AIE & Hashbang: A Unique Industry Partnership

[Music] can i invite to the stage for our final panel of the day please our friends from aie and hashbang to talk about a unique industry partnership we've got uh billy walker and i think marco williams am i right today is that right yeah there we go uh thanks guys thank you for joining us so we just kind of wanted to do an informal talk just on the the benefits of educational partners with industry and vice versa industry with educational partners so my name is billy walker i'm actually the industry relations coordinator for the academy of interactive entertainment my name is michael williams i'm the ceo of hashbang we're a development studio here in linwood washington

yeah so i'll give you kind of a little bit of background on aie what we do as an educational institution so essentially we're a very specialized educator we teach game programming game art and animation 3d animation visual special effects for film we teach game design and production we're a non-academic school so we don't do math history english science so everything is going to be geared towards games and films so the students that we take in or are looking to break into that game industry or that film industry um so essentially for us we're always looking for great partners in the industry whether it be different vfx houses or different game studios that are looking for up-and-coming talent so that's kind of what this talk is about we obviously we partnered with marco and essentially it's kind of a win-win for both right marco can get up-and-coming new talent whenever he's working on a project we get to you know place our students in industry so that

they can start working immediately after they graduate um essentially like we like to partner with different industries invite them in to be a part of our advisory committee they kind of get to see what our students are working on what kind of up-and-coming talent they have that they can kind of choose from so a lot of our students will get jobs before they even graduate from aie i know marco you're new to the advisory committee correct oh yeah yeah fairly new but you're not new to aie not known we've been kind of partnered for quite some time a few years back we started taking in interns into hashbang um and you know this is a great thing that aie provides a bunch of the tools that the developers need they learn the core fundamental skill set and then hash bang gives them opportunity to come into the studio get to work on real games um and and sometimes even get the opportunity to work on a big franchise ip yeah

yeah so we actually um we were started in australia about 25 years ago so our our list of alumni goes back for for quite a bit so we have alumni that are actually working you know for marvel any any marvel film that you've seen in the last four five six years we've had aie graduates that have been you know working on those um but then it goes to you know as big as as marvel to to the small indie studio in someone's backyard so i mean lafayette louisiana specifically um is is the campus that i work out of we don't have a ton of any developers out there but we do have partnerships with the indie developers in the area so that it's easier for our students to kind of get a jump on on their career right so like king crow studios i don't out of lafayette we work with crafty apes which is a little bit bigger but it's a vfx house a new partnership that we have is with encore vfx so these guys come in they kind of get to see some of our talent um and it helps staff them up for big projects which is which is why you know these partnerships are always very uh uh

harmonious for both parties right yeah absolutely i mean it's a benefit to hashbring for a couple of reasons one is that we get a chance to meet new talent that's coming out of the uh out of the school um we get to have a really great partnership the cost there's cost benefits to hashbang to bringing in um you know newer talent that get mentored underneath the senior talent that we have so we have to have a balance there there has to be some some senior talent inside of the studio to be able to mentor and and create opportunity but one of the things that you know i'm really proud of of our team specifically is that it's continued education education doesn't just stop when they graduate um out of aie hashbang um our our developers have kind of created a culture of continued learning and they have these lunch and learn sessions they learn how to do

clean code practice they learn proper design patterns and so really you get this good leveling up of a skill set um and and you know our team has been very good about that and that that's what these aaa you know um studios that's what they want from a company like cash bang they want experts that can jump into any code base to have good practices and they learn that starting at the core fundamentals from aie and then a studio that's willing to like level up those developers yeah that's really key and that's what we found with these partnerships um our advisory committee is comprised of of nothing but you know industry leaders industry uh experts different studios in the area and what that does for us is it tells us hey we're teaching the right things or we're teaching the wrong things um so we have these advisory committee meetings a few times a year they come in they'll view student work they'll say so what are you guys teaching right now okay well we're

