Interview with Feng Zhu

Hi Feng, it’s a real pleasure chatting with you today. Being an artist who needs little introduction we will skip the normal opener and plum for a more unique starting question: Could you describe what fascinates you about drawing, what the lure is?
I think for me it’s more about the design versus the drawing. Because for me, where the fascination comes from is creating something that never existed before. To always see that design come out in either the form of a video game, film or toy, that’s the part that pays off. Guess that’s what makes me happy when that stuff comes out. As for the drawing part, I don’t care too much about it as I was never really an artist. When I was growing up, I was always thinking about new designs and how to get all these ideas in my head out onto paper. So drawing, for me, is actually just a tool or I guess a communication method. I really wasn’t involved in colours or different type of stylings and rendering techniques so I really cannot get my designs to come out there. The fact that somebody else or a team can make it into a project or product, that’s the fascination for me.
What first drew you to art and what schools/colleges did you attend, to develop your skill?
What got me started in this is, again, design. I actually went into architecture originally because
I didn’t know about the whole entertainment design industry. Actually at that time, which was
about the mid-nineties, there wasn’t a big push in that field. Right now it is very popular to have
all those “behind the scenes”, “art of ...” features and concept art on DVDs and almost all major
films now offer them. But back then, there were only VHS tapes and no “behind the scenes”
features. It was very hard for someone like myself to find out how to get into the industry and so I chose the closest thing: architecture at UC Berkeley. I went there for about a year and I found out that architecture was really different from what I wanted to do. At that point, I started asking my friends how I get into the entertainment industry or the games industry as an entertainment designer. That’s when I found out about CalArts and Art Center. I went to visit
both schools and just by looking at the students’ gallery I immediately knew that Art Center was
the school to attend. They were doing stuff way ahead of the industry. Most of their projects took place in either weird, really strange worlds or very much in the future. So I dropped out of
Berkeley and went straight to Art Center and I never looked back. It was a really cool place.
Looking over your bio on your website you’ve definitely had a career that any up-and-coming
artist would dream of. Not only have you worked for some of the top games companies around,
you’ve also had the opportunity to work with the man that bought Star Wars to life. What was it
like working for Mr Lucas and what was your role in the production of Episode III?
Well, it was fun and I think like any job, the first two weeks were partially professional and partially filled with fan boy moments. These IPs we touch existed even when I was a kid. I grew up, of course, watching Star Wars and I’d always wanted to work on a film like that. When I first got a call from the ranch, it was definitely quite - what’s the best way to put it? - exciting, I guess. To be able to work in the place where all the films I love had been created, like Indiana
Jones etc ...
The first week there was very magical. George has this Skywalker Ranch in the middle of pretty
much nowhere. It’s a very nice, huge Victorian house; there’s no work environment like that in all the film industry. And all the original stuff from Star Wars and Indiana Jones and other IPs are still in the house. So you are surrounded by a lot of history, history that molded my career.
It’s definitely an experience that is very hard to explain unless you have been there.
And then, of course, there was meeting Mr George Lucas. I was kind of nervous, I guess, for the first week or two because normally it’s hard for anyone to meet George and there he was, working one on one with us in these meetings. But then after a two to three week period,everything settled down and everyone turned professional. It was just another job, to
make the movie happen and make the clients - in this case, George - happy. So we just worked
week by week, designing things we needed for the film.
The other part that I really liked about working at the ranch were all my friends. Most of them
were people I went to school with at Art Center. So it was kind of like a class reunion of some
sorts. Everyone was working in the same place, a very small art department with about six people. We had a lot of fun times there since the work was quite hard. So we were there for many late nights, pulling all-nighters and doing all these things. But yeah, it was lots of fun!
Your portfolio has to be one of the most interesting that I’ve seen; I could have spent hours flicking through your work. Your concepts for EA’s Battle for Middle Earth II game are truly inspirational. The one piece that brings a smile to my face is the little Tutenstein character you’ve done. Could you tell us a bit about this character and how he came about?
Wow, Tutenstein! That was back when I worked at Blur Studios. So Blur is one of those houses
that take on many different kinds of projects at once. Often we worked on something we called
bid projects, which is when the studios have a script idea but don’t know what it is going to look like. Until they do, it is very hard to get that project made. So they go to a studio like Blur to visualize the concept and the first person that this kind of job lands on is the concept guy.
For the Tutenstein project I read the pitch and it was about a little kid that had died a long time ago in Egypt and who is being shown in a museum. Somehow at night, he wakes up and he’s got little cat with him, and they control everything in the museum. It sounded like a very cool idea for a kids’ show and reminded me a little bit of Calvin and Hobbes, because Calvin also has a cat or tiger and they do imaginary friends stuff. So I liked that because Calvin and the Hobbes is my favourite comic.
The original concept for this project was actually going to be in 3D, I believe, but the real show
ended up being done in flash or 2D. When I designed it, I added a lot of details to make sure that it was very iconic and would appeal to kids.
But there was also a bit of evilness in there for the older generation. It was quite fun, but I think
the final product strayed a little bit away from the original idea, mostly, I believe, due to budget.
But still, it was very cool and I was glad to be a part of it.
So what’s the standard process for you when you come to do a concept? Do you start off traditionally then move to the computer or do you hit the Wacom first?
I guess it’s both. When I started from about ‘97 all the way to 2003, I was working traditionally,
meaning I was drawing on paper and finishing stuff on paper. But in about June or July of 2003, I made the decision to completely switch over to digital. This was mainly for efficiency reasons because in our industry, the saying that “time is money” is very, very true. If you can deliver something fast that also looks good then you can make more income that way. Working on a computer increases your speed tremendously because you have things like the ability to texture, to undo and all these brushes so you don’t have to carry around equipment. It was very hard at first, but after about three months I felt like paper was no longer necessary. So I actually haven’t drawn a single thing on paper for professional reasons since, I guess, ‘03. For the past six years, it has been all digital and everything, including the rough thumbnails, has been done on a Wacom.
That’s the beauty of digital art. It’s something I call the “first generation pass”, which means a thumbnail to a rough to a final image can actually take place in the exact same drawing. You can start something very rough, clean it up a little bit, paint on it and turn into a painting,
all from the initial sketch. Whereas when using traditional methods that cannot happen because
we do a little tiny thumbnail, then blow it up and do a photocopy, and it becomes second generation. And then if you overlay it or copy it, that becomes third generation. Rendering on top of that copy becomes fourth generation already. So by the time you get to the fifth or sixth
generation, you’ve actually lost quite a bit of the energy that the designer put in.
I like the computer because it makes the works feel more alive. You can feel the personality of
the designer inside the piece and that’s how I like to work these days. As far as how I do the design, there’s no difference. Every designer, I believe, does the same thing. You start by brainstorming on paper, producing a bunch of thumbnails, getting the ideas out and trying to
find as many interesting shapes as possible. Being an entertainment designer, the number one thing I have to focus on is that it has to be very cool. Things like functionality and all that stuff still have to be taken into consideration, but because my stuff doesn’t have to exist in the real world, I have the luxury of being able to focus on making it look cool.
Teaching is a big part of your life right now with you setting up a design school, but how did
this all start? What is it about teaching that has made you devote so much of your time to it?
Well, it’s true - right now I devote about half of my time to teaching. This actually started a while ago, just in L.A. I was asked by a school to be a kind of TA; to substitute for a teacher. I’d never taught prior to that. I showed up and the cool thing is that all the students in my
class at that school were professionals. I had professional comic book guys and professional film guys and all these really, really talented people and that really changed my concept of teaching. Especially that class, because a lot of those guys actually became my friends and we were able to share ideas and help each other produce better work. And I saw the direct translation of my teaching into the projects they were working on. For example, I have a couple of guys who were taking my class to learn how to do concepts for designing the Matrix film. Afterwards, they showed me how the work they were doing for the film and I was like, “Wow, all the stuff I have been teaching them is going into these huge films!” It was pretty interesting.
After that, I taught at Gnomon for a long time. And then Art Center finally invited me to teach over there and that was a huge honour for me because they take their staff very seriously. All
their teachers are very high caliber; it’s almost like getting a job at a very high-end studio. So the fact that they asked me to teach not only their regular class, but their very, very advanced entertainment courses, was quite a real honour.
I have been addicted to teaching ever since because you see a lot of people. When they are in school, they are called students but when they get out, they become your peers. They become the people you sit next to, the people you work on projects with and you help each other find jobs. So by teaching, you’re essentially building your own network of designers. A lot of these guys will stick very close to you because often times, you helped them find their first job or helped them get into the industry - I have lots of stories like that. It’s always great for me when someone has taken one of my classes in a subject they didn’t know much about before and then after a few years, they are out there making all these cool projects and cool video games I am playing. Like when you see the credits at the end of a video game and you are like, “Wow, that was a student of mine” or “I remember teaching that guy this thing and now he’s doing this thing” - that’s a great feeling.
It’s all about sharing as many things as possible. That’s what makes our school quite different.
We give out everything we know. If I find some new technique or something for Photoshop, we’ll
teach it right away. We don’t follow any kind of curriculum in that sense, like you have to teach
this, that and this. We cover the fundamentals and anything else that is going to help the students get a job or advance their careers. We definitely don’t hold back any kinds of secrets.
You’ve got your design studio, your new school ... so what’s the next mile stone for you?
For me, right now, I think getting the school up and running is definitely the highest priority. The next is trying to develop some new IPs because in the past, I worked on a lot, I guess, but they all belonged to somebody else. I think it’s the dream of every designer to start doing stuff for themselves. But I also know the reality of things, which is that creating new IPs is very difficult to do from scratch. If you are a designer, there are thousands and thousands of IPs out there. They are all pretty cool, but how many of them actually make it somewhere? So knowing that reality and with my experience from running the games company, I’ve partnered up with some key people to help bring everything together. We’ll be announcing how we’re actually going
to do that a couple of months from now. Basically, the partnership enables myself and my partner to take IPs and realize them much more effectively than just having pieces of paper covered in concepts. So that’s what I am working on next and hopefully it will make a big splash next year, at somewhere like E3 and Comic Con or something like that.
Alright, that’s it. Thanks guys and talk to you again soon!

For more work by this artist please visit:
http://www.fengzhudesign.com
http://www.fzdschool.com
Interviewed by: Christopher Perrins