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.”

Continued on next page »

He also teaches illustration at Wellington’s Massey University, and regularly runs the Concept Design Workshop together with Warren Mahy. Recently, Paul has put together a book, in conjunction with an exhibition, entitled White Cloud Worlds showcasing fantasy and sci-fi art by New Zealand artists.

White cloud worlds

“I have been wanting to do my own book for quite a while. I have been in the industry for a while now, so I have built up quite a good network of people. New Zealand is quite a small place – everyone knows everyone. All of the artists were saying the same thing – ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we had a book we could all get our stuff into’. The problem is everyone wants to do their own book, but they’re working full time and they are struggling to produce enough work to create a book of just their own work. So a good solution is to be able to club together with everyone and go ‘Well, let’s just come up with a book that has lots of artists’ work in it’. So that’s where White Clouds Worlds was born.

It was me first going to 5 other friends saying ‘Do you want to lend me some of your work, I will see if I can create a book around it’. I started working on a book pitch to see if I could get it off the ground. I laid up about 20 pages and I thought that was all looking ok. It was pretty straight forward so I thought I should maybe do more. So I went to more artists that I knew, and before I knew it I had 90 pages of a book. No text, just images with fake text. But it was 90 pages. And we had come up with a working title to it and we decided it was going to be a New Zealand anthology profiling NZ artists or artists residing in NZ.

We pitched it to Harper Collins, they loved the idea (that was about two years ago). The book goes on sale in November. And it is exactly as I said – a NZ anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy art. 27 artists who have written their own text in their own words, and profile some of their artwork. Some of it’s professional artwork, but most of it is work that they have done in their own time.

The theme for the book – if you could say there is a theme – is ‘What do artists do, what worlds do they create in their free time’? It’s a mixture of concept designers, mostly illustrative (some of the illustrators are concept designers as well). I suppose just due to the associations I have, just about half the artists are Weta based artists and about the other half are a mixture of people that we’ve known through friends of friends. We’ve tried to actively look for people that we didn’t know and I’m sure there’s a bunch of people that we have missed which will be regrettable. But hopefully we will get to do another volume and we will get some people coming out of the woodwork who might be interested in doing that.

Obviously it’s a bit of a challenge, trying to put a book together essentially in the evenings when you’re not working, as well as trying to produce work for you own book. I hired the project manager that used to work at Weta, Kate Jorgensen, to get the book off the ground, and help wrangle 27 artists (quite a task as you can imagine!)

We were incredibly fortunate – we had a lot of support, from the industry from Richard (Richard wrote the introduction). We sent off an email to Guillermo asking if he could do an endorsement. A two sentence endorsement because we knew how busy he was. We sent him a sample copy of the book. He (or his assistant) emailed back and said he’d love to. And then 5 minutes later wrote back again saying, actually, do you want me to write a foreword. So we where pretty stoked with that – it was like holy cow that’s quite a coup. And Alan and John where both around as well. I have been such huge fans of both those guys work for so many years that I thought it was just too good an opportunity to pass up, to try and convince them to try and write something for my book. They both wrote the afterword which was pretty awesome. We got Wayne Barlowe and Christian Gossett to write endorsements as well. So there has been an incredible amount of support for the book. Pretty amazing. That’s kind of as far as we have got with it at this stage.

We also have an exhibition to accompany the book. It starts on the 11th of December at TheNewDowse in Lower Hutt. It’s pretty awesome. It came together remarkably easily.”
The exhibition will be on from December until March – quite a substantial amount of time. “TheDowse have been amazing. They have done a couple, like the Kong exhibition. They are a very progressive thinking museum. When you go to them with a popular culture concept like this, they treasured it with exactly the respect and excitement that we where hoping. The perceived notion of science fiction and Fantasy is, it’s low-brow or it is just pop culture. But the way that a lot of us artists perceive it is, it’s fine art – or our version of fine art. It should be seen in a similar light.

Ordinarily, the fact that a lot of the work is digital would have been a problem, but there’s been this growing tide of digital work now being done. They are going to get printed out beautifully. I suppose it’s not a lot different to just buying a really high quality print. Normally that would have been a huge impediment. But certainly not with TheDowse anyway. And because they have done the Kong, and Greg’s ray-gun stuff before, which were very successful exhibitions. Other museums probably would have balked a bit at it. But there is some traditional artwork there as well. We’ve got a number of oils and acrylics. It’s quite an interesting mixture of traditional and digital.

And hopefully it’s going to tour. I think Rotorua and Waikato have currently got the exhibition slotted in. And obviously we are hoping it will go up and down the country if we can. I’d like to get it across to Australia actually. The artwork is not for sale, as it is a public or council funded gallery, and one of their mandates is that they don’t sell. There will be some limited edition prints available in the shop.

We were trying to elevate a lot of this fantasy and science fiction art to a high end, sort of coffee table format of a book. So there is a slipcase version with a limited edition print. Harper Collins have certainly spared no expense in terms of producing a really really high quality book.”

