first guest lecture

This week on Wednesday we had our first guest lecture, from Jolyon Webb and Aaron Allport from Blitz studios. The talk was very interesting and gave a good insight into what working in the games industry is like. The company they work for is a UK based one which has worked on titles such as karaoke revolution, War games: Defcon 1, and Dead to Rights: Retribution. They mostly develop mass market family games.   

One of the most interesting parts of the talk for me was the video of an interview of a student on the course who had graduated and had been working with the company for four months. This was good because it gave a us a look at what working for Blitz would be like from the perspective of someone who had taken the course and was new to the industry rather than someone who had been working in the industry a while. It also gave us a look at the amount of workload the job required, working with a team and the roles that the job covered. 

 

It was also interesting the advice in the interview and the guest lecture about portfolios; it seems that in the last year it is a good idea to become more specific. If you are aiming for a particular job, it would be a good idea to have a portfolio only covering the area the job covers. For example, if you were aiming for a job as a character artist, there would not be much point in you having a portfolio with things like environments and vehicles. This also relates back to what we have been taught on the course, that the final project in our third year is probably best used to showcase your talent to prospective employers. However, at this stage, just getting to grips with the technology and the course, I don’t really know what I would like to specialise in.

Another part I found useful was the breakdown of the different amounts of people working different job roles. There were larger amounts of character and environment artists, but less visual effects artists and technical artists. The guest lecturers also said they were looking for visual effects artists and that when another company went under the people who had this job role were in high demand. They were currently looking for more people to employ into these roles. However, I did not really understand the role of technical artist from their explanation.

They also explained a lot more about character design and the process of developing ideas. They showed how some of their character designs and how they started with a sometimes not very detailed sketch, and then went through different versions until they thought it worked. The part about digital paint overs was also very useful; it seemed to really help to see what was wrong with the model by looking at the silhouette then painting over the corrections. This seemed a lot quicker than tweaking the model directly.

Although this was a very interesting and informative talk, I think that lectures like this will be more useful once I’m in the second and third year. This is because I would know more about what direction I would want to take my career and would have more questions to ask the guest lecturers. However, it was a really enjoyable lecture and I look forward to the next one.