Concept artist Jeff Simpson works for Ubisoft — the creator of the Assassin’s Creed series. In this Movidiam podcast, we talk to Jeff about his unique artistic style and the animation industry. We also discuss the challenges of balancing freelance and in-house work and trying to strike the perfect balance between commercial work and passion projects.
Hello and welcome to the Movidiam podcast. Today, we’ve got on line Jeff Simpson, who’s a concept artist originally from Montreal, based in Canada now. Jeff, welcome to the Movidiam podcast.
It’s a pleasure to be here, thanks for having me.
Jeff, so concept art really is the beginning of the process, when making a complex film or an animation or even just leading people on an initial journey. Tell us how you got into the industry.
I went to Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, because I always loved drawing and my parents both drew a lot and painted a lot, and I just wanted to draw and I didn’t know how I’d make a living doing that. But I figured animation would be the way to go about doing it because animations, you know, you have to draw quite a lot, or at least you did back in the day.
So I went through that and I got my degree but realised that there was something called concept art that existed. I found out by watching Lord of the Rings DVDs when they came out, the extended edition. So you’d have these little bios about the concept artist and the design team at Weta and I said, “Oh, that sounds good, I’ll do that.” Gosh, right out of graduating I got offered a job at a small video game studio in Vancouver and so I was fresh out of school and said, “Okay, sounds good.” Pretty much just hopped around companies and my whole life I’ve just been doing concept art.
That’s very interesting, you mentioned Weta there. These are the sort of industry giants when it comes to this. What sort of projects are you working on at the moment?
Well, I’m at Ubisoft, so I’ve been there for about six, seven years now. Mostly I work on the Assassin’s Creed series, which is always coming out.
There’s recently been a big film actually released, hasn’t there?
Most of us didn’t really touch on that because that was the film guys doing it, and we focus on the games. That’s what we’re good at usually. We had some input, or at least my art director had some input, on the designs and things. I’m not really sure what the collaboration was, that’s a little above my pay grade I suppose but they definitely took some design cues from us and we helped them out a little bit.
But yeah, mostly the Assassin series. I did some work on some other companies like Eidos, I worked on Deus Ex for a little bit. I worked on some films, mostly through other companies like Moving Pictures Company. I did some stuff for Lionsgate, I did some stuff for Universal on the Snow White and The Huntsman. There were two films, I worked on both of those for a few months. Most of that was just in my free time, though. Free time, sort of when I come home, I would have to do that freelance, still doing my Ubisoft job nine to five, so quite a lot of work but it’s the only way for me to really do other projects.
How do you find that that world is changing slightly, for concept art? Is it more freelance or is it more full time teams? It’s a very unique skill and I certainly see in your work this definite visual style and theme that you hold onto or have maintained through certainly some of your profile items that I’ve seen. Do people find you because of that uniqueness or is it a team that you’re used to working with that pulls together on these projects or is it just the network at Ubisoft?
It’s interesting, most of the work I post online, because of NDAs and things like that, games and films take so long to make. Most of my work really is just personal work and that’s the work that gets the attention of art directors and people hiring for whatever. I’m lucky, because people assume that I have some kind of style and so they come to me and so I’ve never really had to search for anything, they find me on whatever platform online or Tumblr or Pinterest or whatever. They say, “Oh, who’s this guy?” Until they eventually find my name.
Although maybe sometimes they don’t, because those websites really don’t like giving credit, but no, I’ve been very fortunate. They find me online somehow, someway, and they send me an email. It’s usually random people, some people I worked with on Snow White maybe six years ago. The animation director from that split off and went here, and he recommended me to a place there and the art director went on to do this.. There’s a little bit of, “Oh, I’ve worked for them before,” but a lot of it is just like, “Oh, we’ve seen your stuff and we’d like something similar to that vein, so okay.”
So it’s the work itself?
It’s all the work, honestly. I’m just a dude sitting in his apartment in Montreal, I don’t really go out and meet anybody or go to industry events or anything, I’m just sitting here and I get an email, “Oh, could we have some sketches for this kind of vibe we’re going for?” And I go, “Here you go,” and they say, “Thanks,” and that’s it.
Well, fantastic. I think these are what these sort of platforms and tools have enabled, in this connected era and I think it’s a particularly fantastic thing that your skill and passion for your craft, really, can be picked up and remunerated by a global audience that’s seeking out your skill set.
