Molly Heady-Carroll is a 'Creature Consultant' and co-founder of Arcane Circus, a Netherlands-based game studio. She tours the world lecturing on the art of designing creatures and consulting for a wide variety of clients including the likes of BBC, Netflix, and Universal. | Molly HC on: X | LinkedIn | Zenibeasts | In The Keep | Support ITK on Patreon |
Transcripts
Music:
[0:00] Music
Speaker1:
[0:32] Thing before we do anything else close your eyes entertain me big deep breath in now picture yourself as just an air like you're just consciousness you're not your body and imagine that that spreads out to fill up the entire room and as you do it exhale inhale now imagine that the building is gone and it spreads out across the entire world and now the entire universe okay i'm ready wow so molly tell us about yourself oh
Speaker0:
[1:16] Well my name is molly heady carroll and i'm a creature consultant for games and animation i've worked in the games and animation industry for about 10 years as a freelancer i've worked for among other things night school studios at Universal, BBC, Netflix,
Speaker0:
[1:35] Anarchy Studios, Impact Gameworks, a bunch of different things. I also co-founded Arcane Circus, a game studio in the Netherlands where I live.
Speaker0:
[1:47] And there my pet project is Xenoboest, which is visible in the background here, which is about giant monsters destroying a 90s Saturday morning cartoon city. And besides that, I also give lectures about creature design at universities, studios, and I teach at the Utrecht University of the Arts in Utrecht.
Speaker1:
[2:08] So when you teach a subject like this, yesterday here in the office, we get the chance to see you kind of give your presentation and everything. But how does one teach?
Speaker0:
[2:18] How does one teach?
Speaker1:
[2:19] And how does one teach something like creature design? I mean, it's such a work of the imagination. What are the fundamental skills that make up that?
Speaker0:
[2:28] Oh, that's an interesting question. I mean, I've started, I've spent my entire life learning about, uh, learning about creatures and, um, by proxy, uh, real world animals. I actually wanted to be a zoologist before I got into the art world.
Speaker1:
[2:45] A herpetologist.
Speaker0:
[2:46] A herpetologist, a reptile scientist. Yes, reptiles. Yeah. And the way I like to say it is that I wanted to study animals and now I make up my own for a living. And I've spent my entire life, you know, accumulating knowledge of real world animals and analyzing creatures in media. I was a big monster kid growing up. I'm a big fan of universal monsters and kaiju films and things like that. Teaching is kind of new for me, though. I've been teaching at the HKU as a freelancer for a while, but this is the first year that I'm actually on a contract. And I think a good way to teach is, at least a good approach to take, is to kind of remember the things that were important to me when I was the age of my students because there were there was information I got that just blew my mind at that age and trying to remember where I was at that time I think helps a lot and also um think thinking very consciously about, why I do things a certain way like analyzing my own methods,
Speaker0:
[3:51] so that I can communicate it to students is also very, very important.
Speaker1:
[3:56] I spent some time teaching meteorology to students and I realized when I started teaching that I actually didn't know anything. Like, I couldn't articulate my thoughts. There's so much that you kind of fundamentally understand in your own head, which is the reason why I asked the question, when you're teaching someone else to do something that you just inherently sort of know how to do, like by the time you become an expert or whatever, It's like trying to tell someone the mechanics of how to ride a bicycle. It feels so natural. So for you, when you're trying to put... I assume that a student has an idea that they want to be designing creatures or whatever before they ever step in the door. You're not just picking up.
