Task 9: Art Direction

An art director is responsible for the overall look and feel of a game. He must take the brief and make the best artistic decisions he can, he will work closely with the lead artist and the whole art team. He essentially manages everything everyone is creating and must make sure it fits the games purpose and looks how it should. But this is a much bigger responsibility than it might seem. The artists and modellers can only create things the way he wants them, including style, environments, characters, textures, lighting etc. He must make sure the work flow is efficient so everyone on the team is working when they need to be, they need to be creating assets on time, so if another artist needs to work on it they can. If there are any delays it could directly affect the release of the game as everyone is always reliant on something to be finished when it needs to be.

I think art direction is a creative role but not necessarily an artistic role. The art director will have a lot of experience with artwork as he has likely worked on many other projects in his career, but he may not be directly creating anything. They will be using their experience, knowledge and artistic judgement to make the right decisions. This includes doing plenty of research, having a lot of good ideas and being able to present these ideas to the rest of the team in a clear, understandable manner.

The art director must have good leadership skills and be an authoritative figure, so he can tell the other artists what he wants and how it should be done whilst keeping everyone as a team. The other people in the team must respect his decisions and carry them out properly.

I think art direction in games is very similar to in films. Many of the same things must be taken into account, things such as lighting, colour pallet, scale, and placement of objects. They must create believable and dramatic environments and characters. This is because the player of a game and viewer of the film are similar in ways. They will be watching/playing the film/game and need to feel immersed. Films will be linear and take you through the world/story with certain camera angles whilst games will allow you to do that yourself, but ultimately the viewer/player will want to be part of an interesting environment with interesting characters. The main difference is that with games everyone will play a different way; they might look a certain direction or go off and explore. This can make it hard for the art director to tell a story. So they must create an environment which will make the player look in certain places and go to areas without feeling like they are being forced too. Often in games there are cut scenes at important times in the story which players can’t control so they don’t miss anything, in which case the art direction is almost the same as in film.

Dead Space 2 - Blood trails leading the player into a room

 

To become an art director I will need to develop almost every quality I have, including artistic skills, people skills and leadership skills. A lot of this will come in time and experience, which is the main thing companies look for. With each role I’ve looked at so far they always require about 4 years of experience and have worked on at least one game.