How to be a Concept Artist with John Gallagher AKA Uncannyknack

#conceptart #illustration #filmpodcast 

This week I’m talking to concept artist and entertainment illustrator John Gallagher AKA Uncannyknack.

John worked as Director of Concept Art at video game developer BioWare, He’s worked as a production illustrator on The Expanse, Once upon a time, The Flash, Super Girl, The Boys and many more. 

I asked John about his route into the industry, what it takes to be a concept artist and illustrator on features and TV productions and what challenges AI might present in the future to artists.

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Transcript

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[Music] hi Jim here and you're listening to the honest filmmaker podcast career advice from people in the business this week I'm talking to artist John Gallagher with an illustrious career that includes serving as the Director of concept art a renowned video game developer BioWare and contributing as a production illustrator to blockbuster hits such as the expanse Once Upon a Time the flash Supergirl the boys and many more John brings a wealth of experience to the table I spoke to John about his route into the industry what it's like being a concept artist on massive Productions like Doctor Strange Multiverse of Madness and also what challenges AI might present to artists in the future enjoy so first question I usually ask everybody is did you go to UNI did you study well uh I actually went to art school for a year straight out of high school um my mother uh stressed academics and and uh performance and leaving myself some options so I had a number of choices but the thing about the you know the the gravity of of being a creative is that it's almost irresistible it's it's like escaping an adventure Horizon can't really do it so I was weighing the options of becoming a lawyer becom a doctor you know standard uh professional routes but uh did go to art school for a year and it was Dreadful um and and that's only my experience so let's be clear yeah every artist has a story and it's usually some sort of wild EKG uh hieroglyphics about how they got to where they are but uh in my case uh art school was horrendous uh it was predominantly at that time and this is the mid 80s early mid 80s uh it was overwhelmingly conceptual and conceptual driven work so while ideas are the currency with which we we uh craft our stories that's not what we were talking about this is more of a esoteric Naval gazing Pursuit and I wasn't really interested in that my my only my my only uh real Mission at the time was I said i' love to be able to tell stories visually um I want to work with cool people and I'd like to make a few bucks doing it so those three things formed a Cascade Event of not a chance Chief so uh I wasn't drummed out of school I did well I that fine but it just didn't hit it just didn't feel right um and that's only for me so I qualify that so internet don't come at me okay that only for me for many people they found it the most extraordinary experience so what I did is uh I called it put a pin in it um decided to live a little bit travel enjoy my life explore because I'd only ever been in school I'd only you know for 12 years I was in school right to college uh and every summer I was working to save up money to go to school for all of high school so there wasn't really that you know pause to consider other options um so I took a few years off and went back to school and got my uh diploma in broadcasting and that has actually served me extraordinary well consider the broad based set of skills that come with the curriculum in addition I was drawing the entire time as well yeah yeah which leads me to how I got my first job as a professional artist go and came by it honestly genuinely uh I had to go back to my hometown in Edmonton I attended School in Calgary it was about 200 miles uh south of Edmonton in Alberta um landlock Province right beside British Columbia where I Live Now on the west coast Canada uh it's only important to know that I went from one city to the other go from Calgary to do my practicum in Edmonton and uh during the course of doing my practicum and introducing myself to the broadcasting community in Edmonton uh I started doing pickup pieces you know little bumpers for for the newscasts where you talk to some interesting local crafts person or you know an artisan or somebody doing some wild interesting kind of outlier activity and in the course of this I in I was introduced to uh BioWare when it was six guys like literally six dudes in Greg's basement and they had just moved into their uh horrendous uh office above a used bookstore tucked over in a little corner of a side street uh in nowhere Edmonton and I did a piece on them because they had just joined up with a studio out of Calgary uh and they were working on a game called uh shatter steel and we had some cool visuals and it was very early in in video games so it's always very exciting fill the screen with all sorts of of uh old school razzled Dazzle and uh in the process of that they said well can you do anything else and I said well yeah I can draw like a son of a [ __ ] and they're like okay we've heard that from lots of people I go yeah but you never heard it from me we've never