What They Don't Teach You in Art School: Lessons for First Time Leads

[Music] my name is erica pinto and i'm the lead narrative animator at santa monica studio just a heads up this is going to be an interactive session so for those of you watching online i recommend you get a partner or group together to get the most out of this session if you're really not feeling very social right now you can feel free to write down your responses during our audiences activities but i do hope that you guys will also participate for warm there are some light god of war spoilers during this talk as i mentioned i am a lead artist god of war was actually my first project leading a team of animators so how did i get there well i got my start in the game industry fresh out of school at the unit the ucla animation workshop go ruins and i got an internship at electronic arts los angeles on the medal of honor franchise bobby coddington who is now animation director at insomniac was my mentor at the time

and he taught me a lot about how to become a good game animator such as how to make a good run cycle how to work with start and end poses and get them all to match up all that fun stuff but bobby was also my first example of what it means to be a good lead about staying positive under stressful conditions about being very passionate about your art but also being passionate about helping others succeed with each successive project i learned valuable lessons from all of my leads what to do sometimes what not to do so when my last lead left to pursue a personal project my managers came up to me and asked if i wanted to jump in and take the reins i wasn't quite sure i was ready to be a lead but i did want to help people and i wanted to help our production run smoothly so i said yes i quickly learned that there's a big difference between watching what other leads do and actually doing the job yourself a lot like learning to be a good artist it takes a lot of practice to be a good lead so what are going to talk about in this

session well there are dozens of books there's video series there's workshops there's entire organizations dedicated to becoming better leaders and i have about 45 minutes give or take to cram all of that information into your head so everybody get your pens and your pencils and your laptops out are you guys ready i'm just kidding but what i am hoping is that by talking about my leadership experience on god of war you all can get a sense of some of those leadership muscles that you can start building and flexing in addition to your artist muscles which are probably already pretty these will be concepts that you can and should dive deeper into to prepare yourself for a leadership role if you're interested let's kick it off with a little bit of an icebreaker what does a lead artist do so i'm going to ask you guys to just shout out stuff oh man i'm sorry i have all sorts of crappy stuff in there i'm going to delete all that that was

from my practice run feel free to redo all that stuff if you want to but uh go ahead and talk and i will try to put it in anybody have a suggestion cry i will uh put that here what else go ahead and speak up not all at once inspire that's a good one i heard someone else document yes that's very good document delegation that's good as well establish an art style uh typos all right have a vision that's good nurture nice

communicate very important i'll put that there be a good listener that's good critique remove obstacles that's good challenge be candid nice yes shield your team from stress from above enable excellency that's a good one all right any last minute ones problem solving that's good where can i put that maybe over here show empathy

coordinate with game design promote alignment that's a good one let's see where i can put that all right i'm going to cut it off this is a pretty good list we've got going here let me go back to my presenter view all right so for myself i tend to break down a lead artist's work into five main concepts here communication which someone mentioned organization inspiration accountability and creativity i'm going to break down these concepts a bit further throughout this presentation starting with communication so for those of you who haven't played god of war there is a giant snake in our game and you have to learn to talk to it and kratos comes up with a very interesting method of communicating with this snake so i thought that was a good example

of figuring out how to get your department running smoothly collaborating with your team and communicating your needs to other departments the first thing i learned as an artist was how to get out of the groove as an artist it's very easy to shut yourself in the studio put your headphones on keep your head down and focus on a task this is actually encouraged for artists because often they need to focus for hours at a time to get really in the groove and get things done but as a lead you have to be aware of what your team is doing around you so it's time to get those headphones off and figure out if there's any fires happening this may come at the expense of your own focus but it does benefit the needs of others and helps you maintain a big picture of what's going on you can better guide your team to do their work well such as demonstrating a combat move for your animators the next thing i learned is that leads often need to get away from their desk and visit people there are lots of benefits of being in a studio versus

working remotely communication goes more smoothly when you can see people's facial expressions when you can use gestures to demonstrate what you want you can have one-on-one conversations going back and forth with each other and sometimes it's easier to demonstrate at someone's desk than trying to write up a detailed email with screenshots and all that stuff so just get away from your desk now at santa monica studio this can be kind of difficult because half of our team is upstairs and half of our team is way downstairs so often people don't want to make the track because it's just so far why can't we just use instant messenger right but it really is worth it to make the trick you get more communication going and you get the little bits of exercise and who doesn't need more steps on their fitbit right now if you need to talk to a lot of people you could run up and down the stairs going individually to everybody's desk and hope that they're available and around or you could just schedule a meeting with everybody and get them all together the benefits of this are that everybody gets to prep for the subject that you're

