Artist Interview : Scott Spencer

Scott Spencer is a concept designer at Weta Workshop, and is the author of several ZBrush books and training materials. Starting out in the field of special effects makeup, he went on to complete his degree at SCAD in Savannah, Georgia, USA. Scott’s graduation coincided with the rising popularity of ZBrush and the release of ZBrush 1.5. Immediately after college, he went to work at Gentle Giant, a traditional and digital sculpting studio that specializes in everything from visual effects to toys and collectables.

Scott helped to put together a concept design and game art department at Gentle Giant, taking on clients from all sorts of different companies, such as Sega.  Gentle Giant worked extensively on Sega’s game Golden Axe, for which the studio conceptualized characters and took them all the way through to final game-ready assets.

During Scott’s time at Gentle Giant, he got to know Richard Taylor from Weta. This saw Scott taking a few trips to New Zealand where he did some workshops for the Weta crew. Eventually, Scott asked Richard Taylor the question – ‘Hey, is there a spot for me at Weta?’.  One did come up a short time after and Scott made the move to New Zealand about 2 years ago. “I’m really happy to be in New Zealand, and I’m loving the country, the people at Weta, and the projects I am working on now.”

From old school FX to digital

“I was working at a company called Lone Wolf Effects in Atlanta, Georgia, which is run by a makeup FX artist named Bill Johnson. He is known as Bill ‘Splat’ Johnson – because he did a couple of splatter movies in the 80s. I had his business card, and on my 20th birthday I cold called him. I said ‘Hey, you don’t know me. Can I come out and clean your workshop?” and he put me off three or four times, then finally said, ‘Ok, I normally never do this but, yeah come on out’.

I worked with him for 10 years, working my way up to being assistant sculptor on 8 Legged Freaks, the last film I did with him. I did everything from movies, to lots of stage, commercial and freelance stuff.

Bill is fantastic – He was a huge inspiration and is one of those people that you have in your life that really changes the course of things for you.”

As a result of Bill’s encouragement, Scott decided in 2002 to return to school at SCAD, in Savannah, where he embraced digital and developed a feel for the tools and processes. “It wasn’t a huge leap. I wasn’t so set in my ways that I couldn’t make the jump – I was excited to pick it up and learn more about it.

It was a 4 year school and I did the animation program, which was quite Maya-centric. It was pretty easy to pick up on things, being around all the other students – doing all the usual tutorials that people do when they are learning Maya. However I could see a disenchantment setting in, because I couldn’t make things in Maya the same way I could in clay.

That’s about the time that ZBrush took off and I was like ‘Yeah this is like sculpting’. Moving from clay to ZBrush is actually a really short step as far I am concerned. And I have done a lot of training for people with no Maya experience, who have just gone directly from being professional sculptors for 20 years, to ZBrush. It’s actually easier for them to make that step than a lot of Maya or Max artists who have been using that type of system for a long time.”

Florence

After studying animation at SCAD, Scott had the opportunity to study classical figure sculpting in Florence, Italy. “I actually went with a professor from SCAD, Paul Hudson, who is a realist illustrator and sculptor and probably one of the most amazing illustrators I have ever seen. He is very much interested in Human Anatomy. The traditional approach to Illustration. Like you get in the Andrew Loomis books for example. Very much in that tradition. He used to be a designer for NASA. And then decided ‘Hey, I want to do figurative art’. So he left, went to SCAD and did the sequential art program there and became a professor.

It was right after college in 2005 when I went out to Italy for the summer with Paul. That was really my first time leaving America. I got the opportunity to be immersed in another culture and language. It was really a wonderful experience being out there.”

Scott recalls spending over 8 hours a day in front of a live model, working on half scale figure sculptures, busts and other studies.

“It was an amazing experience because it was so intense. And so alien to pretty much most approaches that people would be used to. They didn’t encourage you to study anatomy. They felt like if you study anatomy, you are going to sculpt what you think you know and not what you see. So it was very focused on observation and it was treated a lot like a painting. Where you would look at a figure and you would judge the values, the shadow, the same way you would if you were doing a drawing or a painting. They really taught you to see in an entirely different way than I was accustomed to. It was definitely an enlightening experience for that.

There were a lot of very young people there. Especially in the 4 year program, they were seeking it as a fine art career. The school has a philosophy where they really do believe they can rebuild that classical realist tradition. It’s already kind of happening. There are a lot of people moving back towards representational art and the beauty of the figure.

In the shorter program that I was in, there were a lot of people that were established artists who were trying to expand their abilities and their experiences. There weren’t any in my particular group, but they told me that there are a lot of people that come through from the film industry. Those from the film industry usually tend to work under such tight, constrained deadlines that it gave them an opportunity to relax and explore the figure in a way they would not get to normally.”

All throughout his academic endeavours, Scott knew that he would eventually go back to working in the film industry. “The whole idea for going to school and studying was because I felt I didn’t have a really firm grasp on the techniques and methods to create what I wanted to create. And I felt that I could do it faster when I had hands-on instruction, rather than by forcing myself to learn it through trial and error. I wanted to get back into the film industry with a level of experience or an arsenal of skill that I could develop further. ”

Weta Workshop

Scott’s work is typically focused on character design, occasionally interspersed with a few environments, costume and armour elements. “My job is to make the concept and then pass it on down the pipeline where artists bring it to life.

What’s great about using digital sculpting is that there is already a 3D asset that can be passed over to the pre-vis department.

Usually it’s in the interest of the group that’s getting the asset to use it to the best of their abilities. When I was at Gentle Giant, I found that some studios would prefer to re-model your design, but they would always end up just shrink wrapping the mesh back down to the original concept sculpt because it saves you time. Doesn’t make sense to totally re-sculpt it. So it definitely speeds things  up and takes away that step of someone else reinterpreting the work. Plus the director can approve the concept and they know it’s going to be the same as it progresses through the pipeline.

I will also design the skin and the colouring. It’s usually done in the still image and painting to work from one particular angle. This is to sell the idea of what the skin may look like.

This would then go to an artist dedicated to painting the high resolution textures. Just like in prosthetics – the sculptor doesn’t go in and paint the prosthetic. That’s a whole discipline in itself and much better accomplished by a painter.”

Scott goes into a bit more detail about the working process at Weta -

“We will get a project that will come in. It will be, say, a fantasy film. It will have a brief for various characters or environments. So if there is a character brief, it will either be really generic or it might be very specific. We have a talk with the client and get an idea of what they want. Then you go off and use whatever method you have at your disposal to create images to present back to the client that fufill their desires for the character.

For creature stuff I often will use ZBrush to create a sculpt and then use Photoshop to paint on top of it to create a final rendered hero image. Clients really respond to that because they can see it like it would appear in their film. You could do a character a day working in that process. Maybe one and a half in a day if you’re working really quickly. We will generate a lot of images like that. Then whichever one gets picked gets further developed.

If it’s starting at the beginning of the project I will work like that. Then sometimes there’s other projects that come through like the Rugby World Cup sculpture for Wellington. Richard wanted the central figure for the maquette so I ended up sculpting that just in ZBrush by taking one of the figures from my second book, posing it as a rugby player and sculpting it, trying to match to the drawings that he had produced.”

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