For sure. When I was in my late teens, early twenties, I’m 30 now for context, we had DeviantArt. We had all these websites where when you’re in high school, what you do naturally is you do a drawing and then you put it online because you want attention, it’s good. I was doing that anyway. So when people say: “how do I get my work out there?”, I say: “well, have you put it anywhere?”, they go, “no.” Well, that’s your problem! You just have to put your stuff out there. I have been doing that for the last half of my life so it just worked out.
Sure. I think it’s very interesting, often you found having spoken to and worked with a lot of creative directors and artists. Over my career, I find that people need to treat the online very similar to the real world.
Oh yeah, for sure.
It’s exactly the same process, it’s getting out there, it’s meeting people, it’s just using a slightly different medium, but actually a medium which travels quicker, perhaps is more verified by the number of connections and things like that. It’s very interesting. I also noticed as well that Canada is a real hub actually for artists and creative production.
Yeah, Montreal is … Well, it used to be Vancouver back in the day. I’m mostly in games, so Vancouver used to have the strong games industry about 10 years ago but it got too expensive of course. A lot of it moved out to Montreal because Montreal is still pretty cheap. Rent here is very low and there’s a lot of subsidies by the government. We’ve got tons of game studios here: EA, Ubisoft. There’s a huge hub here and because of that, we get a lot of concept artists and a lot of good people. The film here is picking up a little bit. Vancouver still has a very good film industry but I haven’t really checked in on that in a little while so I should probably check it out. Definitely Canada is doing good because it’s cheaper.
It’s interesting. I think the game side, certainly with Movidiam, the initial focus was film and video production and we’ve seen some fantastic studios in California and in New York in the advertising world. But increasingly, we’re seeing visual effects artists, virtual reality, people producing 360 video, and now more and more game studios; certainly artists that work inside that games production workflow that are building collaborative ideas. Ultimately, as you said, you’re a dude in your bedroom in Montreal — there are many dudes out there that actually when they come together can produce some pretty unique and incredible stuff.
For sure, yeah.
Which probably wasn’t even possible just a few years ago.
No, there’s a lot of choice, there’s a lot of options. You asked me earlier, I didn’t really get around to it, but the impression that I get is that video games do like having people on staff and having them in-house; working with teams and paying full time salaries and things like that. I think it’s nice because I think you’re right that a lot of people are going freelance. Most of the best artists that I know are freelance, because everybody wants a piece of them and so the easiest way … Okay, you know, they’ll go freelance and they’ll charge a lot and get everybody to do a little bit but I do appreciate that there’s still some salary positions available where you can kind of have some stability, stuff like that.
In the same way, salary and stability, could it be salary but remote? So you’re actually part of the team whether you’re in Yakutsk or whether you’re in Montreal or whether in Hong Kong.
I’m sure it’s possible, I certainly would love to do that.
That’s the next stage.
That’s the next step. I think it’s just very flexible these days, for better or worse. I know some of the artists who are working all day every day because of freelance and that stresses me out a little bit because as much as I like working, I like to have a life outside of work and it’s nice to be able to separate those two. When you’re having a full-time gig, you can breathe and you can say: “okay, well I don’t need to worry about organising these things and taking on this job and turning down this job.”
That being said, if I want to do something different or work on a film or on an interesting visual effects thing, I’m always having to say no because I like to have my evening off. But I’m complaining about a good problem; it’s good to have work so I shouldn’t really complain. It’s an interesting time and it really comes down to what you want your lifestyle to be.
Sure. You can find a balance between the passion projects and the paid work?
I’m sure, yeah. I haven’t figured that out yet, but I’m sure it’s possible.
It’s a bit of a rubica.
Yes. You still want to do your own personal projects, which is hard to justify. I really enjoy just sitting down and just drawing and then I don’t know, not having a plan and just letting it grow organically, but it’s hard to justify that to someone like: “oh, you know, I’d just like to putter around for a month and see what I do,” and they go, “oh, you don’t have a schedule or a universe you want to build?”, “No, I just want to explore”.
But that’s not really encouraged in our industry very much, I feel. It’s sort of, well, you know, you spend this amount of time and you produce this product. It’s like, no, I want to develop my thought process and I want to develop ideas and it’s difficult to do that sometimes under a very rigorous sort of money equals time.”
Sure. I think probably when there’s a structure and a plan, an agenda that’s got to be delivered, the riggers of that are challenging, to have that flexibility, otherwise, the directorial focus or the producing budget that’s allocated can get stretched, but I’m sure there are ways. Because obviously the last thing you want to do is join a production completely cooked and burnt out mentally from the previous one. So you do need to have a bit of space, you know?