you've never seen my portfolio before there was no internet to advertise yourself uh so long story short I started at BioWare like two weeks later and I was with them for nine years 25 million games uh went from a council of about eight or nine of us to 330 in the course of the time that I was there and that set me up for working in film I took a couple years off and then I found myself in film in 2008 wow and so the stuff you were doing at BioWare and all of the stuff you do in fact is that all in the computer it's not handdrawn but it handrawn on I mean like like I'm sure the majority of your audience of a certain vintage uh and I I say that no with no disrespect um we we were a pre- digital era MH uh you did it old school um it was all analog it was it was pen and paper marker crayon anything you can get your hands on to make marks um but at BioWare the vast majority of the heavy lifting I did uh conceptually was uh vellum paper and markers and pen and uh and pencil so uh I started to slowly transition because the tools In fairness to the tools as tool sets evolve they often start out a little rusty you know there's there's you really got to you really got to square the square the circle on some of this stuff because when Photoshop first started out it was a bit of a mut and until it got the layer system working properly and you know brushes were stable we were I was finding that I had to use three or four different programs to kind of get results so I was still relying heavily I was leaning heavily on analog uh because it was giving me quick interesting uh diverse results I could just throw it on the light box and just you know uh hundreds of iterations very very quickly effectively that was my layer system and uh in given the massive and I would never do it again it's Madness what we did uh but I was so grateful we did have that opportunity um hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of drawings so you get extraordinarily fast and extraordinarily confident and uh you have faith you know how to drop a deadline you know how to do uh spot your blocks in an illustration you just you you're the and then when you learn digital as much as those foundational elements are there they're strong they're they're um they're ever present you still have to learn new tricks with digital it still requires it still requires some rewiring um and certainly uh teaching your hands you know a new new pantoon I think that's important because you form a different relationship there's too many happy accidents of digital to be able to be preemptively predicting that with analog yeah so there was there's there was a long period of transition there where I felt what was happening because I would I would do like a lot of people did and a lot of my friends will share the similar story right we do a pencil sketch like a tight pencil sketch then we scan it CLE it up in Photoshop you know was very much a multi-stage process and uh what happens is you lose a lot of the energy in those drawings you lose a lot of the discovery a lot of the joy of of peeling things back and finding out new ways to solve it uh in Virtual space uh so that that got me to uh I bought a comic store in Edmonton I spent a couple of years with my partners building up the Enterprise um it's long since sold and and uh then rebranded but um you know it was a wonderful opportunity there like just a a complete shift in in uh interest it and video games you age in dog years and uh I mean it takes everything out of you you leave it all on the field so I felt like uh as I'm sure many of your your other guests have probably intimated there times when you just need to not do the work when you need to be away from it and you fill up your experiential Reservoir which has been depleted by well in in the best way you know it bled you while you're smiling you know you're this is this has been fantastic but I'm exhausted yeah so working working at the shop and uh that being a part of my life uh it it allowed me to move different levers and uh to run a business properly so that of course helps As you move into being a contractor in film so then uh so you've done I've looked at your IMDb profile did the usual bit stalking I do on people um lots of different credits on there so you got uh credits as illustrator concept artist graphic artists prev visualization artists are these all different things or are they all effectively the same kind of what well they they run adjacently like the first the first big film job I had and it was only relatively minor in terms of tenure was I worked with a a subcontractor on X-Men 3 Last Stand and so I was working in previs which is its own kind of beautiful animal that's it's I think extraordinarily important the far more moving pieces you have on a larger project probably getting it all cogently put together dovetailing with the storyboarding and the director and the VFX producer and everybody can come in and so this is the this is the page we need to be on it's the first critical step in moving the story forward um that was very that was enlightening and it was a little daunting but with that gave me insight into large uh excuse me working on large features which are largely uh siloed uh different departments work in many cases you would think that this smoothly integrated