From Artist to CEO | Concept Art House Origin Story and Inside Tour

hey everybody concept art house is a high-end art service provider for the gaming industry the company was started over 12 years ago by James Zhang who started off as an artist but then was able to successfully transition himself into being a business person and now the CEO of the company the company has a great reputation but best known for their concept art their illustration work and the 3d art capabilities in addition concept art house has worked on some of the industry's biggest gaming titles such as Marvel contest of Champions for tonight injustice and clash of clans so how did the company get started what were some of the tough challenges that the company faced as it was as it was developing over those 12 years what do different people in the company do well let's find out today when we talked to concept art house [Music]

jeez how's it going hey Joey what's up yeah good see you yeah thanks so much for agreeing to do our interview but we are here with James the CEO of concept art house hello um maybe we could start by just haven't you talked about you know so who are you okay I'm James and the founder and CEO of concept art house we're a high-end art concept art studio based out of San Francisco California and out of Shanghai China in at a high level what are the types of work that you do here at concept art house okay we do concept art illustration 3d modeling and marketing arts we primarily serve the games industry about 70% mobile do a lot of PC games console games put your names you guys probably heard of like world of warcraft and Marvel contest of Champions we did some

work for fortnight and so it's a really good time to be in games yeah and you've got this office here in San Francisco but you're also kind of distributed right can you talk about like number of employees and types of people from like artists to like like producers or PM's and things of that nature yeah yeah so we're 15 people here in San Francisco we have over 70 people which are two offices and sharing hi and Jen do and I'm I'm sure Heinie's so sorry the company they're about 12 years ago and and fully-loaded were mostly artists about 80% are 2d 3d James you got a lot of cool stuff here and you did you work on a lot of stuff some of these just my personal toys about many of the shelves are things we've worked on over the years and I you know I've been drawing since I was a kid like many people in industry and we actually our first projects as concept art house were Dungeons & Dragons from Wizards of the coast so I actually personally have art and like almost all of these books

that's one so yeah before that I started my career 20 years ago at LucasArts and that was a concept artists for games like Gladius and Starfighter and that's represent on this shelf down here so very yeah cover our concept are spaceships monsters all things nerve and they keep talking about so how did concept art house start like when did it start led you to founding the company and you know howdy how did you just even get it started and initially funded okay um I started the concept art house in 2006 okay it was pretty much bootstrapped had a small team of artists I were super talented of Shanghai a bunch of clients I wanted to work with me as a concept artist and I only had so much bandwidth and my clients were okay with me sending some of the world to Shanghai and at the time a lot of my clients were like EA and Sony and Lucas it was yeah I was really hard work I was drawing by day I was doing art direction at night I had some good teams and we slowly grew the team I eventually

learned to be a little more better at business and raised some some money from some angel investors that trusted me and slowly we we balloon the team start off with six people and by 2012 or 130 Wow so James the company's been around since 2006 it's been a long time and you guys have done a great job of just kind of surviving different you know economic challenges and changes but for your company could you talk about some of the key challenges like what were some of the toughest times over this long run that you've had here at concept art house got it I'd say probably two biggest challenges the biggest one is probably myself figuring out how to transition from an artist to an art director that was pretty natural well art yeah the next transition was to go from being an art director to managing people yeah and the managing investors right I did not train me for that in art school so that's really painful and then we've got 200 people I'm managing people I'm not

doing art I'm trying to learn more about business that was really tough right how do you negotiate certain things legal issues all these little things that I did have mentors help me along the way but yeah I was like stress management how do you prioritize your time those kinds of things were big challenges for me that I still struggle with to this day got it but I'd like to think I'm better now dealing with those and I did ten years ago okay second challenge of more external forces a lot of competitors yeah a lot of really good art studios out there right and also sometimes when card games were really good to us four years ago yay they all came to us it's a guard house a lot of 2d work for them eventually those games went away I went to find a new way to what else we're gonna do when the clients went away right Marcus started going down it's where to find new clients and give it the business here and there so I'd say those are two biggest challenges okay great and then you talked about that on the internal side your own personal growth and

