Art Direction: Escaping Your Comfort Zone

[Music] first of all thanks love come along to my talk thanks once again to Lee patty for the opportunity to come here and speak at GDC talk about some stuff that I've learned I don't forget to fill out the questionnaire at the end and remember remember to silence your phones okay so I'm just over two years ago I got into photography and that journey has been something that it's been like one of the biggest learning experiences for me one that helped me kind of grow as an artist when it helped me get out of my comfort zone and in that process I learned about art by art direction the technical side and also things like marketing and I really became curious how far I could push that and that's kind of what I'm gonna talk about today when I think back to when I was a kid I was 10 years old and I really want to be a game designer my favorite game was commandos behind enemy lines and I wanted to work for idols I would have killed someone for a job there I wanted

to live on the moon and I think I'd like at least have a futuristic sports car which is pre ambitious but by a team like that that dream was just gone and dead and I really didn't know what I wanted to do so I had this kind of high school report that basically said I was struggling like struggling it in class and like I was a super quiet and so I took a year after high school because I really didn't know I wanted to do I felt kind of lost and it turned to video games as a way to escape and so I played like so much World of Warcraft and it really helped build my confidence in a weird way I taught me about communication teamwork and leadership and I would read I would laid my words I would lead raids of like 40 people and sitting in my bedroom when in reality I couldn't even talk to someone face to face so slowly over that year that I took care of it helped me build my confidence and since then and even now these are the three things that have helped me get out of my comfort zone

the first is learning something new the second is putting myself out there and the third point is learning myself with talent and these are the things that help me land my job at Ubisoft and when I joined as a youngest director age 25 and why focus on to my day job is visual identity so my job is to kind of interpret what game is and translate that into visuals so that they're unique memorable identifiable so essentially branding the games creating the logos motion graphics anything that relates to the style and so I knew that at the time like throughout my career in the kind of year by year I've just slowly been trying to push myself I'm a comfort zone this is my third GDC talk and to do that I knew I had to like put myself in the deep end and when we learn something new it's a it's incredibly like daunting we don't know we don't know anything when we start and it's a sorry I'm psyche I

artistically crave Leawood try and think of things that can help push this forward so for me that one thing that I'll talk about today is my photography so believe it or not these are actually the first photographs I ever shared online I was kind of funny because it's the thing I love about photography we take pictures of stuff we care about it I just happen to love dogs I want to start taking pictures on my iPhone and when I start to travel I moved from Scotland then to England and then to Canada I would start to travel along and I never really left my hometown so I started to just take pictures on my iPhone never really showed them and I kept a private Instagram where I think I had like ten people I think one of them's here so a very small audience and that's because I just felt this fear these anxieties of like well you know I they're not like great photos they're not anything special and but I was like entering my life and enjoying it and so everywhere I go I like the biggest learning experience was understanding how the architecture just tired of the

cities in general had like different moods and different vibes so I go to places like LA for III do press stuff and yeah just a huge important learning experience and as I got more and more into learning stuff all of my shots on my iPhone I would just take my iPhone everywhere and every day I would just start taking pictures and the more and more I learned the more and or I I wanted to get better at it so start to think about composition symmetry just trying to find like nice visual shapes in architecture or things I had seen and I just got kind of like really addicted to it and but at some point I hit like a plateau it's on an iPhone and I can only ever take a picture of what's in front of me and I wanted to kind of push that further so I ended up leveling up and so after I finished up a game at work I I saved up for a little vacation to Tokyo and I bought myself a DSLR because I find

myself getting more serious about why I wanted to learn and maybe the artistic stuff that I could learn along the way that's where I was like you know how far can I really push this and in the end like I learned so much about just art direction in general one of the first learnings I thought was when I think back to when I was a kid I just I would freeze up when people were behind me when I was drawing when as a university I would just like minimize all of my windows because I was ashamed of the art that was creating and it was really photography that pulled me out of that so the question I would ask is like you know we spent so much time in our arts whether it's a game or maybe she music any of this stuff and how much time did we actually spend making sure that people see it because to me at the end of the day is about like praying art that connects with people and you know we get to share our vision and the stuff we care about and it wasn't really until I captured this one image that I my mentality changed because every picture that I'd taken before was merely just like documenting places I'd seen stuff

at eight dogs that I saw and I put this on my personal facebook tongue and I had like I don't have any friends 100 friends five of them were like hey this is that's a pretty cool shot you should take more pictures and it really helped me like break out of that comfort zone and so from there it was like it's a real turning point so this is taxi driver in Shinjuku in Tokyo just happened to take the picture the compositions there the guy's face just happens to be lit correctly and I was like you know what I'm gonna go out every day after that every night and try and find these moments and so each day I had left of my vacation I just went out and I took and pictures and I would post them on my facebook and at some point I started to think like okay maybe I can branch out a little bit it would bit further out of my comfort zone all a while like realizing that I was taking pictures of stuff like signage typography the stuff that I was used to dealing with on a day to day basis and then this image do that in particular and I sent off to

