Aslan’s Country Interviews John Dickenson

AslansCountry.com, a new fansite for Narnia, has an exclusive interview with John Dickenson. For those of you who have been around the forum on NarniaWeb, member Narnia_Fan12 was kind enough to share this interview with us a month ago. We waited to post it on the front page however until AslansCountry.com launched.

Just as a side note, in the interview, John Dickenson says that filming is already in progress, but we were able to confirm for AslansCountry.com that he was mistaken: filming does not begin until July.

So, were you asked to be a part of the concept artist group, or did you have to do something to acquire the position?

“I’m good friends with Justin Sweet, he and my other good friend Vance Kovacs had done work on the Lion Witch and the Wardrobe film. So when Prince Caspian was starting to go into pre-production, they mentioned me to Andrew Adamson, and their Production Designer Roger Ford. Roger called me in for an interview within a week. They liked my portfolio and hired me to be a part of the concept art team. I worked on it for about 4 months.”

How did you like working among the other concept artists?

“It was my first movie, so I was pretty nervous. All the people that I met and created with there were great. It is a pretty small community of people that do concept work for the film industry. Of course my 2 best friends (Justin & Vance) were a part of it as well. That made it really special for me.”

How goes work on the Dawn Treader?

“It’s been over a year since I worked on it up in L.A. They are now shooting it down in Australia. It was my highlight so far in my career to be a part of. The 3 of us(Justin, Vance), got to work with Director Michael Apted, who was amazing to work for. We really liked the way he went about making a movie. And we also got to work with an amazingly talented Production Designer named Jan Roelfs. He had some great takes on the way this film should look and feel. We also met with Weta’s Richard Taylor for an afternoon. He was a great inspiration. We hope to get the chance to work with him in the future. [Jan Roelfs] left when we did, so I have no idea how the new PD will do on it. But the work we created was some of our best I feel. Once the movies out, I’ll post all my art on my website.”

Read the full interview at Aslan’s Country website here.

John Dickenson’s website can be found here. Justin Sweet’s page is here. And Vance Kovacs’ page is here.

Special thanks to Narnia_Fan12 for giving us a sneak peek!