teaching maya zbrush unity about 60 unreal about 40 you know and then as the meetings go on they'll say like okay well so you may want to start adjusting make it more of a 50 50 split for unity unreal probably the next meeting is going to be more towards unreal um but those patterns shift but it makes sure that our students are ready for industry once they get into into the real world right so that way we're not teaching obsolete skills um that then marco has to go back and be like well it's great that you know unity we don't use unity at all at all we use unreal you know so now i have to teach you even more once you graduate so it kind of keeps our um on our finger on the pulse of the industry by having that advisory committee that can kind of tell us like hey you're on the right track hey you're on the wrong track um which is why we're excited to have you on the on the on the advisory panel so yeah i mean i think you know we've had some really good conversations about curriculum in inside of you know aie or just you know game dev schools in general even and you know uh having the the right level of detail in

some of these curriculums making sure that they're prepared when they come out they have the exact skill set that they need and that's why you know these type of partnerships are so valuable is because you know we get to collaborate on that yeah 100 um as far as like other educational institutions um i can really just speak for ai i know like we've tried to enhance our partnership range especially post covid there's so many remote opportunities for our graduates now that you know hashbring's in our backyard which is fantastic but hey we could work with an indie studio out of boston right just because now they're doing a lot of remote work so we want to start incorporating studios that are outside of our outside of our kind of our backyard out of lafayette louisiana or seattle washington and inviting other studios in to kind of collaborate on our advisory committee so that's why we love these partnerships with with education and industry right it's just so it's so beneficial between

both parties it gives the students an opportunity to meet with seasoned professionals in the industry it's one thing to have myself or one of the teachers say hey this is what it's like right because we've done it uh versus someone who's in industry we can say the exact same thing but they were like oh marco said we should do this and it's like yeah well billy's been saying you should do that for like six months but sure yeah as long as marco says that it's gospel that's great but that's what we want right we want we want industry professionals really to kind of guide our students um but yeah i mean so we're going to keep this pretty informal it's a pretty simple talk like we want to open it up for questions just about kind of what the partnership looks like if there's anything that we didn't talk about or anything that we missed was there anything that you had to add yeah i i think there's just one thing is that um it is fairly common for smaller studios to not want to take risks on some junior talent and and i will say from being a smaller studio you know we grew from a

relationship of inducting you know junior talent into our studio and the lessons that we've learned i i draw back to something i previously said which is to pair your your junior talent with some senior talent and get a good mixture in there keep that continued learning going and and like it it actually pays off to bring these you know um junior devs in i will say some of our junior devs do our best work at hash bank and i'm super proud of those teams yeah that's great feedback for us too we love to hear that um we love to hear that the students that we're training are actually going out into the industry and and they're being successful and um you know they're not they're not a burden right definitely not yeah that's fantastic um yeah absolutely

yeah no good question so it depends on the curriculum that they enroll in so we offer four different curriculums um but really it's it's one for each two years so if they go into game art animation they're in game art animation for two years um my game art and animation students aren't really going to specialize in any of the programming curriculum like so they're not going to learn c plus plus they're not going to learn c sharp they're going to stick to the fundamentals as far as the software that we teach maya zbrush they're going to do some unity some unreal um uh the photoshop adobe photoshop suite um i think some marmoset things of that nature right um a little bit different for our vfx for film class they're going to do a lot of the same art skills they're going to add some editing software in there as well and those are always kind of changing just depending on what industry is asking us for i think right now we're doing renderman i believe that's what we're doing right now but yeah um

so they're really specializing in that course so they're we we call them generalists in the aspect that like when they leave we want them to have a specialty whether that be environmental art whether that be concept art whether that be 3d animation rigging whatever that may look like but we teach them everything right in that game art animation course so that they can really find themselves and figure out like i really hate rigging i'd rather do um environmental art for the rest of my life fantastic ironically tech artists actually drive from this track so you know you you get a lot of um artists that that kind of like modeling they kind of like you know writing shaders they kind of like a little bit of you know being the jack of all trades sort of thing and and so and that kind of spawns the tech artists role where they they they know how a little bit of everything so they're really good

at integrating all of these technologies together in engine yep yeah no good point does that answer your question it absolutely does yeah yeah thank you so much my second question was actually about how the partnership kind of came came about in what direction did it did it drive marco did did you were you aware of the work of aie and so you had a start sparked a dialogue or did you guys kind of do you reach out to studios as part of your you know you have a kind of outreach activity where you go to studio how does it flow yeah um that's an interesting question because you know we we've been partnered for so long it's like the origin story is a little fuzzy but um i i i remember having conversations with um a dear friend of mine lisa weeks who's very big in the community here in seattle um and she hooked um and introduced me to cami smith which was um uh one of your guys's primary users yeah yeah um like talent talent is it talent

