Bob Nicoll has been training creative professionals for over 25 years. The short list includes filmmakers, artists, engineers, designers, producers, and all kinds of product makers. He entered the game industry in 2000, and created award-winning training programs at Electronic Arts and Blizzard. In this interview, he discusses the skills job seekers need to find work in the film and gaming industries, and his own career path as an artist and a professional educator. Highlights include seeing his first logo on national television, working on the movie Contact, and building EA University and Blizzard Academy. Bob also talks about how training has changed in the last 20 years?just like the tools?and the importance of getting away from the computer to find inspiration.
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Instructor’s Welcome Note:
– My name is Bob Nicoll. I’ve been creating training programs in the entertainment industry for, 25 years, 30 years, probably. It’s kind of scary. I was in broadcasting, I was in film, and just about 2000, so the change is coming in the games industry. Went to Electronic Arts, went to EA and started their training program. So I was there for about 10 years. Created EA University. I left there, went back into teaching, I taught some at UFC, I taught some at Carnegie Mellon.
Then had an opportunity to go to Blizzard and I’ve been there for the past five years, I created Blizzard Academy. What we do, what I’ve been doing is, I’ve been a professional educator, at working with all different types of software, all different types of environments, and incredibly talented people. What I do now is I work with artists, engineers, game designers, producers.
So I’m responsible for the development community, the folks that make the product. It’s been a lot of fun. I’m involved with skills based training, with creativity, with inspiration, and have had an opportunity to really been inspired as well as help deliver that sort of inspiration to other folks as well.
What am I most proud of? There are just so many different things. The landscape keeps evolving and changing in front of me, so rapidly that something that is like, wow, we did it and we’ve crossed that threshold, it becomes almost forgettable. I’ve worked through all the evolution of the film industry. I worked through early broadcast, I did live presentations working in sports. I remember the first logo I did for ABC golf.
And that logo was on national TV, I was like, wow! When I was a professional artist that was really cool. But I think that probably some of my most, memorable and proud moments are building EA University. You know, for 10,000 people, big corporation. And then coming to Blizzard and creating Blizzard Academy. So my creative moments have turned into almost more institutional in a weird sort of way, but they’re all really personal to me.
I mean, people ask me the questions of what I do, and I have some flip answers, but the one that I think is probably most accurate is I think I’m a pixel carpenter. You know, I build things. Goodness, well certainly they’re going to need the technical skills. I mean there are some baseline needs. They’re going to need a technical proficiency at the level of craft that’s required for where ever you’re working.
And those skills are different from one studio or one profession to another. The type of modeling skills you would need at Dreamworks or Sony or Disney or Pixar, are totally different in a lot of ways than you would need in a game company. But some of the more contemporary companies, depending upon the company, might be using quite similar skills. Depending on which game you’re at, within a company, you’re going to need totally different skills.
So, the company that I’m at now, to be an artist, a modeler, a dungeon artist, we do have dungeon artists, you would need to be a qualified painter, a texture artist as well as designer as well as modeler and understanding the styles and look. Which is quite different than a lot of other places where the looks are more from the shaders as far as the surfaces and the qualities of the geometry that they’re putting in their games.
Or the level of the complexity of the geometry might be a lot more, a lot higher resolution than what a game company would use. The skills need to be reflected upon where you’re applying to. So, technical skills, is one. You need to be problem solver because in a lot of ways we’re being thrown new curves in just about everything that we do, always, that never changes.
You have to have a sense of aesthetics, whether or not you’re a designer or an artist or an engineer, you have to understand what elegant and simple and what is appropriate and what fits and what’s appealing. Which is ageless, all those things go back. I mean, I almost sound like I could be
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