Smithsonian's folk competition and it became a finalist 2016 and so two years on when I look back at this image all I can see are the flaws so it's that idea of like progress you know go for might just taking regular pictures to suddenly like photography is like really something that's driving me the funny thing is I shot this picture in Auto because I didn't know how to use my camera even though it was like a pretty good DSLR and I shot the image in JPEG instead of raw because I really didn't know my camera I literally got it the week before the man's eye focus was blaring in the image the composition slightly off and it was actually my first EDC talk was March so I'm like 2016 and I just came back it did my first talk and I felt kind of like I don't know like a little bit of a buzz and so I was like you know I'm gonna put my work out there cuz I spoke to like people randomly at this point no one had seen my stuff and so I sent it off to kataku just because people encouraged me to do that and one of the biggest learnings I think about in my day job

actually why focus on is really marketing are or like something that's going to summarize what game is so people remember it and it was identifiable one of the key points I would give off to someone would be to create press release as artists developers what not we already have this body of work that we're just kind of sitting on and I go into that mentality of just like why not just put it out there so gather like five or ten images of the stuff you have write a little bio about yourself and a little description about the work what the work is and include your links best case scenario someone is going to share that and it's gonna go further than your own network worst case scenario nobody replies but you already have that work so you like just send off the email and see where it goes and then it went online and over that period of the year went up on all these websites which is crazy because it was just a vacation picture that I took that kind of inspired me to keep taking more and more and so this point you know I

did my vacation whatever went back to my day job and I wanted to get better at photography so I started taking photos every day slowly and surely learning more about how to operate the camera learning more about the technical side you know if it was if I was at work at go I'm a lunch break and just go with other people who were photographers they would teach me all of the different ins and outs of how the camera functioned on my weekends I would go at night and just practice practice practice even when it comes to events like this I'll message people and say hey does anyone want to go take pictures so I set myself like little mini tasks to make it manageable you know like maybe it was like how to capture movement I had to freeze time I had to get closer to subjects because as someone is kind of awkward I just never did it and to do that I knew I needed to kind of level up my gear so I reached out to Cannon and they were able to loan me a bunch of different stuff so I thought about the areas I was lacking and just so that I could become more comfortable with those kind of things and I keep training my eye like simple

shapes symmetry that kind of thing and at some point I realized I had all of this knowledge that I already had within my comfort zone which was directing style guides being able to do different styles for different games or products and I wanted to plan it to my photography so I look back at the things I was inspired by whether it was Acura ghost in the shell' Blade Runner and to the void and at the time had never really seen photography pushed to that kind of level because it was the point where I saw my photography less like documenting stuff and more like art so leaning on my skills in graphic design style guides I fought I like the use of color composition content in a way to make it consistent to be distinctive and so that people would remember it and so it had like more and more pictures where I was talking about silhouettes composition the thing about photography is talking about patience like waiting for the right shot randomly these two people happen to go by and they're like 50-50 split right there in the middle the guy and the girl the umbrellas and I was like there was this kind of stuff they're

just driving me other times I get a bit more creative because I was learning about the technical side and I would get flashes with gels and I would just place them in the streets and kind of wait at the end and take the shot almost like sang up my own little fashion shoot on the street which I never really I don't think people do that so a lot of times I just capture moments thinking about my composition nice clean lines and whatnot and so these are just images and images so then at some point I started just tagging different musicians or directors songs I was inspired by and through that you know I was able to kind of I don't know share my work and have people who liked the stuff I was in to also get behind it things like you know if you think about art direction we think about choosing the right silhouette even if it was doing logos or was doing concept art I was able to kind of look for all my thumbnails and figure out like what was it about the image that would be you know would work and I posted the image on the right and I actually took about

two fives in different images on the first half to get to this dis one image and I cropped type the stuff that was maybe not in the same fantasy of like cyberpunk or these kind of saturated visuals and I darkened down a silhouette because I studied a lot of Raja Deen not her judean judean sci-fi Blade Runner stuff and I was able to kind of turn her camera around and readjust myself reposition myself whilst learning all of these new skills and then at some point like I started to kind of just play with color play with mood like realizing that I was capturing some moments that were kind of isolated and whatnot I'd bring in the audio to link the people and I would also just think about what it was I want to communicate using color to do that and this is all the stuff that I was doing in my day job so again notice I was randomly in Tokyo and I saw this place just outside of Tokyo which was it just looked like Midgard from Final Fantasy 7 and I posted on Twitter and then a bunch of Final Fantasy fans and stuff lead to it and so all the while

