one primarily working on the updated design for the USS Enterprise. [1] He worked on Star Trek from April 2007 through January 2008. [2] [3] He then worked as Concept Illustrator on Star Trek Into Darkness between May 2011 and April 2012. [4]

Born in Long Beach, California, Church was taught how to draw by his industrial designer father when he was a child. He attended the University of California, Los Angeles while honing his design skills by taking night classes at the Art Center College of Design. In 1994, he began attending the Art Center full-time, ultimately graduating "with honors as a Transportation Design major with emphasis on Entertainment Design". [5]

From June 1998 through April 2005 Church was Senior Art Director at Industrial Light & Magic. While there, he supervised concept designs for Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002) and Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005) and did creature designs for War of the Worlds (2005). He then moved to Los Angeles, where he did design work on Transformers (2007), which, like Star Trek, was written by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci. He also did concept art for the film Outlander (2008), starring Ron Perlman. For Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, Church received a Visual Effects Society Award nomination in 2003 in the category Best Effects Art Direction in a Motion Picture, shared with Alex Jaeger and Erik Tiemens.

Star Trek marked the second time Church has worked with fellow concept artist James Clyne. The two previously worked together on Avatar (2009), which stars Zoë Saldana and for which he won an ADG Excellence in Production Design Award in the category Fantasy Film in 2010. He worked on Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) and Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011), John Carter (2012), and Zero Dark Thirty (2012) for which he received his third ADG Excellence in Production Design Award nomination in the category Contemporary Film. Other projects include Tron: Legacy (2010), the television series Falling Skies (2011), Real Steel (2011), J.J. Abrams' Super 8 (2011), and Thor: The Dark World (2013, starring Chris Hemsworth).

More recent work includes the television documentary Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey (2014), Godzilla (2014), Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014), Tomorrowland (2015, written and produced by Damon Lindelof, produced by Jeffrey Chernov, music by Michael Giacchino, and production design by Scott Chambliss), and the upcoming video game Star Citizen. [6]

Star Trek awards[]

ADG Excellence in Production Design Awards nominations[]

Church received ADG Excellence in Production Design Award nominations as Illustrator in the category Fantasy Film

External links[]

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