sharing of resources it's I'm sure it's much better now depending on the project but at the time I mean it was still very much like 2006 right it's still SE of the pants and what that did I wasn't doing any concept designing but I was learning uh lens's depth of field multitude of other kind of crash course being your own Director of Photography that allowed me to inhabit some of the design work later like approaching it as in what's it going to look like in my movie versus what it what is it going to look like in my video game and it really allows you to switch again to move gears and and get your own you know your own circuit boards working properly in terms of how to solve problems visually uh so the first very first project big project was that then I worked on uh a documentary massive documentary for Discovery uh which was Mars Rising which allowed me to access um a different tool set which was working with a multitude of vendors and service providers and 95-year-old former Nazi scientists that live in Florida because it was very much much you have to talk about the origins of of the space program and as we know it was it's divided between the Soviet Union former Soviet Union and and uh NASA so between all of those things you're just building up this kind of you know you're you're filling up your suitcase with more and more experiences and I didn't want to be anybody who was like oh I worked in video games I think I'm a big shot that may be private moment for me in film no one no one really gets a dam they're like oh you did some cool stuff good for you kid because you're typically working with high Achievers everywhere so they just go oh cool you your company sold for $180 million good for you then my my first concept gig was for a back in Edmonton was for a series called fear itself which was episodic Anthology so every single one of them was like a mini film you know we had a budget between two and5 million doll per episode and we created mini films every every eight days which was a phenomenal crash course in being confident doing all sorts of everything I was I was credited as a graphic artist but I was doing some storyboards and I was doing some illustration as well so it really let me get into the deep end and then the designer on the show who's uh been a mentor since uh inspirational uh man delightful Creator um named Steve gag and he put the he put it in front of me and said well are you going to stay in Edmonton forever and be Mr whatever you are or are you going to come to Vancouver and and be a star I was like oh well I you frame it that way so I I took the bait uh my backup plan was to be a college instructor in digital illustration so so pra practicalities do how do you do you have an agent how do you get work if I'm starting out in this business is it all Word of Mouth what's the kind of how do you get those gigs yeah I would I would suggest to anybody that that is starting and I don't have the world's largest Network um I'm not I I I won't lie I have a lot of friends and a lot of colleagues and a lot of people that I uh love respect and support but I don't have friendships just hoping that they can get me a gig you know like I'm friends because I think they're awesome human beings um so in terms of of the actual practical approach yeah unfortunately it's not a particularly welcoming industry in that sense um it is easy to apply to become uh for all intents and purposes what somebody has to do to become a member of the film industry is depending on their on their specialty what they what they have chosen to be a part of at least for my art for the art Department which is my area of expertise I can tell you you apply to be an art Department permit step one you just literally go to the website and in Vancouver it's II 891 you go to the website you download the form you fill it out you send in your portfolio if the portfolio is reviewed by the art Department reps and if they like what they see and it's clear that you're interest Ed in in narrative storytelling in some way and your aptitudes point in that direction you become a perite what that means is you're on a list and members get preferential treatment union members of course um but if you're fortunate and someone has to bow out from a show or something else or somebody really likes what you're doing and you clearly show above and beyond capability they'll uh reach out to you and you can get a permit to work on a show m then you build up your hours and to become a member of the Union a full member no longer a permanent you have to have worked a certain number of days and typically that's anywhere from 30 to 60 days yeah and it can be on one show or two shows or three shows and that constantly changes to make it easier to bring in more permits because it used to be very prohive like it was like you had to have like 30 days on five different shows or whatever it was probably exaggerating but it was kind of crazy what you used to have to do it's a little easier now but it gets more stringent as you want to move up if you want to you know for example become an art director or become a production designer you really go to you really got to have your your foot on the gas yeah and uh the other thing I noticed obviously you've got your website which has got some amazing images on