That is difficult even for me to focus on because I have a side of me that wants to become that very snobby fine art painter and live in a garage in the middle of nowhere and just create weird shit. I really want to do that, but I also sometimes wake up and I go, “aw, jeez, I want to do a Star Wars character.” To try to find the in between, between the commercial versus the fine art. Fine art I feel is very organic and you need to explore, whereas in commercial there’s not much room for that, really. You really have to produce. The other struggle I seem to find is the validity of what you’re creating, where does it fit into those two worlds and not to put too much of the corporate label onto it, I don’t know.
I’m just wondering, looking at the kind of long tail and the different sorts of people that are looking to make video content and potentially even games, to a certain extent. It’s changing, the distribution is changing and so the kind of people that are wanting to produce this sort of stuff is changing and actually do those briefs get a little bit looser and can you start to administer, perhaps finding a bit of work yourself, and then managing the project as well as doing the artwork on it?
Yeah.
There are all these little changing paradigms going on. I get what you’re saying, you’ve got a creative skill-set and you’re trying to map that onto an industry as opposed to your skill-set being in demand for exactly what it is as opposed to being mapped onto an industry.
Especially if you want to make a game, it’s very difficult to make a game on your own. It’s getting easier but you really need a lot of different people, a lot of different special skills, right. It’s cool if you’ve created a universe and all, you’ve done all the art, but to make that a game that people enjoy playing.
It’s a big magnitude change?
Yeah, you need a lot of skills, you need a lot of people who know what they’re doing. There’s also that aspect of putting yourself with the right people.
Tell us just a little bit, for the listeners, about the product stack or the tools that you’re using. Presumably there’s the very basic, the pencil, the brush, at one end. How does that develop and how do you work or what’s the best way of describing how you work?
Oh gosh. I’m very basic. The only program I know professionally is Photoshop. Even within the program, a lot of people are using custom brushes and filters and advanced techniques and integrating 3D programs. This might make me a bit of a dinosaur but I don’t really use that as much. I like to use the default brush; keep it simple. It limits me in terms of complexity sometimes or if there’s an environment with pillars and perfecters and lots of crazy things going on.
I prefer to have things pretty simple and effective and use what I know, which I wouldn’t recommend for anybody because certainly in this day and age, you have to, even if you want to be a concept artist, you have to know ZBrush and SketchUp and Maya and 3ds Max. Or at least know them well enough so that when you’re having a conversation with your modeller you can help them out a little bit, say, “well, this’ will work this way.” But I’m pretty bare bones. I’m doing a little bit of ZBrush, a little bit of SketchUp.
That makes sense, it’s very effective. It’s very effective, so why change if it’s working? Don’t break it.
If it works, it works. Certainly, you have to challenge yourself. But I feel a lot of the work being done, especially in concept art is very busy, it’s very noisy, and I feel like that might be because we want to learn all these programs, we want to learn all these things; and the design ends up suffering because we’re so excited about using all these new techniques that we forget that all that really matters is the design and the image in the end. I don’t want to sound like a purist or a snob, but I feel like sometimes we forget that what we’re really trying to do is make something look cool.
Do you find that when you’re briefed by a producer or someone upstream in the production workflow, do you find that sometimes your work is actually changing their way of looking at the project because it’s there is 10 or 15% which is your own inspiration, so you can actually influence the final outcome?
Sure, yeah, sometimes, hopefully!
Of course, of course.
That’s the dream. I’ve been working on Assassin’s Creed so long it’s a bit hard for me to tell what is me or my personal flavour and what’s just part of that franchise now. Yeah, it’s difficult. I do get lucky because like I said, people come to me and say, “Jeff, we’re doing a film and say this film has ghosts in it and we’ve seen your work and it’s very ghostly, just make them look like that!” I say, “No problem, that’s what I do anyway.” They’re usually pretty happy with that. Yeah, if that happens, you’re very lucky and I’m very grateful that it does happen to me sometimes.
Yeah, very interesting. It’s incredible to think the number of people that have actually been exposed to your work, whether they’ve known it or not. Presumably there’s a following or a community that you have which have an appetite to see more of what you do.
Yeah, hopefully!
Good. Well, look Jeff, it’s been absolutely fantastic to talk to you on this Movidiam podcast and I’m sure our listeners really appreciate the deep dive and snapshot insight into your world and how you work, so thanks so much for your time. Jeff Simpson on the Movidiam podcast, thanks so much indeed.
Yeah, thanks a lot.
Find Jeff Simpson online here:
Movidiam: Jeff Simpson
Tumblr: http://jeffsimpsonkh.tumblr.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeffsimpsonkh
