Michael Curtain teaches his students in his Concept Art for Video Games course.
By Robert Baird, CITL Senior Associate Director
Michael Curtin started drawing as a child and never looked back. His life-long passion led to a B.F.A. at Illinois in painting, work designing training adventure games for UIUC, a stint as an environment artist for the Volition video game company, and, most recently, the development and successful launch of a Concept Art for Video Games course for the new Games Studies and Design Minor at Illinois.
Watch the full interview below.
Concept art, used widely in cinema, theater and video games begins with drawing since that is the quickest and cheapest way to visualize what might ultimately cost quite a bit in time and money. For Michael: “If you're making anything [and] you need to come up with something new, you need someone to design that. And drawing is an incredibly fast way to burn through ideas. And that's what concept artists need to do -- they need to put a world at the fingertips of the cinematographers, or the directors, or, in the case of video games, the game designers and the writers and everyone else. They need to efficiently create a world.”
Because of his previous work at Volition, Michael knew Dan Cermak, VP for Volition, who, himself, had begun exploring a transition from the gaming industry to teaching and mentoring roles on campus. Around that time, interest was growing on campus around the idea of developing a game studies and video game minor at Illinois. That interest grew out of the Playful by Design community of practice launched by Judith Pintar (Teaching Associate Professor, School of Information Sciences) in 2017 through an Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities grant. Judith, now Director of the Game Studies Design Program, was very intentionally building the new Game Studies and Design Minor as a cross-campus, multidisciplinary, community-engaged program. Michael recalls: “Judith reached out and said, ‘we need art classes.’ And there was a lot of back and forth about what that meant. Should that live at Art and Design? And finally they said, ‘pursue what you think would be valuable’.”
In exploring possibilities, Michael returned to the foundations of drawing and concept art as a course focus: “My experience in video games was [that] a tremendous amount of folks on the visual side got into video games because of their interest in concept art. Everyone had this through line that they loved to draw. They would go on their lunch hour and they would get their sketch pads out, and that skill set --being able to dig into an idea and represent it visually -- and know how that fits into a game, is what drew me to the class.”
Knowing he wanted to use his art and video game industry experience to inform the design of the course, Michael began crowdsourcing the ideation process with colleagues: “I started calling everyone I knew in the industry, calling in every favor I had to walk me through what their common experience of people-who-were-new-to-the-industry was; what can we do for students to help them get hired? Help them develop a portfolio. But, also, get them through their first day in a studio?”
While we assume that most art classes allow students to follow their muse and choose their own topics and approach, this is not, necessarily, and pedagogically, such a great idea. For Michael, “if you go to a bunch of students and you point to them and say, ‘we need you to make a bunch of art, and you get to draw whatever you want,’ then several bad things happen. Particularly if they know they're going to have to show it to other people, they stick to what they're good at; they find a subject matter that they are comfortable with, [and] they dig in.”
After consulting with his professional art contacts, the focus and approach of the course became clear. “We decided early on . . . that we wanted students to be collaborating on the same project.” Michael engaged with CITL pedagogy staff Ava Wolf and Robert Baird early in the course development process to help translate his design perspectives and professional experience into a classroom setting. Michael felt this helped “set me on the right path.” This brainstorming with campus professionals and video game industry pros led Michael to an innovative course design that involved guest lectures, visitors and a strong marriage of art studio best practices with video game industry practices.
Michael: “Something I incredibly enjoy about the class is prior to class, there's a ton of coordination with industry people; what they're going to do on guest lectures. But I also . . . established a relationship with Bruce Nesmith, who is a retired game designer from Bethesda. He was the lead designer on huge titles like [The Elder Scrolls IV] Oblivion, and these things that have just shipped millions and millions of units.” Through these industry contacts, Michael was able to envision a course that adopted the stance that the students were young concept artists for a new video game project, working together and receiving feedback from the teacher/Art Director and other industry professionals. Michael and Bruce then got to work fleshing out this imaginary game development as a course-based, assignment-driven learning environment. Michael: “And I go to [Bruce] with a complete narrative that I've developed for the course; a game world. And he, from that narrative, develops prompts, the assignments, meaning that the students select those prompts based on what they would like to pursue, be it environment art or character art.”
Now with an entire game and a world to design, Michael ran into the constraints of working with novice art students in a single course that was only eight weeks long. Michael needed to take an interesting slice of that big, imaginary world: “The design challenge for me . . . was that you don't want to drop an entire world in front of a student and say ‘fill the whole thing’. You want to narrow it down, because constraints are your best friend in a scenario like this. And so I physically constrained the game world by saying ‘everything's going to take place in the interior of a facility.’ Very finite; you can’t leave. And [the students] are meant to fill this facility with all this stuff: a greenhouse level, administrative area, living quarters, a science and robotics area.”
The students buy-in to the video game design team within the class model was such that Michael saw passion and commitment to the projects. “But the fun part is, there's a game world to build. And by the end of it, we are fighting in the classroom; ‘no, the character wouldn't do that because they did this over here,’ or ‘no, you can't do that because there's no oxygen in that part of the facility’. It's that sort of thing where, if you drop them into . . . a design ecosystem, it is easier for them to find something that they can grasp onto that they actually care about.”
The student work offered surprises and creativity: “What was a nice little garden district that was manicured, is now a forest . . . And it meant that they [the students] had the leeway to throw in wild ideas. And so things I totally didn't expect; like one of them developed a train system on the interior [of the facility], which totally played with how I thought [about] the scale of it . . . but I also thought it was phenomenal.”
With a strong art community across campus and town, Champaign-Urbana serves as a good location for artists and professional designers. More powerfully, Michael sees Illinois as a great location for professional and novice concept artists: “Concept art is this stunning, bizarre mix of skill sets that really feeds [well] into the interdisciplinary nature of Game Studies and Design here at the U of I, because the U of I is a gigantic ecosystem that has everything you can imagine, from bug collections, to material libraries, to gardens you can go visit. It is an amazing opportunity for an artist who needs to design an entire world to go, just interact with things, to go look at things, touch things, figure things out for themselves, and then represent those things in a new way on paper.”
After receiving good feedback after the first iteration of his course, Michael notes that the course has been given “the green light to be taught again. And based on the enrollment and the attention it's getting in the fall semester, it's going to expand from what it is now, which is an eight week course to a full 16 week course, which is a phenomenal opportunity.”
The student demographic of the course was, somewhat surprisingly, quite diverse in majors and student career objectives, with many students beginning the course without much interest in a professional art or video game career. According to Michael, “many of [the students] were not art majors, they were not all comfortable with rendering, and they were brave. They were making art that was going to be shown in front of their peers -- that was shown in front of industry professionals.”
The course ended with a critique of the student work, with Michael bringing in Mike May (Zenimax Studios), a professional concept artist with 25 years of experience. “And he [Mike] walked through their work with me. And that is harrowing [for the students]. And they were amazing.” Mike confided in Michael that one student “was just ready for industry” and “got it.”
Another student shared with Michael that she had never considered art as part of her career path: “Art was not on the table, but she was talented. And I was thrilled to hear that she was at least scratching her head, wondering how art was going to fit into her career and her life going forward.”
Did you enjoy this episode, or do you have a story to share about your teaching? Drop us a note at ttll@illinois.edu.
This podcast was produced by the Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning at the University of Illinois. Episodes can be found on our website, citl.illinois.edu, and major podcast platforms. We hope you’ll find us there and join the conversation!