Even More Industry contacts

So I just had my chat with James from Denki over Skype, as it was over Skype all i have are my notes that I wrote down but honestly he was really nice to talk to so my notes are limited. We spoke for just over an hour and covered all of the topics i wanted to cover and more. While he focuses on 2D animation much of his experiences are very applicable to my own situation. As he is the only artist in a small team he takes on the entire art creation responsibility and so needs to be able to do a bit of everything. I'll put my notes here and try and make sense of them.

The first major point he made was about the maintaining of momentum and how that can be really beneficial for finding and maintaining work in the industry. He was doing stuff all the time straight out of uni be it starting his own company to side projects to joining Denki and he used the analogy of a horse running along side a train, it's much easier to jump from one moving thing to another than try and build momentum.

This led on to a chat about the main points he would look for in a person when considering them to hire. They boiled down to:

• Character - their ability to take and give direction, are they willing to learn, are they willing to teach
• Process - he likes to see the thought process behind shots rather than just them in isolation, give them story (more on this later)
• Momentum - as mentioned, the momentum of a person shows that they want to be doing this, if they choose to do something in their spare time it shows passions for the subject.

We then moved onto team dynamic and I asked him about what it's like working with other disciplines and how easy is it to get feedback, he said that the way Denki works is that they go with whoever has the best idea be it an art idea coming from code or a design idea coming from art, which ever is best they go with which makes feedback flowing between team members, he said they are at the level of being able to finish each others sentences which shows they are all on the same wave length. He also mentioned that the company worked in a way that was like painting a picture, they work in layers of detail with all aspects of the project improving at the same rate giving a well rounded project even if they have to stop working on it early.

From there we spoke about his portfolio and what it showed when he applied to Denki, he'd never done any game work before but his portfolio showed a range of styles from life drawing, realism to cartoony but tried to avoid tropes of design like the scantily clad women in space. He also said he showed a range of polished and process work (feeding back into the thought behind the piece)

I showed him my most recent showreel and he gave me some feedback. He mentioned that the clips were probably a little too long and that showing a second angle on some of them would have helped display it better but that it was solid work and showed good technical side. He suggested that it might be better to structure my shots with story in mind as that would make it more memorable and gave the example of the hippo like creature chasing someone in the scene, it would demonstrate both the technical side but also add a story element that would make it more memorable in the long term. He suggested possibly using a mock screenshot of a game and displaying my work that way (which is similar to something I've been considering doing already).

We then spoke a little about lengths of projects and how that can affect planning and concepting time.

Throughout most of the conversation we kept coming back to the theme of "Art serves the play" which usually means in a project animation can be first to go as often it has less of an impact on how the game plays, this means some of the animation isn't as polished as he'd like but other art elements come first.

Finally i asked him about finding the balance between belief in your work and arrogance and he gave a very good response in that its better to believe in what you want to do rather than focus on skill, skill will always improve with time and effort being put in so instead focus on what you want to say with your work rather than the work itself. He referenced a poster his physics teacher had which said "Aim at nothing and you'll hit it"

All in all it was a pleasure talking with James and he had some very interesting points to make.