On Ratatouille, a lot of time was put into the environments, and the city of Paris was featured in several sequences. Credit: Dominique Louis (pastel). All Ratatouille images © Disney Enterprises Inc. and Pixar Animation Studio

When audiences choose to spend their hard earned money on a movie ticket for one of the latest super-sized, effects-laden, summer blockbusters, they aren't thinking about how the CGI bells and whistles come to life on screen. They just want to see and believe the amazing explosions, the towering robots, the foodie rats running around a kitchen or the ghostly galleon battling the swirling elements, really could be real.

For Harley Jessup, who production designed Ratatouille, concept art serves different purposes through the different phases of production.

For the hundreds of people working behind the scenes creating that make-believe, that's their greatest reward -- the audience accepting their art as reality. But there happens to be a lot of steps to eventually get to that place in darkened theater somewhere in the world. With summertime releases, the stakes are always higher and the competition is fiercer to get audience eyes and make back the incredible budgets invested into making the films. With price-tags soaring into the $200 million range for some blockbusters, the producers and the filmmakers do everything they can to maximize their pricey visual effects budgets, making sure they plan as much as possible so as not to waste precious funds on poor execution. And one of the most helpful tools in that process is concept art.

With the time and talents of exceptional designers and illustrators being utilized very early in the film pre-production process on concept art, directors are able to create visual blueprints for the production and post-production teams to follow throughout the process. Director-commissioned concept art created at the start of a film can obliterate most of the confusion that can appear when, say a 3D modeler is unsure of how a character should ultimately look, or when the vfx team isn't exactly sure how an expensive CGI environment will work with certain camera angles. The guessing just adds time to the post-production calendar and bloats budgets already beyond capacity. Concept art not only takes out the uncertainty, but it also helps the entire team coalesce around a united vision that streamlines the process further.

VFXWorld talks to production designers and art directors for three of the summer's biggest blockbusters, Ratatouille, Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds' End and Transformers, to discuss the function of concept art in their productions.

Harley Jessup -- Production Designer, Ratatouille (Pixar)

Tara DiLullo Bennett: Concept art has always been an important part of traditional animation, but does it serve the same role now in the world of 3D animation?

Harley Jessup: I think it does. It serves different purposes throughout the different phases. During pre-production and development, I always think of it as a preview of where's its going and the possibilities. It's interesting because some of the artwork from the very beginning of the film often looks more finished than the artwork that we are doing at the end. By that time we have outlined the way the world looks, so later on we are into plans, views, and elevations -- our more practical model-building guide for the technical director. In the beginning we are really trying to inspire a back and forth thing between the art department and the story department. It keeps building in a very exciting way.