I have experience leading in-house and offsite team members from a variety of disciplines including Concept Art, Traditional 2D Animators and Final Line Artists, 3D Generalists, Technical Artists, Visual Effects Artists, Lead Artists, Marketing Artists, and User Interface Designers. I am comfortable working with Junior Artists at the very beginning of their careers to Principal-level contributors - Masters of their craft.
My strength is recognizing and elevating team members' abilities and finding ways to bring complementary skill sets together, maximizing team moral, creativity, and productivity.
It is my job to lead Artists to achieve the Stakeholders' creative vision. A Stakeholder may be an Executive or Principal, Intellectual Property Owner, or a team collective. Regardless, it's my job to develop an understanding of the creative goals and vision, devise a plan, and bring the vision to fruition.
Visual problem solving is a process. It's not about having the right answer every time. It has more to do with asking the right questions and how well we work together to define our path forward. The process involves organization, prioritization, mutual respect, open communication among team members, and iteration. With these ingredients, teams can move toward visual goals acheiving a high level of creativity and efficiency. Rather than top-down, my style of leadership involves providing a bottom-up foundation of support and information so that team members have everything they need to succeed in their role.
Start with a plan.
- Talk with Stakeholders to understand preliminary vision
- Learn about project scope, timeline, and budget
- Identify comparable products in the market
- Learn about technical capabilities/limitations of platform
- Provide recommendations for team size and composition including key roles
Flow into pre-production phase.
- Our goal is to create a product that we feel excited about and translate this passion and enthusiasm to our audience or customer! If we LOVE it, they are more likely to LOVE it.
- Let's get to know our audience. Then find where our interests intersect.
- Gather our creative minds - Writers, Artists, Designers, Developers and the like - and start dreaming. Notice which ideas we feel most excited about. What ideas rise to the top?
- Explore product mood and personality on inspiration boards.
- Begin drawing pictures, story boarding, and wire-framing
- Prototype these ideas and see if dynamic concepts are fun in real time.
- Check-in with Stakeholders regularly and incorporate feedback
- Collaborate with Concept Artists in defining Product Vision
- Assemble a preliminary style guide defining the world, its inhabitants, features and UI
- Build the internal team. Recruit and hire to fill key positions.
- Identify external partners, test their capabilities, negotiate terms
Roll into Production.
- Collaborate with Lead Artist to further define style guide
- Collaborate with Technical Artists to establish technical specs, tools, and templates for production teams
- Collaborate with UI Designers on features, user flow, and experience
- Translate Concept Art into actual assets
- Collaborate with Art Producer to define all art needed for launch
- Maintain global view of Art Production
- Define Directly Responsible Individuals or Partners for categories of assets: Story, World/Environment, Character Design, 2D and 3D Animation, Features, UI, VFX, Video, Branding and Identity, etc.
- Delegate tasks according to team member strengths
- Guide team members' daily and weekly priorities
- Maintain responsibility/accountability for quality and timely delivery all final artwork.
Test Product.
- Test drive the product and collect feedback from Stakeholders and a broader audience.
- Incorporate feedback
Repeat. Polish. Repeat.
- With each successive test, improve artwork quality and user experience.
Launch.
- Pre-launch, collaborate with Art Producer to establish post launch production support plan
- Win Stakeholder approval
- Achieve visual excellence and launch product on time!