development from concept artist to being you know quite frankly I'm very sophisticated on the business side like how were you able to do actually make that transition well it's definitely not like huh I'm gonna level with my business today yeah it was really like it's sink or swim and straw for six people you know everybody's names you know and and the better we got the more people we had the less drawing I just naturally did I think any any good art director will probably share the same story at some point your team comes before you and they're doing more things for the team I'd like to think the eye is still sharp when you draw a less and less and less and then that I'll tell you what I tell people is and when you're an artist it's really about it's really about the self everything you draw as I look at my sketchbooks look at my art no one else did that art except you right when you're a business person everything is about the market and everything is about other people right so then it's about what your clients

want what your investors want where your partner's want where your employees one that was a tough transition right cuz art was so instinctive for me I'm going to draw this yeah and then business is like what does that person need in this market how can we help each other to accompany boys so right so it's gradual and it was really about talking and meeting with people that are way smarter and more talented than me and learning from each one of them honestly yeah on the external side you had talked about how you've had to adapt to different market forces and things of that nature so maybe we could talk about that so from your perspective right now what do you see is emerging trends or things that are coming up in in terms of the the market in the future Wow big question just go restaurant for huh well we're at GBC 2019 I think one of the bigger announcements was Google stadia yeah yeah I think everything-everything in entertainment right now friends it's streaming it's instant gratification we're in the world

of Instagram yeah tik-tok yeah that is going to come in the form of gaming too right a lot of kwibi for example with meg whitman and steve Katzenberg it's no bite-size entertainment right quick bytes right many games are going towards how can you get a great entertainment experience for three minutes five minutes okay so we see that too with a lot of the games we work on yeah a lot of the role-playing games we used to play like well father's gay those are something like you know you sit down you play for hours on end right now you have to get a tiny little story in about three minutes at five minutes and monetize the audience because of that so we're seeing that as a trend okay another area is production values yeah streaming speeds are faster than ever right right so you're gonna see a lot of different platform players getting into will higher production values mobile games we starter was few hundred thousand dollars yeah now it's not unheard of to have a 40 million dollar

mobile game right so that is good to us in terms of our more assets better assets okay okay well thank you very much for your time geez [Music] hey folks I'm here with Davis the director of business development for concept art house Davis I thought we could start by talking about you know some of your biggest clients over the years concept art house has had you know extremely you know big clients and done really impressive work can you talk about that like who are some of these clients and what some of the work that you're most proud of here certainly certainly with the wool as long as concept our house has been around as a company for the last 12 years we definitely skew more mobile yeah just for the luxury of being based in San Francisco and having Apple Google and Facebook in our backyard yeah so I would say the breakdown is about 70% mobile and 30% console and PC focused projects yeah but of course project near and dear to my heart are two k WB and as well some

of our big work with Blizzard because I think our stone is still my number one game right so yeah concept aren't there's stuff that you're doing now for project that you can't talk about although I know they're really huge projects but in terms of stuff that you can't talk about other specific games that you you you guys have worked on on the path in the past that you can talk about certainly you know mark right now in terms of where we're talking in 2019 yeah Game of Thrones conquest is getting a lot of buzz yeah and that's a project that actually was a lesson for me when I was first brought on board of understanding the differences in art styles I don't have an art background myself but understood the industry pretty well yeah and usually I using a project like that where a client came to us and said we trying to figure out the look and feel of this game while also trying to blaze our own path of making a unique and still invoke the IP Game of Thrones conquest had us challenged with finding different styles of art across a you know a scope of whether it was very cartoony very realistic and somewhere in the middle the style you see now and all the

