MF GALAXY

GOING TO CONS IN COSTUME, WHICH CHARACTERS ARE HIS FAVOURITES FOR COSPLAY, WHY IMPROV IS SO VALUABLE FOR ANY ACTOR BUT ESPECIALLY FOR VIDEO GAME WORK LISTEN/DOWNLOAD Mark Meer is possibly the most affable fellow in showbiz. He’s a terrific stage actor, voice artist, and improviser, and I’ve known him since we were both cartoonists at university and worked together in the sketch comedy troupe The 11:02 Show. He’s best known as the voice of Commander Shepard from BioWare’s Mass Effect trilogy and has done other video games including Gods of Rome and Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced. And he’s not just someone whom fans love—he’s a fanboy himself, and attended numerous conventions in costume. He’s literally a pro at cons. He’s also appeared in short films such as Tar Zombies Barbecued and Flight of the Polar Bear ; and he’s been a stalwart of the Edmonton theatre community for decades in ongoing longform improv such as Die-Nasty! and Gordon’s Big Bald Head. And if that weren’t enough,...

HOW HE BEGAN HIS CAREER IN TELEVISION—BUT NOT WHERE OR HOW YOU’D THINK, DRAWING AT BIOWARE IN ITS EARLIEST DAYS, THE MYTH AND REALITY ABOUT HOLLYWOOD AGEISM + WHY OLDER ARTISTS HAVE AN ADVANTAGE LISTEN/DOWNLOAD I met John Gallagher so long ago I don’t even remember it, but we were both members of the same fannish club called ESFCAS, the Edmonton Science Fiction and Comic Arts Society at the University of Alberta. A bunch of us there wanted to be professional artists—including Adrian Kleinbergen and Nigel Tully who found work in comics, Jaemi Hardy who became a fine artist, and Marc Taro Holmes who worked in video games and Hollywood and has published instructional books on art— and you can hear my conversation with him on MF GALAXY. But John Gallagher is a particularly amazing success story. After training at the Alberta College of Art and Design, he went to work at Edmonton’s BioWare studio as a production illustrator. Later he broke into Hollywood, and has wor...

HOW HIS GAMIFIED EDUCATIONAL APPROACH CAN HELP YOU DESIGN CREATURES +  CHARACTERS TO BREAK INTO THE INDUSTRY OF YOUR CHOICE, HOW TO TRANSITION FROM TRADITIONAL ART SCHOOL TO PHOTOSHOP + TABLETS LISTEN/DOWNLOAD   Marc Taro Holmes knows an awful lot about art. I’m not just talking about last December when he up and got himself elected to the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour, or more than twenty years ago when he got his BFA from the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary. I’m talking about his more than fifteen years as an Art Director and Concept Artist for tiny outfits you’ve never heard of, such as Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Disney, and BioWare where he worked on games such as Dragon Age Inquisition, Neverwinter Nights, and Baldur’s Gate. He’s still doing contract work for game design on characters, costumes, and fantasy-historical settings. Back thirty years ago, he and I belonged to an informal group of young science fiction, comic...

HOW IMPROV HELPS WRITING, THE DIFFERENT KINDS OF LAUGHS WRITERS MUST UNDERSTAND, THE GAME MECHANICS OF IMPROV, FACING RESISTANCE TO HUMOUR ON MASS EFFECT 3 LISTEN/DOWNLOAD FREE Cathleen Rootsaert is a remarkable creator. She wrote plot and dialogue for the video game Mass Effect 3 by BioWare, and edited dialogue for the studio’s Star Wars: The Old Republic and Mass Effect 2 games. In the late 1980s, along with rising improv stars Wes Borg, Neil Grahn, and Paul Mather, she co-founded the legendary Edmonton comedy troupe Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie, which had a brief run as a CBC television series. She’s the playwright behind Mimi Amok, After You, Legacy, Make Me and Mama Mia! Me a Mama? which won the Sterling Award for outstanding new work. She also won the 2005 Alberta Playwriting Award for Abigail in Twilight. She appeared on the Ken Finkelman series The Newsroom and the Winnipeg Comedy Festival special I’m Becoming a Mother. She’s a core member of the two-deca...

Why video games are superior to movies, how to make machinima for fun and profit, and the dearth of African VG-makers in North America   Leo Lucien-Bay is a cinematic designer on the BioWare blockbuster video games Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 . In addition to essentially “directing” the playable dialogue sequences of those games, Lucien-Bay is also an animator in the hacker’s form of animation called machinima , also pronounced ma-kin-ema (like cinema). He wrote and directed an award-winning machinima called “Beast” that got him his job at BioWare. Lucien-Bay’s originally from England and lived part of his young life in Cameroon . He’s a lifelong fanboy who favours DC over Marvel. He hates bragging almost as much as he hates smiling. And he’s made a life for himself and his young family in Edmonton. In full disclosure, we worked together on Mass Effect 2 and we’re friends. In today’s episode, Leo Lucien-Bay discusses: How you can make mac...