remembering that I never really put my stuff out there and suddenly I have like this confidence slowly by slowly to kind of level it up and this was one of the more recent pictures I Poe and actually at a time I I looked at classic Blade Runner I was trying to deconstruct what he did with the color palette and it was one show in particular that I kind of wanted to match the feel of and so going from like I want to learn new skill to hears putting my stuff out there bringing me out being able to share my work one of the things I realized that held me back was um all of the stuff I wanted to learn and being able to get to that stage I knew that the only way to do it was to surround myself with people who knew best and so again I just want to far I could take that and I started reaching out to different people because really why I wanted to learn about was portraiture when you do street

photography is quite like a you know it's like just me by myself often at night or whatnot it's going around by myself and the thing I always struggled with was a confidence like face-to-face communication especially the anxiety that would feel of just meeting somebody new for the first time and so I sent off all these different emails ahead of the next trip's had planned whether it was LA or San Francisco or Vegas Tokyo and I had a lot of people reply and so yeah I was able to learn from these people because they'd been in situations where they were already used to like posing and I never had to worry that I could see how it makeup artists work I could see how I know they held themselves for different shoots all whilst knowing that I'd never really done that like these are actually I never shot pictures of people at all before maybe my my nephew his birthday but suddenly I you know I just had this confidence and I accepted the nervousness of like you know what I have nothing to lose so I would just

reach out to different people on the bottom right you see my message to go like love your work if you're ever in Montreal let me know here's my link nothing more than that put it out there and I think it was that mentality of like you know today tomorrow nothing in my life is gonna change so I might as well take that step almost like tennis and just serve it and so what was cool is I got to meet these people and they were really inspiring to me because these are people all actually had some kind of link to video games this is a DJ called danger he's actually inspired by one of the things the black mage and Final Fantasies so he has a mask French DJ and he actually did the soundtrack for fury which is a little indie game great the other thing is he actually is a graphic designer so he designs all of his stage graphics he designs his logo all his branding handles it all himself so I was like me these people although had this camera it became this kind of device or way that I was able to just meet people and hear about their stories at some point one of the it's like one

of the biggest J pop bands reached out I know it's they followed me so then I just sent a message and at some point they were like hey you're in LA why don't we you take my picture I was like cool and this is actually the first shot of people I ever did and it was nothing special but it's uh I don't know it was that idea that I randomly was in Japan like in LA sorry and people I never met had to take this picture another person I ended up like reaching out to was Ryu hey Tamara and I knew his work from film he made the movie versus Midnight Meat Train things like that one of the first Japanese films I ever seen well I didn't know is he actually directed all the cutscenes in Mal Gear Solid so from there like I have this skill I realize I got to know him and he liked mentored me I think he just kind of helped me out a lot and it was actually cuz of him I got to take pictures of someone else I'll show later there's also a she Maharaj she was a climber and so I think it's more point I guys like the fact that I'm

here I'm at my phone and I was like there must be some opportunities I can seek and hunt down just so I can learn more and learn faster learn efficiently on the right is actually jessica van who's an actress she was actually Hannah in battlefield 4 so it was it was a surreal thing of like you know I'm making a little stuff that Kara by channeling video games and whatnot and meeting people along the way at some point I get the comic artists of this like spider-gwen and you can see the similarities anyway but at some point I knew I was in LA so I reached out to one of the biggest spider-man spider-gwen cosplayers and it happened to be Handel who has a huge following online she I used to work it Square Enix I think and so when I was meeting people I had this kind of these anxieties I get really anxious and when I meet somebody and I didn't know what I would be able to talk about how I'd be able to direct them I would be able to meet the shot that I had in my head and finding locations being prepared for it

two more points yeah so as I continued like just taking pictures of different people it was something that basically I picked up photography plateaued then I was like I need to learn something more assort are learning the technical side start to learn about lighting consistency and whatnot and it was this that kind of led me to a fashion shoot randomly and so I was in Japan at the time just on vacation actually and I was directing five models in the middle of Tokyo and I had seven days to turn around so someone it was kind of works in triple-a I used to do indie stuff in the past but I wasn't used to that quick turnaround so entirely like out of my comfort zone each model was from like a different place and yeah I had like a brief and had to match it and it was a weird thing as a game artist because I spent so much time just you know at my computer or whatnot I see don't go outside that much and so

