Artist Portfolio - Mike Hill

Gary Evans find this artist enhances his concepts using story theory, engineering and psychology

- Gary Evans

The Mike Hill method for watching films in three simple(ish) steps: first, pick a movie and watch it. Second, if the movie moved you in some way, don’t just go ‘Yes, that was nice’ and leave it at that; watch it again, slowly, carefully, scene by scene. And, three, take the movie into a video editor, cut it up, colour code the acts, the sequences, the scenes, really get in there, pick it apart, look at the story from all angles, and try to understand the decisions made by the scriptwriter, the director, the editor, even the color grader. The Mike Hill method for watching movies is about seeing “how the story looks from 30,000 feet.”

This is how the British artist likes to do things – all things, it seems… He was emailed some interview questions. Mike wanted to know precisely how long his answers should be if we could give him feedback once he’d sent them, and if we could establish an iterative process to make sure his responses were perfectly clear. We asked Mike to share some pictures of his work. Mike politely requested a proposed layout for the article, showing the images we’d like to use and how we’d like to use them, which he would then review, and, if necessary, make substitutions.

Looking at how Mike approaches those two everyday things – watching a movie, answering an email – and you get a good idea of how Mike approaches concept work on big-name franchises (Game of Thrones, Blade Runner 2049, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare). He has a deep desire to understand how things work now and how they might work better later. He wants everything to be logical, everything structurally sounds and functioning right.

You should also be able to predict the kind of response we’d receive after asking Mike a careless question like this: what separates good concept art from great concept art?