Check out This Gorgeous Star Wars: The Force Awakens Concept Art

Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) has just released a bunch of concept art from Star Wars: The Force Awakens, all of which is totally mind-blowing. Some of these pieces were more or less exactly what eventually appeared in the film (like the shot of the TIE Fighters advancing against the backdrop of a huge setting sun), while others depict what could have been a totally different version of the story.

We've embedded some of our favorites below, but we suggest you also visit ILM's site and checking out all of them. 

From ILM's site:

Since Industrial Light & Magic’s inception in 1975, every idea dreamt into existence found its genesis within the ILM Art Department. Forty years ago, legendary concept designers like Ralph McQuarrie and Joe Johnston brought George Lucas’s brainchild of an asymmetrical Star Wars “used universe” to life, imagining fantastic worlds bursting with iconic heroes, villains, spaceships and aliens. The ILM Art Department continues to revolutionize film design today, coupling classical technique with the very bleeding edge of technology. Acclaimed directors like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and J.J. Abrams work hand-in-hand with the best art directors and artists in the film industry, exploring ideas and iterating on those ideas until their vision is realized, making the unreal real and the impossible possible.

“Each artist began to explore his individual response, and collectively, we began to answer, with our words and art. Out of our brainstorming sessions emerged visual imagery of where we might want to go and what it would look like when we got there. We were not merely illustrating scenes that already existed: we were initiating storytelling concepts through the visual images themselves.”

– Rick Carter, co-production designer, Star Wars: The Force Awakens.