WORDS BY LIAM BOSECKE PHOTOS BY DAV E COURT 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.
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.
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”.
“I have four kids,” he says. “It’s mental at home and mental here, I’m super busy.”
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.
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.
