Concept Art and Design for the Mortal Engines Film

Philip Reeve built the world of Mortal Engines on the page, but it took an army of designers, model makers, VFX artists, set builders, and Wellington-based creative maniacs to make that world move on screen.

The film may have divided audiences as an adaptation, but the visual development remains one of its strongest achievements. Mortal Engines had to solve a problem most science fiction films never face: how do you design a city that is also a predator?

That is where concept art becomes more than decoration. In Mortal Engines, design is worldbuilding. Every airship, track system, metal gantry, cockpit, engine bank, and drifting skyport has to explain the logic of a civilization that learned to put wheels under hunger.

This page highlights the work of Nick Keller, a Wellington-based concept artist, illustrator, and VFX art director whose Mortal Engines work helped define the film’s sense of scale, motion, and mechanical appetite.

The 13th Floor Elevator: Valentine’s Shark in the Sky

The design above is the 13th Floor Elevator, the airship used by historian, explorer, and antagonist Thaddeus Valentine.

Calling Valentine the film’s protagonist would be giving him too much moral credit. He is charismatic, educated, dangerous, and very good at dressing up violence as civic duty. His ship needs to reflect that. It cannot look like a battered scavenger craft. It has to feel expensive. Predatory. Personal.

Keller’s own description of the 13th Floor Elevator as having a shark-like quality is exactly right. The craft has a sleek menace to it, with a nose and cockpit profile that suggest forward motion even when the image is still. It looks like something built by a civilisation that has confused elegance with moral superiority.

That matters for Valentine. He is not a brute in a metal box. He is an aesthete with blood on his hands. The 13th Floor Elevator gives him a vehicle that feels fast, refined, and faintly cruel.

The cockpit is just as important as the exterior. A cockpit is a character space. It tells you how a person sees the world. Valentine’s ship gives him command, speed, and separation. He does not need to touch the mud, smoke, and panic beneath him. He can glide over it, make decisions from above, and call the result history.

Designing Municipal Darwinism

The great design challenge of Mortal Engines is Municipal Darwinism.

That phrase is absurd, funny, and horrifying all at once. It turns predation into urban policy. Bigger cities chase smaller towns, strip them for resources, and call the process natural. The concept is comic in the way all great dystopian jokes are comic: you laugh, then realise the system is only slightly more ridiculous than the language real empires use to excuse themselves.

For a concept artist, Municipal Darwinism is not just a theme. It is a design brief. Cities need silhouettes like animals. Tracks need to feel like claws. Scale must be readable at a glance. A viewer must understand, instantly, that London is not simply moving. London is hunting.

Can you spy Hester and Tom?

That is the point. Human beings in Mortal Engines are often dwarfed by the machines they inherit. The tracks dominate the frame. The city becomes geology. Tom and Hester are almost swallowed by the environment before London even gets its jaws around them.

This is one of the best things about the film’s concept art. It understands scale as moral pressure. London is not just big because big looks good on a cinema screen. It is big because the entire story depends on the feeling that individual lives are being crushed beneath inherited systems.

The Lions of London

The Lions of London are one of those design flourishes that feel completely right for this universe.

They are imperial, theatrical, and ridiculous in the best way. They announce London’s civic mythology while also making the city look like it wants to bite. That is the whole joke of the Traction Era. It wraps brutality in symbols, banners, civic pride, and grand old names.

The design process for London had to solve more than mechanical plausibility. It had to make London read as London, even after the city has been rebuilt into a mobile predator. That means monuments, heraldry, layered architecture, industrial bulk, and the suggestion that the old world has been eaten and repurposed into a moving class system.

The key is silhouette. A moving London that looks like a generic tank would fail. It has to look like a city, a fortress, a factory, a museum, and a beast all at once. Keller and the Wētā design team had to stack identity vertically: civic symbolism on top, industrial consumption below, with tracks and engines turning the whole thing into motion.

Airhaven: The Floating Counterpoint

If London is appetite on tracks, Airhaven is motion without roots.

Airhaven works because it gives the world another form of mobility. The traction cities are heavy, grinding, territorial things. Airhaven floats. It suggests trade, smuggling, espionage, refuge, danger, and myth. It belongs to a different species of machine culture.

Keller’s Airhaven concept art is therefore not just about designing a cool sky city. It has to feel like a place where airship crews, fugitives, merchants, pirates, agents, and rebels might all cross paths. It has to look improvised but functional, fantastical but believable, delicate but large enough to hold a society.

The best airship designs in Mortal Engines do not look interchangeable. That is important. This world is full of factions, routes, economies, and improvised engineering traditions. Airships need personality. They need to look patched, prized, modified, stolen, militarised, or lovingly maintained depending on who owns them.

That is why the film’s design work often feels richer than the film’s narrative pacing. The images imply a whole working world just outside the frame.

Hester Shaw: Designing Damage Without Turning Her Into Decoration

Hester Shaw is one of the hardest characters in Mortal Engines to adapt visually.

In the novel, Hester’s disfigurement is severe, central, and emotionally defining. It shapes how people react to her, how she reacts to herself, and how vengeance becomes part of her identity. Film design has to make choices about that. Too much softening and the character loses some of Reeve’s bite. Too much stylisation and her trauma risks becoming costume texture.

This concept image leans into contrast. The red scarf becomes a visual anchor. It gives the character a flash of mythic readability against the industrial palette. Hester needs to stand out in a world of metal, smoke, brown leather, and rust. But she also needs to look like she belongs in that world, as someone who has survived by moving through it rather than posing inside it.

The film’s version of Hester remains one of the adaptation’s most debated choices, but the concept art shows the basic design tension clearly. Hester must be readable as an action figure, a fugitive, a survivor, and a damaged child of the Traction Era. That is a lot to ask from fabric, colour, silhouette, and posture.

Good concept art does not solve all adaptation arguments. It clarifies what the argument is.

Why Keller’s Mortal Engines Art Still Works

The strongest thing about Nick Keller’s Mortal Engines work is that it thinks in systems.

The 13th Floor Elevator is not just Valentine’s ship. It expresses his status and predatory refinement. London is not just a huge vehicle. It is an empire with jaws. Airhaven is not just a floating set-piece. It is a different model of civilisation, lighter and freer, but still vulnerable. Hester is not just a costume. She is a survivor who must be legible inside a world that has already tried to chew her up.

That is the design process at its best: not just making images, but solving story problems visually.

And for all the film’s flaws, its concept art remains a deep well. It points toward the version of Mortal Engines that exists in the imagination: bigger, stranger, nastier, funnier, more layered, full of impossible machines that somehow feel like they have tax codes, maintenance crews, civic rituals, and terrible snack options.

That is why this art is worth revisiting. It does not just show what the film looked like. It shows how hard the artists worked to make Reeve’s impossible world feel engineered.