it I'm definitely going to get one of those for my manave um is is that uh selling your own prints is that a profitable side hustle for someone who's in your business or is it something you just do because you want to get your artwork out I I I'll tell you um I think I'm one of like two or three people I know who does it and I don't do it um for any other reason than Comics are why I draw in the first place I everything to Common they were the the the ground swell um were the ground zero they were any sort of epicenter kind of descriptor you you want to uh bring it was I love Monster movies I loved all of that I grew up in the era of the original Hammer films I watched all those I saw the universe must that was my diet that was my steady diet and bad TV from the 70s um but Above All Things it was comics comics spoke to me that was the siren song and I wanted to um and this is this I I'm not exaggerating I'm not inventing a narrative here um I wanted to give back in some way I wanted to honor this you know the origins of of my little story and uh I started doing because you have to sit and wait sometimes when when you send out a concept to somebody and it's you're waiting for notes you don't want to sit there and just fart around and you know watch [ __ ] videos on YouTube like you you want to work you want to keep working on your skills and that's what it was it was a skill building exercise I thought well what do I love more than anything and I'll continue to practice all the time to get better at this stuff I thought well superheroes so I started posting them just you know for hey I wonder if people really enjoy this and um I've was nervous man I'm not going to lie my very F and I tell anybody this it's a true story my very first ComicCon was in 2 13 here in Vancouver at Fan Expo and I was like I don't get nervous about iic the only day I've ever been nervous was when the day my daughter was born um other than that kind of unshakable when it comes to that sort of thing because you just you get so used to certain rhythms and certain cadences you're just like no anxiety really aim for me it's not a good jacket to wear I I understand it plagues other people but um in my case I I thought it wouldn't be a very good bed fellow so let let's go to let's let's use therapy as well as we can and make sure that that's not a that's not a thing for us but the long and short of it was uh first show I was nervous and I I because I didn't want to let down fans you know like other Pros I know there's usual you know [ __ ] circular firing squad it's they love you but they want to knife you and it's it's the standard riger role of of creators right they're like I love what you do but I hate that you're good at it uh or a permutation thereof yeah um and I I I didn't want to let down fans I wanted to give them a new version of or maybe something they hadn't seen a lot of uh and over th those 10 years 11 years um I've built up a bit of a fan base and and they're Loy and they're supportive and respectful um and I've I've managed to do some comic covers and all of that obviously you got all these you got superheroes sci-fi fantasy artwork is there any character you particularly enjoy drawing Silver Surfer oh that's a good one why uh well first of all um Jack Kirby is all Five Guys on my Mount Olympus um now that's not fair Ralph mcquary uh sidm um Mobius I mean there's a few others few other luminaries but I I think Jack was was responsible for just casually creating universes and there's something so astonishing to to witness and frequently and regularly witness that kind of genius and I don't throw that word around very much but um Silver Surfer because I um I connected to the character not the mournful wo is me endless Stanley soliloquies but more about the character in essence uh that you make a noble sacrifice and life is still a complicated mess uh but I was always drawn to the Stars I'm too big to be an astrona so to me it he struck me as the perfect elegant solution to how do you travel the Stars uh and and experience the most astonishing things and so I still haven't done the perfect Silver Surfer drawing yet right I don't think I'll I ever will but he's a character very much I take as a personal challenge to try and get to the best or or perhaps to frame it a little bit differently my personal best of how I would how I would present the character to Jack like how I would take the knee bend the knee show him the picture what do you what do you think of this and and then there's other characters that are just just a hoot I mean you never get tired and the reason there many of them in terms of you know their iconography are so popular and and because they're based right like you Batman is always fun to draw uh Wolverine's always fun to draw the Hulk is always fun to draw like there's there's characters the reason that they're so persistently superlative and endlessly popular is that the iconography their their form language is delightful to get in there and dig and you can offer different permutations of that character Silver Surfer I think is pretty much surfer and that's it yeah um you you either nail it or you don't in my opinion only in my opinion so again internet don't come at me but uh other characters do allow a broader range of interpretations like Batman