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3DTotal: Marco! How are things going? Thanks for this opportunity to pick your brains! Now then, you describe yourself as a freelance concept artist - that’s all very well and good but what I want to know is how do your friends and family describe you?
Marco: Straight and personal from the start - next question! Just kidding! First, thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk a bit about myself. Speaking of which, while I have lots of friends, only a few of them really know me for what I am. Especially when we talk about the things I do for a living. There is one thing all of them seem to agree on though: I’m a dreamer. Which for them means I’m basically a naïve, asocial nerd, living in a parallel world made of “my stuff”. Of course, I beg to differ; it’s obviously them (and not me) that are living in their small nutshells and missing out on the whole picture!
3DTotal: Is there a typical job or client that you get often, and what would this work involve?
Marco: This is quite a tricky question to answer. Till last year I would have told you that my freelance activity involved a lot of different clients and jobs, but since then I've decided to move to something completely different and I'm now working in a big structure. I decided to do just that in order to be able to grow, both personally and technically. And yet, today I would probably be forced to answer the same
question: “I'm not authorized to discuss
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the matter any further”. *Laughs*
What I can tell you is that going from the freelance activity to a defined position into a certain pipeline has proven to be very difficult. Moving from my own set of tools to something completely new and unknown has been not difficult – it’s been a real nightmare. I felt like all my experience was reset with a switch and I spent an undisclosable amount of time trying to relearn the ABC of CG. Spheres man, spheres! Not even teapots, I'm telling you. A bump map? I’ll get back to you in a couple of weeks. A normal map? – Maybe next year, if they don't fire me before. As for the clients ... I can tell you I'm not working for a pizzeria. Not yet, at least (who knows considering this “economically exciting” period!). |
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3DTotal: Sorry, that last question was pretty dull - well done for getting an interesting answer out of it! It does sound like you have some really exciting times ahead, but as you say let’s leave them for the future. Can you tell us a little bit about you came to be ‘discovered’ by such high profile employers?
Marco: The question wasn’t dull at all, but the answer might have been, especially considering the kind of work I’ve done in the past 13 years! So ... how did I get out of my little dark room with no windows? Sheer luck, I guess! With a lot of help from the Internet! What is really wonderful these days is the sheer power you have to show your work to millions of people at a click of your. |
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mouse. That was absolutely impossible some 10 years ago. Today you can drop a line to one studio executive and say, “Hey, here’s my work. Maybe you’ve seen this on the xyz website. Interested?” Keep in mind that some of the high profile employers (at least the most open-minded and dynamic ones) keep on watching the Internet, both as a means of employment and as a way of keeping up with the industry, so you might end up receiving an offer from them even before you send them your CV. Tutorials for textures collections and publications in books helped as well, especially because it gave me the chance to show any potential employers the way I work
3DTotal: Your designs are awesome! My favourite of all is the “airplane CbrK74 model” - I absolutely love the mix of futuristic and retro elements. Where did this design come from, and how do you start with a project like this? Is it just ideas in your head, references and inspirations?
Marco:The design for the CbrK74 is quite old, and I would say form follows function, or at least the need. One day I imagined some complex chase animation, where the fleeing plane was supposed to slalom between waves of an angry sea, then jump onto a cliff, scaring away sheep and the |
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occasional farmer, and continue the escape between trees and roads. No plane could do that, unless it has a structure similar to a bird with wings that could move independently. But since I didn’t want the whole wing to move, I only made half of the wing flexible and then invented the rotating engines. That wouldn’t work in reality of course, as no structure would be able to sustain the change in acceleration caused by the moving engines, and the engines themselves would require an enormous amount of fuel to operate, but ... well I kind of liked the idea.
Generally speaking, I would say that ‘chaos’ is my main source of inspiration. I still remember my room as a teenager; my mother’s pale face as she tried to get inside; my friends willing to help me clean it up. With dynamite!
Time has passed but things haven’t changed too much. Today I use some sort of ‘ordered chaos’ (my wife wouldn’t allow the unconstrained one), made of objects, tons of books, movies, music and images I both shot myself and collected over the Internet. I usually listen to music and even watch movies while I’m working. I basically use everything from modern Indian videos and Japanese pop music, to 1920s and 30s European architecture, to 19th century mechanics. I also travel a lot. Less than I would like, but probably more than the average guy. In the end I try to feed the sponge between my ears with everything I can. And still, inspiration might come from elsewhere. Sometimes it’s just a matter of trying to see the world we have in front of our eyes from a different perspective. Keep on asking yourself ‘why’ things work. |
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