Concept to Cosmos: Drew Leung’s Journey From Hollywood Illustrator to Story-Maker

Andrew Leung, SEP Cohort 2

For more than two decades Drew Leung has been the secret weapon behind blockbuster worlds—one of the “top concept artists in the industry,” as he puts it. His paintings shaped franchises like Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and last year’s Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, but something was missing. “I’d spent my whole career illustrating other people’s ideas,” he says. “My ultimate goal is… I want to tell stories, that’s it.”

That revelation led to Ancient China on Mars, an epic science-fiction saga that fuses his Cantonese-American heritage with operatic space adventure. The project began as a live-action screenplay, but Drew quickly encountered Hollywood’s appetite-for-risk problem. “Photoreal sci-fi needs a giant budget. Stylized animation lets me hit the same emotional high on a lower bar.” Animation also unlocks representation: “Audiences are strangely more open to non-normative characters when they’re animated.”

Ancient China of Mars, dir. Andrew Leung

To get the story out sooner—and prove an audience exists—he’s laying out a graphic-novel/webtoon hybrid. The phone-scroll format, he argues, deserves its own visual grammar: “A real Webtoon isn’t just chopped-up comic panels. If you respect the medium, readers smell it.” This isn’t Drew’s first time blending art forms. He previously created an animated documentary, “The Chemical Factory,” about his mother’s childhood during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, streaming on The Documentary Channel. The film taught him to weld raw history to stylized imagery, a skill now powering his Mars epic.

Enter Snarky Elephant Productions. As part of the incubator’s second cohort, Drew found the pressure cooker he never knew he needed. “It forced me to answer questions I’d been dodging. I rewrote the script sixty-plus times—97 percent of the original is gone—and every pass made it better.” The program also gave him a captive audience when friends and family tapped out: “I could bug Neil at 1 a.m. and know someone would still read my pages.”

 “I’d spent my whole career illustrating other people’s ideas...my ultimate goal is… I want to tell stories, that’s it.”

For passionate creatives, Drew’s story is a reminder that the craft muscle keeps growing; world-class technical chops don’t mean you’re done evolving. Philanthropic allies will see the cultural value of a Chinese-American hero’s tale aimed at global youth culture. And industry advocates can’t ignore the package: blockbuster pedigree, multimedia fluency, and a production model engineered for cost-conscious animation.

Given his track record and relentless curiosity, odds are good that Ancient China of Mars will land exactly where audiences are ready to scroll, stream, and dream.

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At Snarky Elephant Productions, we’ve embedded the idea of shifting established standards and changing company cultures into our DNA. Snarky Elephant focuses exclusively on producing content about and by underrepresented groups, especially groups with the least amount of representation in film. We are dedicated to providing equal pay and equal representation among crew and employees. For more information, contact us at info@snarkyelephant.com or visit us at snarkyelephant.com