different time areas different uh the Hulk I mean everybody has their hot take on the Hulk U Wolverine again all the very popular uh kind of Spider-Man even has a you know an extraordinary uh range of options in terms of how you want to interpret that that character and I I'm very much a method uh illustrator too um I make a point of familiarizing myself with what other people are doing to interpret that character and um like I go for best of breed in my opinion like I look at who I think is the definitive or the one of many definitive kind of key creators and how they interpret certain characters maybe emulate that um I also collaborate with other artists which I think makes me a bit of a rarity um I collaborate with sculptors um quite a number of sculptors and uh we're all we're all friends we have free exchange of assets and and skill sets I think reaching out into the community to do that and people whose work you really enjoy and say hey man are you okay if I use one of your statues for this really fun thing I'm working on and they're like absolutely and so they then when they go to a show and they're selling 3D prints of their work or the stls or raw or whatever uh they have an accompanying poster that goes with with whatever statue they're selling so uh there's there's really it it strikes me as kind of what you would do anyway it's a collaborative Medium as far as I understand it but it seems in digital art especially uh it's occasionally people get quite siloed you know they just kind of lock themselves into their into their capsule and do their thing and their work's wonderful but I don't see a lot of collaboration which is is one of the great joys of Discovery is like how other people interpret um things that you both know you both you both have your own version of but then when you come together you have a version that's stronger than either of you perhaps or different rather or both than you would have perhaps come up with on your own um that to me keeps it constantly fresh and new yeah you know yeah uh so I said I was going to give you my fun questions there was one very unfun question I'm G to ask you which I'm sure you get asked about all time which is AI so how I'm sick to death of seeing wonder what Brad Pit would look like as Dr Doom these things that just keep popping up on my feed what's that like as an artist and is there there any upside to this you talked earlier about you know uh going from pen and paper to photoshop is there an upside to this or is it all a bleak future no I I don't think it's a big future at all um at least for myself I wasn't I had seen art breeder and I'd seen a number of prompt programs early in the day and I said well this is AI has been around for a while please don't get excited about it I think it's a shallow money trench that's thousand miles wide miles long and an inch deep because everything about this is final result oriented um with no process no engagement no agency no intention uh and while there are a cynical few uh that insist that it's you know the sky's falling I go but yeah you kind of live like that anyway so you're you're easy to dismiss uh on the edges of discussion I think in the middle of it um you should have an evolving perspective I think it's mandatory to uh I made myself very acquainted with the tools and in a matter of a couple of days you push it to the very precipice of what it's capable of that's not a great sign that tells me it's there's not a lot of density and there never will be that's never the point the point is it's a surface Ploy and uh I'm I'm a as much as it you know paints you with a sort of conspir brush I'm like please always follow the money this is this is like cloud storage this is going to make five people unbelievably wealthy and for the rest of us it's GNA skate it's a disruptive event absolutely and it's but it's an imitative one so I I don't ever see or foresee and yeah but you don't know and I said well I have friends in the game MH I have colleagues and friends who work with AI directly they're don't use the programs they build the programs and they're like yeah I it's gonna be fine yeah but it's so easy to get excited about it because it's easy to proliferate imagery especially especially for people who feel empowered and now I'm not I'm not a I'm not a gatekeep and tell people that they can't they can't use prompts to you know and in some cases create really hilarious novel fun weird goofy [ __ ] that I never would have thought of I'm not threatened by seeing work that I never would have thought of I think sometimes the level of pattern recognition by the generative models concerns some people because the Acuity and the ex ution is so extraordinary but superficial like ultimately it's like mering right it's just a exercise and technique there's no storytelling rather than thinking that you've drawn the conclusion on the basis of the most superficial of evidence I would encourage anybody to learn the tools learn how stable diffusion Works learn how control netw works learns how to learn how this happens what how these algorithms build information and bring that into your own process bring that that uh disruptive event into your own process try new things not with AI you don't need to use AI your pipeline will be supported by Ai and its rightful