Interview: Mick Gordon

When peo­ple meet me in the flesh for the first time one of the things they tend to notice is that I am a pretty pas­sion­ate fellow.

I find that the great­est well­spring of this pas­sion and inspi­ra­tion is from being around indi­vid­u­als who have a gen­uine pas­sion for what they do.

From all walks of life, hob­bies, voca­tions, the sin­gle under­ly­ing string that ties them all together is their unstop­pable tor­rent of zeal for what­ever it is that they do.

One of the finest exam­ples of uncorked enthu­si­asm (and unbe­liev­able humil­ity) is my audio­phile hom­bre Mick Gor­don who I met and worked with ear­lier this year on a game project.

He has been an audio direc­tor in the games indus­try for over half a decade and suc­cess­fully runs his own award win­ning stu­dio, Game Audio Aus­tralia ser­vic­ing most of the big boys, from EA, Sony Enter­tain­ment, THQ, Warner Broth­ers, Nick­elodeon, Mar­vel, Ubisoft and con­tin­ues to work at a fer­vent pace to add to this already impres­sive list.

Read more

Dreams and Suicide

It is almost 11pm on a Thursday.

It is another cold Mel­bourne night and I sit here again in my warm lit­tle home stu­dio at my key­board com­pelled to write while the tree out­side my win­dow plays tag with the wind.

I wanted to write now while my emo­tions are still fresh.

I have spent the last two hours relax­ing from my hec­tic work sched­ule, watch­ing a rel­a­tively old film — Dead Poet’s Soci­ety, which I have been told many times is fan­tas­tic, but never got around to view­ing until tonight.

Unabashedly speak­ing, I cried while watch­ing it.

Read more

Ideation Process: Part 2

Now, up to this point, we’ve been think­ing of the sketches as a per­sonal tool, that is, an exter­nal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a myr­iad of inter­nal ideas in an attempt to organ­ise free flow­ing thoughts into a struc­tured pat­tern for our own per­sonal use.

We have part of the design in our minds and this can often cause us to stop short of cre­at­ing sketches that mean any­thing to any­one but ourselves.

This sit­u­a­tion would be fine if the work we are doing is only for our­selves, how­ever, most often the art we doing isn’t just for fun, it’s because some­one is pay­ing us to deliver.

Read more

Dear blog…

Dear blog,

The old rusty inef­fi­cient coil heater that my ex girl­friend gave me before she moved out is turned on, click­ing and clack­ing mak­ing me feel warm and fuzzy.

Out­side my wall sized win­dow, it is a chilly dark Mel­burn­ian night, I can hear some night birds chirp­ing as the world turns over.

I just fin­ished my dinner. All things con­sid­ered, I feel pretty darned con­tent with my life and the writ­ing side of my brain wants me to bang out a blog post. See where it goes. Cool wit you?

Read more

Natural talent is overrated…

Some­thing that has come up time and again espe­cially from peo­ple out­side of the indus­try or out­side the field of art mak­ing, is the sen­ti­ment that in order to be good at art (or music or writ­ing or pro­gram­ming or what­ever cre­ative field or hobby you are pur­su­ing) you need to have nat­ural tal­ent, you need to be born with it or you will never amount to any­thing pur­su­ing this field.

This is a belief that per­me­ates main­stream think­ing, an igno­rant notion handed down from one per­son to the next, through cul­ture and mythol­ogy and has a destruc­tive effect on young cre­atives try­ing to find their way in the world

Read more

The critic…

Are you try­ing to do some­thing new? Make some­thing of your­self? Travel a less beaten path? Are you not doing as well as you hoped and is some­one putting your efforts down?

You know what they are? A critic — some­one who most likely at some stage had a dream of their own who never had the will to pur­sue it, who blame it on every­thing but their own lack of heart, who live daily under the weight of regret.

Read more

Frustration is a motherf*cker…

You’re try­ing to do some­thing well — cre­ate a killer piece of art, sing a tune, bal­ance your accounts, write an arti­cle (tee­hee!) and despite your most sin­cere efforts it is just not hap­pen­ing for you. You most likely feel the wrath of your inner demon scream­ing, want­ing to devour small ani­mals and you feel frustrated.

In my artis­tic career (rife with frus­tra­tions let me tell you!) when I was learn­ing per­spec­tive in illus­tra­tion, I mean learn­ing it prop­erly, not just the rudi­men­tary stuff — I’m talk­ing design­ing in three dimen­sions where so many things have to come together just per­fectly for you to pull off some­thing worth being proud of, I had a hard time. I dis­tinctly remem­ber what the cycle was like

Read more

Making something look good…Part 2 (Links & Resources)

Alright, thanks for com­ing back, this is the sec­ond part of the a two part blog post, the first can be found here: Mak­ing Some­thing Look Good…Part 1

As promised, here is a list of var­i­ous skills and asso­ci­ated resources that have helped me to improve my art­work over the span of 4–5 years and will prob­a­bly do the same for you.

If you have any queries, addi­tions or just want to say hi, you’re encour­aged to hit up the com­ments sec­tion of this post. I also wrote this a while ago, so if there are errors, gram­mat­i­cal or oth­er­wise let me know and I’ll edit. Remember…caring, is sharing =)

& Resources)">Read more

Making something look good…Part 1

So…how do I make some­thing look ‘good’ in art?

I have been asked this so many times that if I had 5c for every time that ques­tion was raised I’d…actually, I’d prob­a­bly only have about 35c or some­thing, so I guess that point goes out the win­dow as a valid rea­son for me writ­ing this post.

Dif­fer­ent angle then…I know that as a young artist, it was a ques­tion that per­vaded my devel­op­ing mind every time I tried to illus­trate some­thing vaguely awe­some like Venom totally kick­ing Spiderman’s skinny-gaudy-leotard-laden butt.

Read more

So…what is a concept artist?

“I am a con­cept artist for video games…” is the answer I gen­er­ally give when asked the oblig­a­tory “So what do you do for a liv­ing?” when I meet some­one for the first time.

Other times, I will answer “I am a ven­tril­o­quist in a trav­el­ing cir­cus who uses dead ani­mals instead of wooden pup­pets to put across cau­tion­ary tales about the evils of pre­scrip­tion drugs…” if I don’t really want to talk to someone.

Assum­ing I answered con­cept artist, their eye­brows usu­ally raise as if I just told them I ride to work on a uni­corn bare­back “Hey! That sounds kinda cool!” and “My kids would LOVE you!” are typ­i­cal responses which always make think “Do you think I get to play video games all day for work!?” We really don’t, but I tell them I do any­way just to per­pet­u­ate the fan­tasy for giggles.

So then the ques­tion arises, what DO we really do?

Read more