Kenji161230_001 - DesignCinema

In the first episode of SI Cinema, Phan Du talks about the concept design industry. He discusses the history of the industry and how it has changed over the years. He also talks about how to get into the industry and what it takes to be a concept artist. Phan Du explains that many students are attracted to concept art because they think it's easy and fun, but in reality, it is a difficult job that requires a lot of hard work and dedication. He uses the analogy of buying a sports car to explain the difference between being a fan of something and actually understanding and working in that field. Overall, he aims to give listeners a clearer understanding of the concept design industry. 30 December, hi everybody and welcome to the first episode of SI Cinema, the podcast edition. This is Phan Du speaking and a beautiful Thursday outside. I hope to make this episode clear about the role and my time here to record it for you. I have no idea how long is it. One hour? Probably over an hour, my guess. Because it's a podcast, so speak freely and relax. Just pretend we're in a classroom here. And just run the speaker points and things related to this episode. No video. I'm hopefully trying to make it interesting as possible for you guys. I've never done a podcast before ever, so this is going to be an experiment for all of us here. So I'm going to apologize ahead of time for any kind of mishaps, coughing and so forth. Because I cannot edit too much. Because I cannot do that. Because I cannot edit too much. Let's just make it as raw as possible. So you guys have a true sense of what it's like to just have a conversation. Alright, let's jump into this episode. And by the way, I'm going to speak a lot slower here because there's no video. Let me make sure the audio is nice and clear for everyone to hear. And speaking slowly actually is a challenge for me. I'm used to speaking at a really fast rate. So I have to constantly remind myself to slow it down, breathe, relax. So you guys don't miss anything I'm going to say here. Alright, for the first episode, I thought it would be a good idea to talk about the concept design industry. Because we've got a lot of students in the show. Of course, we have a lot of professionals as well. And I think we have a lot of students who try to make their way into the concept design industry. But yeah, at the same time, history is quite hidden. Now with the internet and Facebook, all these kind of things on the art side, on the books, it's a little bit exposed than before. But that exposure sometimes is not entirely 100% either. So what I want to do about this episode is talk about a few things. Number one, a little brief history of the concept design industry in terms of from a point of view, how I see a change in the growth. Then we're going to head into how do you actually get in? What are the chances? What are the odds? What do you actually prepare for? And what do you actually do, right? I'm going to do a section which is if you actually get in as a concept artist, what do you do every day entirely? What do you prepare for in terms of portfolio and things like that? What do you work in? In the meantime, you get yourself ready for these pieces. All right, so let's talk a little bit about the history. What leads to this episode? When I started in this school in 2009, most of the students who applied to our school had a pretty good understanding of what the concept art was. They had done the research. There are other books. There are research on the internet that kind of had a good idea of what they are heading into. So we don't have to worry about them. Okay, you get it. You're here. You know what this business is about. You know the odds. You know what you do every day. Perfect. Now, come today, seven years later, we started to get a small percentage of students who applied who had absolutely no idea what this industry actually is about. I got about maybe 10% of the students who applied just absolutely no idea. They were there. They wanted to pursue this, in my opinion, extremely difficult job, a career path. So they had to ask, what is there to do there to do this? And I actually think this has to do with the popularity of video games as well as film in the past 10 years. That's up to, you know, 1990s or even early 2000s before YouTube came along, before social media became a giant, enormous thing. That's taken over our life now. Video games and films were quite under-exposed in terms of production, in terms of what goes on behind the scenes. And also, especially in the video game side, you will be seen as a very nerdy business to be in. If you tell your friends you're working at a video game at present, you automatically get the assumption that you're a big nerd or geek or things like that. It just wasn't very cool to be in gaming. And then, somewhere in 2010, 2011, there was a load of video games that got released. For example, Skyrim and Fallout. All these games that you see a lot of attention on the Internet that brought the game industry to mainstream. I think it did. But to that, only the nerds and most hardcore gamers would know about these games. But then, you see on television, you start to see video blogs on YouTube, having millions of photos just talking about video games. Skyrim alone probably had 30-40 million photos throughout all the channels on YouTube. So now you have influx or exposure of video games to the mainstream audience and no longer is video games versus RC nerdy. I think now it's almost cool to go in-game. So back to the sports student, I think the small percentage of students who apply will be like, All video games are cool. I want to do it. Which one? Which job suits me to get in? There are triage, programmers, sound design, music and animation, VFX, textures and dance and concept art. I think a lot of them tend to choose concept art because from the outside world, it looks really fun and maybe even perceived as cheesy. Because all you need is a piece of paper or photoshop. Buy a wacom tablet and boom, you're in. But making concept art, you don't have to study really hard. C++ code, you don't have to know Maya, animation curves and things like that. You don't have to learn Zebra's own hardcore free software to be quiet to become a good triage artist. It just seems like easy way in. At least from the outside, in my opinion. However, the truth is far from that. This job is equally as difficult as anything. That would be an impression of the product. It just seems like all you don't have to do is education. You don't have to study anything, just draw. That's part of it. And I think that's why so many young students are trying to apply as a concept art, even though they know very little of what a job does. So let's talk about that. What exactly is it? And it's confusing. Sometimes I don't need to. I think this case applies. Who don't know very little about concept art think that what you do