commercials and and the game itself is of course the final product and so certainly known it knowing that not only people come to us for concept thing when it's a blank piece of paper but also they already have the idea or they already have the IP and trying to make it their own is a big project you know big path that people come to us for very often [Music] everybody I'm here with me lead and project manager Shawn hey how's it going everyone can you tell us a little bit about the work you do and your role here in concept art ass yeah absolutely so I'm a 30-meter cross trainer like you said mainly working with clients and our artists to make sure that the work that they were wanting to get done gets done correctly so my main focus is to work with PMS as well as just kind of being that middleman between being able to make sure the clients happy as well as make sure the artists are doing the correct work with the most tech with the

technical specs in 3d you know you're responsible for for hiring here or like evaluation of talent and maybe you could talk about you know the kinds of people that that are hired at concept art house and what kind of skills they need to be successful here yeah so I am a little bit in charge of that one actually I've been doing a lot of reviews with some students for GDC the main focus that we're looking for and because we are an outsourced company we're working with a lot of different various clients different styles is someone who can kind of have a little bit of talent in every style something I can go from something like World of Warcraft to something more realistic like it would be soft work and like realistic characters so and as well as someone who knows deadlines and it's very good with scheduling and it's very organized great all right well thank you very much for your time Shawn yeah very nice meeting you guys [Music] Haitian yi senior production manager right yeah okay can you tell us a little bit about what you do here at concept art house

and like maybe an example of one of the projects you've worked on yes definitely as a senior production manager I'm pretty much the final gatekeeper yeah from concept or house and the client so I am the person who providing the client the file for them to review okay and also I'm tracking how the production team work like that how the workflow and how are we on schedule we are target of our estimation time almost like what project or product management sounds like what are some of the tools that you use to track some of that stuff we will work with the client on JIRA yeah or shotgun yeah a lot of how we use Basecamp got it yeah yep Jeanie can you show us an

example of a project or how you work with one of your clients biggest point is coming you know what their famous bean is contest attention yes for this project we working on a lot of their marketing art which is like loading screen runs blaster screams yeah so that usually was in there a couple of sketches for the clintons and then because this game is already having 16 3d models yep so the client will providing the models for us kind of like doing the very rough posting yeah so for example in here we start with like 30 model posting and have like some kind of background your emergent to it and then to see how kind of feel clients like and then do that we go to the color off stage color off stage is more like the 30 team helping us sitting on lighting on yeah

and then but then you can still see the 3d very 3d look especially on the facial expression is still yeah final stage you can see the facial that especially know the muscles holding down and you can see like how wire renders that are to be tears yeah that looks great to it I feel like I'm staring at the mirror another great example is sometimes the 3d model doesn't really help us to express so we can only use like a very minimal 3ds rendering and but a lot of ideas of putting them from tiaras and you can see

there's some 3d work and then some of the 2d renderer not at all to see the end there is some much better lighting and emerging together right so I mean working on commands projects really fun because it's a lot of character you actually oh yeah and what are some of the big challenges you really run into like working with clients or if I am somebody looking to you know get art from concept art house what are the things I should be thinking about or doing and preparation so that the working relationship is as smooth as possible there's a couple things about first is like for example when we see this image beautiful is yeah but a lot of times we also need to think about how the UI layout well this great image be blocking by the

UI so how we we want do we really want to be center in the image so a lot of details we need to go through the great communication with the clients yeah and also really know what clients born for and how the images to be filled right yeah great and then my just my last question for you SHINee's like you know you you've been working here for a while can you talk about like what do you think in terms of the culture of working at concept art house can you talk about what that's like I mean we have this is a great work experience for me because we have so many we can touch in facing so many different projects we're are not only focus in one style or we all of our artists great artists over here they've handling two to three different style different project at the same time right so in a way that artist is really skillful on switching their gears jump into all their styles and then for the culture and here we are really family

orientated really we see each other like friends and families and it's really great to see everybody growing here yeah we have we have newborn baby coming in so that's great to working here okay [Music] James has been a wonderful time here thank you so much for hosting me Joe you're a longtime friend you're welcome anytime our radio services who look me up okay thank you very much [Music]