Paul has been sitting on the idea for this book for a number of years, and had been tracking different artists around the country carefully, resulting in the book coming together rather easily.

“That was one of the problems actually – the book quickly filled up the allocated pages that the publisher gave us. I filled up 90 of the 128 pages before it even got started. So unfortunately that made it a bit difficult to slip in newer artists that turned up along the way. But we did manage to get a few new artists in there that I didn’t know personally or that came recommended. It came together very fast in that respect.

But it is a very diverse book. Some people have some very strange worlds. But that’s the strength of the book. And the other big strength is the fact that the artists have written in their own words – something that was suggested to me very early on by one of the original guys that helped me out. He said ‘Look, I think you need to let the artists write it in their own words.’

We were terrified by that prospect, because we thought ‘My god, 27 artists, what are they going to write?’ We were a bit worried about it because that is a huge level of wrangling. It’s much easier to interview someone and just write it basically. But he was dead right – it was such the right thing to do. We just got so much more of an interesting, more informal… because they talk in their own voice, you can identify with it so much more. I want this book to be accessible. I want it to be a really high quality book but I want it to be very accessible too, to students and kids. The same kids that we were when we first picked up our favorite book.

I suppose we are trying to profile the artists a lot more so it’s a little bit more like a magazine in that respect, where you can interview the artists and find out how they work. We are very much more about trying to identify with the artist and what they are doing as well as the artwork. That was a big part of the idea of the book.

We didn’t give the artists any brief about what to write at all. But a lot of the artists will talk about how they got started and maybe what got them inspired. Some of them will talk about how they work. Others will just talk about their particular project they are working on. Some people talk about their industry and how they work in it. It really is quite eclectic. One particular artist gives quite a fictional account. He does not make a point that it’s fictional, he’s just writing it in a way thats post-humous. You kind of have to assume that it’s fictional – because you know he’s still alive. One of the more entertaining reads of the book.

The irony is that there are a lot of gifted people in NZ working at an international level, but who are totally unheard of.

We want to show the world class work that’s being done in New Zealand by artists most people would never have heard of. The irony is that there are a lot of gifted people in NZ working at an international level, but who are totally unheard of. A couple of people are starting to get their name out there – Greg Broadmore is a very good example. But I never knew there was an NZ comic book artist that was now doing Hellboy! You know, he’s doing Hellboy, he’s working out of Auckland illustrating Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. What an incredible achievement. He’s just one of a number of artists doing some pretty amazing things at such a high professional level.

But it is a New Zealand book – it very much caters to a NZ market. Of course we hope it sells well overseas but it’s book that I really want to play to a home crowd initially. Then hopefully people might find it exciting and buy it overseas as well. We are celebrating that NZ creativity – very NZ-centric. Other fantasy art books, like Spectrum, are not country specific at all. They are just picking artwork from across the globe. And there isn’t necessarily a strong theme or concept behind it.

So that’s been a huge part of my life over the last two years, getting that up and running, while working full time, teaching, running concept workshops and all the rest of it. Its been a pretty hectic couple of years. And there are other books I want to do but yeah, just getting this one out of the way. It’s just a case now of the enjoyment of getting it to the public and seeing how it goes. Nerve racking obviously. Most of the book has been self financed by myself so you have invested a huge amount of time and money into it, and hope you see some return on that. Mainly so you can hope to do another one!”

Early Years

“I think most kids draw when they are growing up. I remember consciously doing illustration work from about 3rd form onwards, when I started college. I met a group of friends who were into writing and drawing. There were those Choose Your Own Adventure books, which we really got into. The ones that were done by Ian Livingstone & Steve Jackson. We began writing our own and a couple of us started illustrating the stories.

That’s the earliest illustration work I can remember doing, rather than just drawing for the sake of doodling something. I think what got me really interested in becoming an illustrator was getting given a copy of Alan Lee’s book Merlin Dreams when I was about 16. That was an amazingly beautiful book with Arthurian style short stories”.

Continued on next page

All Images © 2010 Paul Tobin. All rights reserved.

Early years

Greg’s fascination with art began at a very young age, as he recalls: “My earliest memories are of drawing these huge battlefields filled with tanks, soldiers and explosions on A1 pieces of cardboard my Grandad would get me from the paper mill. He would bring me heaps of comics with the covers ripped off, dumped by magazine retailers. Mad magazines, Commando comics, Batman, Spiderman, and more pivotally for me 2000AD. I always drew, it’s just what I did. I never thought I’d do anything else but drive a tank or draw comics.”

The human figure has also featured in Greg’s art from the very beginning. This started off with drawing heaps of soldiers, fueled by his fascination with World War 2. “I still draw a lot of dudes with guns. That shit is just ingrained.” He also has an affinity towards portraying robots, and he finds that this serves as a helpful aid in understanding the human form. “I love drawing robots and ultimately, for me, that’s an exercise in drawing human form anyway. A robot to me is a caricature of a person, an attitude, or snapshot of some human attribute embodied by machinery. It’s a liberating way of drawing people. The fact that robots are supposed to be emotionless representations of humans makes it fun to play with any projected emotion or attitude that you put into it. That (excuse the rising art wankery) juxtaposition of concepts is appealing.”