is just draw funny stuff on there. You paint the characters, action scenes and all that. And really, that's not what you do in the job. That has to do with sometimes marketing art or other books. But mix a bunch of stuff together. And I'm gonna cover that later in the part 2 of what you actually do. But it has to do with... I like to use analogies of cars. Okay. Let's be patient with me here when I set this up. Again, this is a podcast. It's gonna run for quite a while, so let's just keep talking. Pretend you win a guy for him. He didn't stay powerful, right? You guys probably heard there's a lot of things going on right now. And the amount is 1.5 billion. Okay, a lot of money over there. Imagine it's just some guys, some girls, and you win. You're the only winner. Now you have close to a billion dollars in the bank. After tax, maybe you have 600 million dollars or something. Crazy like that. And you want to go buy some sports car. My guess is the sports car this person is gonna buy, it's gonna be probably Ferrari, Lamborghini, maybe a Bugatti. But probably something like a Ferrari, Lamborghini. Very high chance, not one of those two brands. Now, does this person know anything about the car? Probably no. But do they care? No. Why did they buy the car? Because it's expensive, it's very flashy, and it shows you have money. But in terms of knowing history, the buyer doesn't have to care. They don't even know where Ferrari are made. You know, I don't think they care. All they know is it's freaking nice looking, it's sexy, it costs a crap load of money. But most people cannot afford this car. So therefore, when they try the car, they don't have money. That's the purpose in terms of why they buy the car. Totally fine, totally legit. No problem there. Okay, so scenario number two. Now you're a student trying to become a mechanical engineer to design high-end car engines. Okay, and you apply to a school that teaches you how to do that. How to design very high-level, high-performing racing engines. And now this school is going to interview you and ask you what company you would like to work for after you're done. And your answer is Lamborghini or Ferrari. Okay, totally cool. They're going to ask you about a company with a great engine. Okay, let's tell us a little bit about this company. Why do you want to work for them? What kind of engine do you like? Which Ferrari model is your favorite? Let's see. I don't know. I just want to work for them. I have no idea. Okay, do you know where the engine is mounted? Is it in the front, in the back? How many cylinders? No, I have no idea. I just want to work for them. Now you can see from the school's point of view, you're starting to be like, Wait, you want to choose Ferrari or Lamborghini? But yeah, you have absolutely no idea what you actually do. But yeah, and you're choosing those two brands. Why did you choose Ford? Why did you choose GM? Why did you choose Lotus? Why did you choose those brands? Why Ferrari and Lamborghini? And my personal opinion is because those brands are named brands. They're recognizable and they give you a lot of voice in terms of social site. It's like, cool, I work for Lamborghini. But yeah, you don't know anything about them. Now, is there anything wrong with that? No, probably not. Choosing the good brands is important. You know what I mean? Make you happy to work there, sure. But I think what's driving that for the concept industry is not because you want to be a concept artist. It's to draw every day, to work on product. Very long hours and a lot of stress. I think the answer comes in because you just want to play games. It's fun to be in a company that makes cool games because the answer you get on the outside, right? With the car mechanic. It's a Lamborghini Ferrari on the outside. When you ask students what you want to work for after you graduate, the number one answer, I think, 99% of the time, probably it's a piece of entertainment followed by a couple other big brands like Bioware, I think. Tesla doesn't seem to show up much because I think it's a hard title to pronounce so they don't promote themselves as much in terms of Skyrim and things like that. So you get Bioware pieces all the time. But there, when you ask a follow-up question of who your favorite artists are, or tell us about which game that you like concept art from, or for Bioware, which particular game that you find interesting in terms of design. No idea. The answer is like, I don't know. I know the jaw there. I've never seen this course about it. I don't know what the students look for. None of it. So that gives you a clue of, oh, the reason why the students begin this company is nothing to do with the fact that they want a concept art artist there. They just want to be there because it's a big brand. And that was the whole point of this episode. It's about that. I want to talk about what actually is going on in your job. Just don't go to the business simply because you think working at Pizza is you play Pizza game all day. That don't do anything. You sit on your desk. You play World of Warcraft nine hours a day. You draw a little sketch on a napkin, and that's your job. It's complete opposite of that. And before you want to choose this as your next career for 20, 30 years, know a little bit about what you get yourself into. Now, hopefully, this episode will break that down. Alright, so that's the setup in terms of why I'm doing this episode. Let's go back in history and talk about concept design 20 years ago. So when I started out, my first job was World of System. This studio was about 300 to 400 people, I think. They had three divisions divided into, I believe, three to four floors. Big building, out in Austin, Texas, right by GCT Bridge. Nowadays, it's being bought out by EA, and I believe the same building is used to make the Star Wars MMO for Bioware. But 20 years ago, this was the home of Lord Priest, who created Ultima, so I was on the same floor as him. Basically, they're doing Ultima online. And then, it's also the home of Chris Roberts, who is currently, of course, making Star Citizen. But back then, he was the creator of Wing Commander, and I happened to be the last Wing Commander, called Wing Commander Prophecy. And then, upstairs from us was a very small division making cool games by most of those guys you probably never heard of them, which is J, I think, J Simulation. They were making really hardcore fly sims, very niche market. But they are like a bunch of military stuff. If you go up there, you feel like you basically walk into a military company, because they have, like, a chain book of stuff out researching. Anyway, that's where we started. And when I got the job, actually, the first person in terms of that studio was an official title for a concept artist. Prior to that, concept art in video games was quite rare in terms of their official job position. Most studios were just using whoever's job best to do that job.