this was helping me to kind of just get out there put my stuff out there and it was a weird thing actually saying my stuff physically which signs kind of weird to some people hopes so yeah I guess craziest thing was like nigo who's uh he works for Uniqlo and did Bape and stuff like that so when i think about you know trying to build this talk and originally they said why don't you two talk about your journey photography I was I just rying to think of the stuff that has really honestly helped me in my journey to trying to get to where I wanted to go so the points I made were first one like learn something new I think one of the the most important things is to keep learning different skills that can help impact the stuff that you do so that you can grow as an artist number two put yourself out there I think as artists we think about the things that we're scared off we're scared if if people won't like stuff if they won't look at it your honesty just wasting

your time if you won't make money all of this stuff I learned to just forget about all of that put myself out there in a way that I was comfortable with which actually meant not actually speaking to people but just reaching out and I knew that the last point is the only way to progress was to actually be around people who were doing that stuff well so I have like one last example this to me was like a surreal moment because at this point I've been putting my stuff out there and suddenly I lift up my viewfinder and it's hideo kojima on the other side and I was just like mentally I was like shaking my cameras and stuff because I'm just like I'm not gonna get a good shot of this like it's just not gonna happen but then I realized that everything you know I'd practiced enough and I was comfortable enough with the camera any anxieties I had it basically took like 2,000 pictures of just like I better get something yet and I knew I wanted to shoot so the panic was like lesser than what I thought it was and at some point I'm stood in front of him is just him in

his office and I'm just like I have no idea what I'm doing like my background is mostly aesthetic pictures and I was just like snapping away so after a few days of like hanging out I was hanging out and I was like I need to show him something so don't want to make him wait too long because I don't know you can tell I see the anxiety because I sent a picture of my from my phone instead of the high-res picture because I was like I'd rather he don't see what the colors look like and all this stuff and I sent him a DM on Twitter and I sent it to Hideo Kojima's was like sneak peek and he's like master of the sneaks peeks and stuff so I was like this is pretty the most stupid thing I've ever done and had to make it worse I said a little blue tick and I'm like he's like left me on red and it only been like six minutes but it was like the most stressful six minutes of my life and it was funny because as an art director you know being working like five years nothing you're always gonna feel these anxieties and at some point they feel less worse once you kind of get out of the comfort zone and he sent me the little thumbs up emoji and I was like

cuz I was like I was I was like he's not gonna reply he's not gonna happen Freddie's gonna pray for God and what was funny is like you know I was inspired by the stuff growing up I'm sure a lot of us played Metal Gear Solid some of us might know snatcher as a cyber punks games if I think is the first game he ever worked on and this was the image and I took a bunch of other images and so yeah the point I was making is just it's a weird one where I learned a skill but I was able to lean on the stuff that I was comfortable with whilst also just being completely out of my element and I have one video which I felt summarized like my feeling it's not gonna play the audio great that into the board so then you feel you capable of being and go little bit out of your depth and when you don't feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom you're just about in the right place to do something exciting it's sort of carved yeah it's basically

like if you feel safe in the area you're working in you need to go a little bit I have your comfort zone a little bit are your depth because I score you're gonna make the most interesting stuff so sometimes as artists we need to go over comfort zone pick up a new skill try a different style do a lot of work to kind of slowly chip away at that going to stage speak at GDC thinks that helped us move forward either a day a month a year but ultimately things that pushes our comfort zone that's all thank you [Music] and I don't know how I'm doing for time I can take questions five minutes feel free to go up to the mic tell me where you're from what you do okay hi there my name is Brantley McCord I'm an

instructor over in Indiana Purdue University the co-instructing well I'm a grad student and so where we're at we mostly try to develop tech artists and we're kind of in an awkward position because we're mainly an engineering school so not the best artists but also not the best programmers yet and we're working on that but a lot of my students seem to have a reluctance to make a portfolio because they feel like they need to get their art good enough for the portfolio to show it first yeah do you think that holds them back or do you think there is a threshold that they should get their artwork to first before they start showing it that's a good question I guess the question is like yeah what point do you feel comfortable with your portfolio enough to share it and maybe the process it took to make it for me I think is after after University and again after I realized I wanted to move up I dedicated a lot of my time to working on my portfolio and I think when you're starting out one of the most important things is being able to to

realize what the quality bar is me personally I would go on LinkedIn I would find all of the the artists are in the area I wanted to work in and I would actually just reach out to them and I would say hey my name's Liam I'm just starting out would I be able to ask you some questions I'll just leave it I always end of a question an email keep it brief they were to apply and it gave me all of this feedback so I think the most important thing is really knowing where your work is in relation to where it needs to be so that you can really clearly identify the parts that you need to grow that's what helped me personally thank you so much thank you good for time okay thank you so much a a fingers a room after but Cheers appreciate it you