Week 19: Life changing or career building?

This week's task is a pretty tough one to get info on. The main questions is whether games companies want fresh arts graduates with open minds who can be taught things or whether they want graduates who have taken games orientated courses and have learnt modelling, texturing, animating or concept drawing skills.

I've searched through the jobs postings on gamasutra and all of the arts ones are asking for experience in max and photoshop, as you would expect, but they do also want traditional art skills.

I found a pretty good interview on gamasutra with Doug Tennapel, the creator of Earthworm Jim.
Tennapel says he likes everything Insomniac does, as well as the game Psychonauts which I am inclined to agree with. I liked the way Psychonauts was pushing the exaggeration of the characters, but I did feel that this meant that some looked like they were in a different style to others. Some of the campsite kids have a wildly different look to other ones, but on the whole the designs are brave and work well.

One of the main messages from the interview was that videogames companies need to be hiring artists who have more of a broad art background with experience in skills like colour theory and anatomy. He claims that instead many are being blinded by the details that artists can achieve

"Like for instance, if a guy maybe renders with his pencil really well, puts good shading on a creature, but his anatomy is completely wrong…they hire him because he tricked them with his cool detail, even though the foundation of his drawing is weak."

It's good to see that a message like this is coming from someone within the industry, asking for all round applicable art skills. I feel that the balance between art and modelling is a delicate one, and one that this course handles well. The art skills we get taught by Chris in the drawing module are applicable to all types of art. Perspective, colour theory and anatomy are universal skills which perhaps are not as prevalent in the games industry as they should be.

But perhaps neither is original and creative thinking, which would be more likely to come from art course graduates. My art foundation certainly taught me how to think outside the box and redefine words like 'drawing'. A drawing is not pencil lines on a piece of paper, it is any type of information about anything presented in any kind of way. So if I were studying oranges for example then yes I might do a traditional drawing but I might try cutting it up and printing with it, rolling it in paint and then on paper, casting it, trying to replicate its colour, warping its shape, measuring it and writing down its stats, rolling it and recording how it moves or smashing it on a canvas.

All these are legitimate drawing techniques, which I don't think some people on this course really understand, perhaps because they weren't expecting to have to address them. It would explain the slighty underwhelmed response to the exhibition the other week, which was full of interesting abstract work.

So I've basically come the long way round to saying I think this course has it right. The industry is asking for specific skills like 3D Studio Max and Photoshop which we can deliver but hopefully with some prodding we can deliver a more broad understanding of artistic techniques and skills which can help expand the horizons of the games industry as well as providing the more immediate benefit of accuracy and understanding.