acquisition industry relationship industry relationship and so we we were just kind of talking here and there and then we created an intern program um at hashbang and you know patch fans had one of these really cool roller coaster rides where we ramp up a bunch of people and then we have to kind of go down and now we're you know we've been on a huge uptick for quite some time but you know when we want to bring people in i would talk to cami and say hey who who do you have is really good that i can bring into the studio either on an internship or at a junior level and she you know these these guys they work with the students throughout the entire time that they're there and so they really know who's a good fit like they they know who's excelled throughout the program and whatnot and so we really already get kind of the um the cream of the crop out of out of us out of aie

yeah yeah great thank you that's interesting yeah cool good questions anything else any other questions [Music] uh yes we do i don't know it's i have an idea of what those cities are but nothing has been finalized yet um where where are you guys at are where you where are you looking yep toronto okay um canada has not come up um not to say that it won't in the future but i know what's the remote situation look like i know a lot of the companies that i've talked to in like ontario in those areas they're like they can work remote but they have to live in ontario right is it kind of the same scenario yeah and and i do have graduates that are open to that they're like we don't mind moving um pre pre-covid that was kind of

the standard you know especially in lafayette when we would recruit students into the school we're like hey you need to understand the industry is not necessarily in your backyard so you need to look at atlanta austin california seattle those areas that the industry is really booming in and so most of our graduates already have the mindset that like hey i'm gonna move right um so it just depends on the on the talent that they're looking for but more than likely i can connect them with somebody that's willing to relocate yeah i'll give you my card after yeah what else guys anything else um what else do you do to help um uh students find jobs obviously the relationships like you have with the hashbanger are essential but do you also kind of help people with kind of portfolio reviews are there other activities that you do there yeah yeah 100 so my main focus is is relationship building in the industry obviously we have a very introverted student base um and so you know we want to play to their

strengths and their strengths are programming their strengths our art their strengths may not be networking right so um i'll talk to you all day so that's kind of my strength i'll make those connections for the students but past that um you know i'm not an artist i'm not a programmer but i can help with resume building skills i can help with interview skills i can help with you know how to set up your linkedin to be more noticeable so we kind of work on a lot of the soft skills outside of programming art development etc uh to make the student a little bit more well-rounded before they leave right um that's that's kind of the the aie education that they're receiving yeah right great yeah well one of the things that hashbring does in like our our collaboration and when we actually meet up and we talk about you know what does hashbang look for in a a junior developer how do we how do we qualify um a person and how do we you know essentially pick and choose because

you have a pretty large pool of of graduates that are coming out and so you know one of i you know at least from hashbang's side our responsibility in this role is to say hey here is what we're looking for from a portfolio if we're going to look at a portfolio it needs to have xyz things and then aie reacts to that by educating the students about how to make a a proper portfolio and and get it in front of a studio because if you don't have a portfolio that looks good that has your very best work in it you know it's very possible it's going to get overlooked yeah yeah yeah no 100 percent and and you know our model could be we train them and then we just send them out into the world and say good luck and and send us a postcard wherever you land but we want to be more involved in that process with them you know we really want to guide them through the industry as best we can so that's why having great partnerships with with with studios that are local is is so

beneficial um not only for marco but for us a hundred percent you know yeah do do former students go on to become industry relationships with you guys and then go recruit students from youth 100 it's kind of a fear yeah it's this great like you know because we do have such great relationships with our students as far as you know helping them find jobs and making sure that they're successful in the industry it kind of pays back tenfold right so if if if i've got a student from lafayette that graduated and they move on to a studio and then they move on to a bigger studio and they're like hey um so we're looking for uh four junior level unity programmers who you got you know so it makes my job easier but it's that is that those long-term gains right um yeah so our job easier too yes here too yeah um so yeah a hundred percent that's it it always gets paid back to us tenfold great yeah good well i think we're at the end of the time and the time here i don't know if there's any more what questions from the few of us we have what we will do is we'll be sending around the links to the recordings to

everyone so there'll be other people watching too and if folks see this uh the recording tomorrow whatever i want to get in touch they can look you up on me to match i guess thank you very much for your time thank you