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3DTotal: “No More Wine” has to be one of my favourite pieces of work this year. Could you tell us the idea behind this character and how long it took you to create it?
Simon: “No More Wine” is typical of my pictures ... totally unexpected! I was just messing with ZBrush and the great ZSpheres when the idea came. At the beginning I just had the idea of a little Davy Jones-like character, eating his soup like a child - the other ideas came during the creation process. First was the spaghetti idea; I thought it was fun for this character to melt them with his tentacles, because of the shape similarity. After this I got the idea to play with food, putting sushi on his plate, a giving a kind of weird relationship between him and his food! And last came all the details: the little octopus to add fun to the scene and also to keep the weird relation of cannibalism with the food; a second plate, almost invisible, but enough to put this feeling of a romantic diner between the viewer and the character; and finally, the wine that ended up giving me the title, first because the glasses were empty, but also because the situation could be the result of an abuse of alcohol [Laughs]!
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3DTotal: Do you have any further plans for this character or are you working on a completely new piece?
Simon: About the “No More Wine” picture, no, I’m not going to work anymore on it. At least, not unless Disney want to do a series with him!
What I’m doing right now, is a big tutorial/interview with the Pixologic team about this picture process. I hope it will be useful for everybody! I’m also already working on a new picture, which I hope going to be as fun as this one for the viewers. |
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3DTotal: You’re only 26 years of ages and already working for one of the best studios in the world - at this time, the world is pretty much open to you. So by the time your 36, where do you see yourself and what would you like to have accomplished?
Simon: [Laughs] Only 36? I really don’t know. What I hope is to work with good artists and continue working on good projects and visiting big cinema companies. I’m really interested in working on feature movies because I’ve never done that and I’m curious to discover a new kind of production. I also want to try a lot of different graphic styles; I feel I could have a lot of fun doing them all!
My final goal is to be a freelancer and be called to work for “my” art. I would like to do children’s books or a series with my graphic style, or live projections for music concerts or ... everything! [Laughs] I need ten lives to do all I want! |
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3DTotal: You mentioned cinema in the list of things you would like to do. Is there any particular genre you would prefer to work on, or is it all appealing to you?
Simon: I would love to work on a feature movie, something original. I like a lot all the stuff we can see nowadays on the screens, it’s really powerful and visually perfect, but I miss originality (I know it’s hard to find).
Movies like the City of Lost Children or Mirror Mask have got some of the best universes for me, and when you look at them you clearly travel, you discover new environments, weird feelings, colours ... Everything is adapted for these worlds and I love that!
That’s the thing I like a lot with 3D feature movies such as Finding Nemo: the entire universe is completely adapted to work around the world of the heroes. Every object, |
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mechanism, the world itself - they are all replaced by something linked to the story. I love when even the most simple story allows the creators to build a completely new world, as crazy as possible, to pull the viewer into a new dimension!
So to answer, I love every genre and would love to work on different styles (realism, cartoon, motion graphic etc). If the story is interesting and allows us to experiment, then that’s great!
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3DTotal: Aside from basking in the glorious Californian sun, what sort of things do you get up to when you’re not slaving away behind a computer screen?
Simon: When I’m not pasted in front of my screen, I love hiking in mountains with my wife and dog and taking photographs. It’s very “brain resting” and allows me to come down off the virtual worlds that I’m in all day long.
Of course, parties with my friends are a good |
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way to forget work and crunch times, but I’m never too far away from the office, and even when I’m not working, I study everything around me - people, shapes and colours!
3DTotal: Well it has been a real pleasure chatting with you and I wish you all the best at Blur and in your future endeavours. One last question before we wrap things up. You know those little USB rocket launchers that you can buy, that sit next to you computer? If you could have one of those, who in your studio would you most like to fire it at and why?
Simon: I think I would fire it at everybody around me [Laughs]. I like disturbing my friends a lot when they work, particularly when they’re looking tired! I would probably start World War III with all the different nationalities that I have close to me [Laughs]! By the way, that’s one of the things I like here: being with a lot of people from different countries and being able to joke about everything, even with the cultural differences! Everybody stay open!
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