CDW Studios

Becoming a digital artist in the entertainment industry isn’t something many people would consider, and for those who do, it can be hard to know where to begin.

Adelaide is a city that can feel stagnant at the best of times. Ambition to create special effects for a Hollywood blockbuster, or modelling characters for AAA games can feel like a pipedream; casually brushed off as a career path for “someone else”, or solely available to those who are “exceptionally gifted”.

However, breaking into the entertainment industry isn’t such an unrealistic notion – although it could easily be discarded under personal insecurities and misconceptions.

CDW Studios (Concept Design Workshop Studios) is nestled comfortably on the third floor of the Myer Centre, in Rundle Mall. Amid the bustling shoppers and screaming children, it has remained a quiet achiever teaching Visual Effects and Entertainment Design since 2011.

Yewth was fortunate enough to catch up with the founder of CDW Studios, Simon Scales. These days Simon rarely finds any spare time to run the school.

“I have four kids,” he says. “It’s mental at home and mental here, I’m super busy.”

Establishing CDW as a permanent school wasn’t something Simon originally intended to do, but having studied at the Concept Design Academy in the United States he envisioned bringing those same learning experiences over to Australia. Having worked within the industry himself, Simon understands the difference a world-class learning environment can have on nurturing a student’s abilities.

“I’ve worked on De Blob and De Blob 2 through THQ in Melbourne. After that finished, I came back to Adelaide and started working for Lego,” he says. “I was starting to develop CDW stuff when I moved back to a studio in 2011. We ran a workshop for sixty people and it sold out. It was a crazy two-week event, 9am till 9pm every day. It was intense, but everyone thought it was amazing.

“Because I went to CDA, I did the workshops to give people an opportunity in Australia to experience a similar kind of thing. You’d have industry professional teaching classes and demos, which has never happened before in Australia. When I went over to the States, that’s how they were teaching it, and I thought: ‘This is crazy, to actually see someone drawing or modelling in front of you’.”

Simon also firmly believes in giving back to the community and creating passion for the arts. For this reason, CDW have started to host weekly events and Twitch Streams, regularly streaming art shows for critiquing, and the occasional class here and there. In addition, they host life drawing sessions every Friday night.

“We’re just trying to build a bit more of a community,” Simon explains. “Getting people from overseas to be able to see stuff we’re doing, perhaps they might want to come at some point. Even if they don’t, it’s still giving back to that art community. Trying to get some involvement, not just in Adelaide, but globally.

“Currently 30% of our students are from interstate or overseas. So, there’s a lot of people travelling to come live here and study. Probably a lot of people wouldn’t think that of Adelaide.”

CDW’s recent partnership with Flinders University has solidified its institutional legitimacy and accessibility, now offering accredited training through Flinders, under the Bachelor of Creative Arts (Digital Media). Despite this still being uncharted territory for both Flinders and CDW, course coordinator Katie Cavanagh says the partnership is intuitive and the relationship has matured organically.

Having started her teaching career lecturing in English, by way of fortune, Katie transitioned into Screen and Media where she began to teach Digital Media topics. Then, as time went on, perhaps through sheer luck, she met Simon through a competition CDW was hosting.

“I always wondered if it was rigged, but Simon swears it wasn’t,” Katie jokes. “About four years ago, I noticed a lot of students were talking about doing CDW topics. So, I entered a competition on Facebook to win a workshop there, and I won. It was a weekend workshop with the compositor who worked on The Silver Surfer.

“That gave Simon and I a chance to talk, and the more we talked, the more we realised it would take a lot of work for CDW and Flinders to get into a formal partnership. But it just seemed like the right thing.”

Establishing fresh opportunities for her students is what Katie strives for, and she is excited about the CDW partnership covering new ground and creating learning opportunities.

“That’s how I like to form degrees, that’s why digital media is so weird. I like to see where the students want to go, and then if it makes sense, pave it,” Katie says.

Digital art’s continual tangibility has made it difficult to define, as technology has taken on newer and more accessible roles in our lives. While most of the art we interact with daily has been, at the very least, touched upon by a computer at some point in the creation process, Katie’s own passion for the arts is palpable; she describes digital art as “electricity”, running through everything we interact with.

“You can’t open up anything today without seeing art that’s been printed digitally, or created digitally. Pure print that has no digital process is rare in the public realm. There’s often digital art involved somewhere, even in non-digital artefacts,” she says.

When people think of the digital arts in terms of representation, it becomes even hazier. At first glance, its legitimacy as an art form can come into question, which may be due to its accessibility and flawless integration into society. People may use it every day, but that doesn’t make it understandable to everyone.

“I think that digital art is one of those things where we see it, but don’t know where it’s made,” Katie says. “People know the work, but I think they tend not to know who makes it and they tend not to know where it comes from. It’s a really invisible art form.”

Invisibility hasn’t put a stop on digital artists earning a decent living. With certain industries in danger of disappearing, Katie says it has to be one of the more useful skillsets you can have: learning to be an adaptable creator in an ever-changing world.

“There are certain industries in danger of disappearing,” she says. “We have a lot of leisure and we have an insatiable desire for stories. I think visual story tellers and people who make us question ourselves by the art they make have a huge marketplace; not always a paid one, but there’s a huge audience out there.”

Learning from industry professionals isn’t an opportunity most people are fortunate enough to have, or may even be aware of. Alex Colvin, with over a decade of experience behind him, is one of many industry professionals currently lecturing at CDW.

“The first place I got a job at was Team Bondi,” Alex says. “That was straight out of TAFE, and then I just moved right over to Sydney. About three other mates from the game art course and I all got a job there at the same time, and that was pretty cool.”

Alex, who is also working as a senior artist at Mighty Kingdom, describes the intensity of the workload, and the difficulties of working on a AAA game coming straight out of TAFE.

“The work I was doing itself wasn’t hard, but the volume that I had to do was pretty intensive, it was quite a lot to do,” he says. “In ‘L.A. Noire’ there were just heaps of pedestrians around, so there were just tonnes of outfits to make, that was the main thing I was doing for a while.”

Alex eventually moved back to Adelaide and is working on production design for television and games.

Finding work in such a tight-knit community can require exceptional networking skills and having a natural flare for people. Alex explains that building a reputation in the community is fundamental in finding local work.

“You just have to know who to talk to. There’s obviously the big companies, but I find that most of the work I get is through word of mouth.”

Finding work locally isn’t always as daunting or unrealistic as recent graduates might think. A big part of it is learning to be adaptable and being open to learning new skills.

“I think it’s an exciting time for students right now that are coming out of study in the next two or three years,” Alex says. There’s a lot of stuff going on, there’s heaps of opportunities. Maybe not all in Adelaide, but certainly in Australia.”

Carving out your place in this unpredictable and technologically driven world really boils down to your passion for the work, but with schools like CDW Studios supporting local artists, a career in the creative world is closer than you think.

cdwstudios.com.au

Words by Liam Bosecke

Photos by Dave Court