place in service and support its prime directive will be to serve you yeah it's not coming for you it's not some nefarious Boogeyman it's a fact of the modern experience and if you're going to be a Creator you'll have to know how to wrestle this[ __ ] to the ground and and you do and you can it's not it's not it's not hunting high and low to to ruin our lives yeah so and ask me in in six months yeah yeah yeah a different story after after we have to you know our our robotic overlords have taken over everything I I really don't have that feeling at all yeah I think will find it it will find its place because I had to make a big splashy debut right but let's see what his follow-up album is and I think everybody blows it up because it's the first time yeah right this is effectively uh this is this is uh Smells Like Teen Spirit you're like what what else because the first thing exploded worldwide I'm I'm sick of it already I'm sort of I I see it pop up on the timeline and I kind of skip past it now because I think it's come to the end of its its usefulness yeah and there's nothing wrong with that it had to make its proof of concept land with with h Fanfare and it certainly did that it was for some artists it was like a nuclear strike fromit they they just said oh my God this is the end and I said on the basis of what yeah well let's let's see see what happens with that um it really is I see what happens but yeah I think I'm I'm comfortable saying mark my words it will find uh a support and service position for creators where it's suddenly just going to be running [ __ ] in the background for you yeah that's boring and [ __ ] time a waste of time you think it's part of your process but it's actually a Time sync yeah and it's going to handle things like it'll get for example if you uh want to do quick layouts for a story and and you can your own sample size so it's literally using your artwork as a as a fixed sample size with and it's air gapped it's not hitting anything else on the internet and it samples your work and your work only and you listen I need some ideas for uh you know give me 10 ideas for a new Batman illustration and it's all based on your word yeah yeah yeah go oh well that's how it should have been before well it's not it wasn't there yet ine and using the logic of of helping itself to the entire internet unfettered and unlicensed and with no apologies and no permissions the sample size is limited suddenly you're you're producing your own work but you're coming up with amazing [ __ ] you never would have come up with in in a a tenth of ton and you go well is this I'm plagiarizing myself or am I maybe maybe it's just interpreting my ideas in a way because we all have we all have cart tracks in the dirt for for our narrow Pathways this is just simply a new way to interpret old data yeah yeah and suddenly you're looking at a new version of yourself and you go well what about that all of a sudden artists creating incredible work that they actually used their own sample sies they just looked at their own work and suddenly they're reinterpreting their own work and doing incredible [ __ ] and then come at me again and tell me how AI sucked it gave him a second leas on life I I maintain that that's the likely the most likely direction that this is going to end up going yeah yeah okay and and if I turn out that I'm I'm prognosticating in the wrong direction I'll I'll take that hit right on the you can you can claim that this video is AI can't you this podcast you just say I didn't say that never said any of that [ __ ] what the he's honest filmmaker profoundly dis sampled my voice get you to say anything well you know what's crazy well it's not crazy but uh I did a test on this because I sometimes do some of these where it's just me talking about how to sell a movie how to go to sales and distribution and there's a site you can Chuck your videos into and it spits out any language you want me talking that language and I always thought I'd watch it and go I can tell that's not me but I showed it to the kids and they were like what how how could you speak French it was seamless it was seamless me talking about film and I'm like but it's a ball L do I want to release 10 versions of it in French am I then going to be a to respond to anybody in service and support that's it in service support and that is not nefarious at all it's a huge timesaver for you can you imagine having to try to hit with n native level fluency yeah all of different language groups yeah yeah it's crazy I'm learning Japanese and I can [ __ ] imagine just suddenly like having to do an entire two-hour podcast in Japanese mangling the language missing all soon soon it'll be doing real time W it we'll be having a conversation and it will be re real time translating I mean how amazing is that going to Beal translator yeah yeah they are these things terrible yeah yeah things terrible it's support and service it's not Conquest oriented it's service positioned and that's why I'm having such trouble with the current I don't even wait in anymore I hope you enjoyed this week's episode if you want more advice from industry professionals who are out there at the moment working or you just want to listen to some cool stories from film sets from around the world then please do subscribe[Music]