I was wondering where to find the early design sketches of the Ghostbusters’ costume and gear, the Ecto-1 and the Firehouse HQ…
I’m curious to see what the first conceptions of them looked like and how they evolved to the versions ultimately used in the movie…
I know some of these sketches can vaguely and briefly be seen on the wall behind John DeCuir in the 1984 featurette… I hope there are scanned versions of them somewhere…
I unfortunately don’t own a copy of it, but maybe these designs were featured in the old ‘Making of Ghostbusters’ book…
Don Shay’s Making Ghostbusters is probably one of the best sources for concept sketches for the film, sadly there are no concept sketches of the Firehouse, and only about two of the Ecto-1.
Even the sketches of the equipment are fairly small in number, with the majority being the ghosts and monsters.
I know its not much - but you can also check the Storyboards on the DVD set (Also in Making Ghostbusters). They have the Hotel Scene as well as the lost original pack introduction scene (where Egon plugs it into the Firehouse wall). That might help, I know it’s not technically concept sketches.
For help with the Firehouse, though Making Ghostbusters didn’t have a sketch, it did have a picture of a model they built of the ground floor.
Cool! Do you by any chance know where to find a scan of that model picture? I’d love to see it.
In fact, the reason why I’m so eager to see Ghostbusters design art is this…
Films like Ghostbusters, Star Wars, Batman, Raiders and what have ya have inspired my from a very young age to start drawing and create worlds and characters of my own. Some twenty years later, I was lucky enough to become a concept artist myself and I’m still inspired by the artwork done for those classic movies I adored as a kid. My bookshelf is full of ‘art of’ books on all of them. Well, except on Ghostbusters.
I recently realized I’ve never even seen any Ghostbusters designs except for the ones featured on the DVDs, mostly ghosts & monsters.
While they’re all great designs, it still leaves a hunger for designs of the actual good guy stuff.
Slightly off topic maybe, but I noticed today that I have a couple of Terror Dog designs you guys might not have seen yet. I scanned them from a 1984 issue of the French magazine “L’écran Fantastique”. They don’t seem to be included on the DVDs and they’re not in the Terror Dog designs section of this site.
i have a huge interest in the development process of my fav films. MAKING GHOSTBUSTERS has a few pics of equipment… there’s a very early drawing of “STANTS” (like i said… early) wearing the ecto-goggles, as well as an early early image of the ectomobile. there are quite a few pics floating around of GB2 equipment… slime blowers, geiga meter, slime scoop… but not a lot from the first film.
yeah, there were prototypes produced. aykroyd even built a mock-up when he was shopping his original script to the studios. i’m a bit rusty on my GB history, but i think production designer steve dane built a rough prototype, which was then handed down to chuck gaspar for construction. i’ve seen VERY little proton pack concept art and designs…
I think (although this would change if we had a way of getting the info from the time) that the search for the Firehouse exterior may have been shorter then a location scouting would usually take. The station was supposedly near to a hotel where a bunch of the production people were staying, and it go chosen pretty quickly.