Greg’s early sources of inspiration continue to influence him to this very day. Dinosaurs, tanks and robots still dominate his art, although he says that maybe curvy women feature a little more nowadays than when he was a boy.

Apart from high school, a year in a grossly unsuitable polytech commercial art course and a failed half year in fine arts at Wanganui, Greg has not had any formal art training. However, an early start combined with childhood sources of inspiration and years of solid drawing have brought him up to the level that he is at today. “Draw all the time, get a Wacom tablet and Photoshop (or a pencil and paper) and draw all the time. It just takes perseverance, as corny as it sounds, to get the skills – the rest is imagination. Draw lots of crazy shit.”

Career
“I Spent many years on the dole, from my late teens until my mid to late twenties, getting hassled by the welfare people continuously. During that time I played in metal and punk bands, travelled a lot around Aotearoa, drew a lot, but probably focused more on music. Drawing was fun but I never thought to use it as a career at the time. I decided to grow up a little and get a day job, that lasted a few years and I decided to give illustration a stab, I had done a few small jobs, and thought drawing for kid’s books would be fun, so I approached Learning Media. I got fobbed off for a year or more, but eventually got a start and ended up doing more than 30 books for them. Some full books, mostly little stories in books with multiple stories. I still do jobs for them now and then, but don’t really have the spare time to take them on. I had an epiphany one day and thought, ‘why the fuck don’t you send a folio to Weta Workshop?’ Luckily Richard liked my moxie and gave me a job and I now work fulltime as a concept designer. I’ve been doing that for five years or so.”

Greg’s time at Weta Workshop has undoubtedly been the best part of his career, as this is where he had the opportunity to participate in his most favourite projects to date. “Working on King Kong was a major for me. I love illustrating Dinosaurs, It was what I was mainly drawing before I was employed at Weta Workshop. So, as a commercial job, that was a real high point. Drawing T-rexes and Triceratops all day for months on end, awesome. What a nerd. We created a book off the back of that called The World of Kong: A Natural History of Skull Island which used a lot of this concept work, plus I got to do many, many more illustrations. That was great too, although it was a difficult time, and really had it’s ups and downs emotionally. Overall it was a great thing to achieve, so I was really fucking proud to be a part of it. One thing I never thought about before working at Weta was the thrill you get when your drawings come to life, either as a prop, a prosthetic, an environment or a creature (CG or practical). It’s pretty fucking cool to see.”

More recently, Greg has just finished work on Doctor Grordbort’s Contrapulatronic Dingus Directory which he wrote and illustrated at the Workshop. Greg describes it as “massively satisfying to complete. It’s part catalogue of bizarre science fiction Ray guns/contraptions and part comic book. I modeled it after the Sears and Roebucks catalogues of the early 20th century” The initial idea for the Raygun pieces stemmed from a series of acrylic paintings on canvas that Greg did at home. These paintings were subsequently pitched to Richard Taylor of Weta Worshop, who was searching for ideas for possible collectables. “He loved them and wanted to push Weta’s own original ideas, so we’ve made them, and they kick arse. I pitched that we make them as real metal replicas, like antiques of old firearms. It’s freaking cool to pick these things up, they just look and feel real, that’s an amazing thing, to go from something that was simply a painting to a solid tangible object.” Doctor Grordbort’s Contrapulatronic Dingus Directory will hopefully be published shortly.

The evolution of Greg’s illustration and concept art career has exposed him to both to the world of freelancing and the studio environment. Greg explains: “Freelancing is scary in that the work can dry up at any time, but working from home is awesome. I love the freedom. On the other hand, working at a studio, like Weta Workshop, where you are surrounded by stupidly creative people with world-class skill, different techniques etc. is invaluable. It can sometimes be hard to concentrate, but any way that you can work where you can feed off friends and fellow artists is going to have a really positive affect on your work. In the end, they both have great advantages, I really look forward to working alone as much as I appreciate working with others.”

While not everyone will land a gig with Weta Workshop, Greg notes the importance of the internet as a promotional tool for young New Zealand-based illustrators who are just starting out: “There aren’t a lot of jobs in this industry locally, so as far as finding a position at a place like Weta, it’s difficult. But with the internet, as shit as it is in Aotearoa at the moment, it’s entirely possible to work as a freelancer or even better drive and create your own projects, then deliver that content, whether it be TV, film, Videogames, internet cartoons or comics, whatever, to the world.”

With regards to possible future work: “I love doing film work, having a director with great and ambitious vision like Peter Jackson or Neill Blomkamp is fantastic. But ultimately I enjoy creating my own worlds and this is something I’ll be focusing more on.”

Continued on next page