Speaker0:
[4:36] Well, sometimes no. Sometimes they know they want to work in games, but they, at least with my students at the HKU, because it's game art, Sometimes they know that they want to do games and work in that pipeline, but they don't know exactly where. So when they take a class from me, they kind of give creature design a chance and then they either learn more about the world that they want to work in or they realize this is exactly what I'm interested in. But for me personally, I mean, like I'm really, really passionate about creatures. Like my whole world is just that. If I can talk about creatures, I'm happy kind of thing. And my life is designed around doing that as much as possible kind of thing. But I think really it's sort of like a Trojan horse when I teach where I'm talking about creature design. But, you know, the students I'm talking to, they might not be as passionate about it or maybe they just kind of are curious about it. The really important thing for me is that the students are tapping into being like a really a really honest version of themselves and what they enjoy and figuring out what it is that makes their soul sing and doing that as much as possible because that happens sometimes as well where somebody who isn't focused on creatures is inspired by how passionate I am about the things that I'm interested in and that sparks something in them always makes me happy when that happens What.
Speaker1:
[6:04] In your opinion, your professional opinion, is a creature?
Speaker0:
[6:07] A creature?
Speaker1:
[6:08] Yeah.
Speaker0:
[6:09] A fictional being.
Speaker1:
[6:11] Okay. What about a real creature?
Speaker0:
[6:15] A real creature is a non-fictional being.
Speaker1:
[6:17] All right but so does the word creature inherently mean fictional uh
Speaker0:
[6:22] No i don't think so i think creatures can be real or imagined.
Speaker1:
[6:25] Yeah we went to the zoo earlier yeah you got to see some actual creatures i did yeah one of the things in your lecture that we talked about yesterday was i i asked this specific question about i think mythological creatures and we had gotten into this tangent about how oftentimes these are like sort of a hodgepodge or a mashup of different things.
Speaker1:
[6:45] But when it comes to real life creatures, how do they inspire a design for something that doesn't exist?
Speaker0:
[6:51] The cool thing about being a creature designer is that it is a design process, where you, research, ideate, prototype, you go around and around and around, refining a solution to a problem. The cool thing is that nature has already done this millions of times for millions of very specific circumstances, which is what we call species. So the real world zoology, you can reference, because those are systems that actually work, you know that they function. So looking at nature is useful, because you're able to look at examples of behaviors, anatomy, looks of animals that work that you can then translate into your made-up creature to make them feel believable.
Speaker1:
[7:49] That's so interesting. And you sort of have to kind of get a feel for the laws of physics and how they affect the creature. Like for instance, Godzilla, there's always that debate about something that big's bone structure couldn't be real, that sort of thing, but it still has to move and feel like it exists in a potential world.
Speaker0:
[8:08] Yeah. I mean, if that's the limitations of a project, I mean, you can get a very surreal project. I don't know, like Yellow Submarine, the creatures in that which i really really love they don't have to necessarily apply to the laws of physics as much as a fictional thing but yeah like with a godzilla where oh it wouldn't be able to work i mean as long as it functions for the story like the reality of it is less important to me and more kind of is it fulfilling the requirements of the piece of media more than anything else but yeah nature is a is a huge influence on every artist i think i mean like I can't, if I just did my best to not reference nature, I couldn't come up with anything as mad as an actual species that exists. Like there's parasites that enter sickleback fish and alter their, through hormones, alter their brain behavior so they don't hide from shadows. So they get eaten by birds because they need a warm environment to finish their development process. and then they lay eggs which go in the water with go like that's mental if you came up with that off the top of your head people that's stupid that wouldn't work but it exists in nature.
Speaker1:
[9:21] Lion's mane mushrooms that like infect ants yeah yeah like they explode and the spores spread everywhere inside of the colony so if the ants discover that one of their buddies has been infected they just carry them yeah out way away from the or the the ant hill whatever the fuck they live in the ant hive where they make the honey these guys are laughing at me but yeah it's it's amazing there's so many cool things in nature that are just like mind-blowing as you said you couldn't come up with anything crazier if you tried yeah even if you do like yeah it's interesting you can only kind of draw from what you've experienced in a way yeah or it or you'll find that you've had some parallel thought and then you discover later like oh that oh well i guess the big guy upstairs thought of that one before me yeah that kind of Some