going to discuss and be in that mindset to discuss it plus everybody hears the same thing at the same time so there's less room for misinterpretation on god of war we tried to group our meetings to certain days of the week such as tuesdays and thursdays that way on the other days of the week people could stay in the groove and keep the work done now we have a bunch of people gathered here so i'm going to go ahead and start an audience activity i'm going to throw a couple instructions up on the board so go ahead and wait until i'm done talking about all the bullet points until we start talking it's a pretty easy one just interview your neighbor so turn to someone next to you and ask them their name asked them why they came to this panel and asked them to talk about someone in their life who was a good leader take good fentanyl take good mental or physical notes so you are really listening and remembering their responses and feel free to exchange business cards or contact info if you so choose that's part of communication as well if you're going solo this time around feel free to write some notes to

yourself about point number three all right let's get started so what have we learned about communication it doesn't have to be scary it's as simple as just turning to someone next to you and saying hi and if you mess up or stumble a little bit that's fine messing up is still better than saying nothing i mean we're not mind readers and we won't know what you have to say unless you actually say it so don't bottle it up inside you just keep talking to each other one of the worst things that could happen to a team is that communication breaks down and people just kind of go into their own corners and work on things without communicating to each other so keep talking the next concept i'd like to talk about is organization this is one of the characters in our game he's a shopkeeper and he loves to keep all his tools nice and clean and his workshop nice and tidy and as a lead a little bit of ocd can go a long way as well to getting your team to run like a well-oiled machine a big part of organization is time management and a big part of time management is getting good estimates now every artist is asked how long they need to get their art done that wasn't a new concept for me but the

shell shock was figuring out how to gauge the speed of all my other team members so you know you would go to each of their team members and be like well how much time do you need for this task but the problem is you don't want to pressure them to give you better numbers to try to get them to do their work done faster what you're trying to do is get an accurate sense of how long the time is going to take them because that's going to help you plan out a proper schedule and figure out how to mitigate crunch if you have if you can avoid it if possible make sure to plan for unknowns and setbacks because you know stuff's going to go wrong or stuff's going to need to get changed you're going to have to start over for some things i've heard about 20 buffer can be a good rough estimate just to tack onto every task and remember that little stuff takes time too a very small task that might be a half hour here five minutes there half a day here all that stuff can add up over a long production such as god of war which took several years so if you're not keeping track of that little stuff and planning for it in your

unknowns and your buffers then that can come up to bite you later be honest with yourself and with your producers if you see that the scope of your work is getting big and too big for your team start having those hard talks about cutting things or increasing your head count definitely don't fudge the numbers because you're really only setting up your team for crunch or for outright failure on god of war we did a pretty good job of keeping track of our 100 plus cinematics and we kept track of all the pros uh progress in shotgun we broke down each of the production phases here and we were able to tag when things were being worked on we didn't do such a good job of was estimating how much time each of those tasks was going to take or how much time it actually took when it was finished yeah where we really failed was in keeping track of all those little things we had a lot of small animations which we called points of interest or pois which were not big full

cinematics it might have been just a small thing like freya constructing a magical bridge right here but add everything up together and it became way bigger and it just went way out of scope and we ended up having to cut all of these you can see we just didn't do them and that was pretty sad so we really are want to collect data with those estimates there's different kinds of tracking software you can use we use shotgun you can use jira you can use handsoft whatever option works best for your team but the trick is just getting everybody to pitch in and give their estimates and give their actual time spent because real data is going to lead to better estimates down the line and that's going to help you with your scope planning this can usually be like a producer's work but as a lead you can set a good example and send reminders to your team put in your own estimates just make sure everybody is doing it and it doesn't have to be you know every five minutes or down to the minute it can be

kind of rough like in hours but it really does help as i mentioned we weren't great on god of war about collecting that data so after the project was over we went into perforce and we started looking at our perforce history just seeing when the dates were when a file was checked in seeing the notes of what people did when they did a certain scene and we kind of took a sample set and tried to take our best educated guess based on the revision history notes for how long it might have taken to do this it wasn't super accurate but it was still a better baseline than doing nothing and now we have some rough estimates for planning out our next project beware of burnout you know it's one thing when you're only responsible for yourself and your own personal well-being and your health but it's another thing when you have a team relying on you to establish a reasonable schedule and scope so really keep an eye on the health and morale of your team we had a pair of talented animators who kept staying up till one in the morning in the office despite me telling them to go home well

whose fault was it were they just perfectionists staying late noodling on everything with all their passion or was it maybe that because they were so fast i piled on too many tasks on them maybe if i'd had a better sense of the scope we could have talked about cutting down their work a bit or maybe hiring more people so that they could go home at a reasonable hour the next thing in order the organization that helped me was just keeping tidy and this was something i never thought about when i was in film school learning how to use spreadsheets but when you're a lead learning some office software can really help you with asset lists estimates order forms all that fun stuff so take some time to learn something like excel or google sheets or whatever is going to work best for you a bonus is as an artist you can make them look pretty that's fun documentation super important take time to write down your team's best practices your workflows your tutorials etc

this will one make it easier for new hires to hit the ground running and also serve as a handy reference during crunch when we were in the midst of production the animators had something they called the buttery smooth checklist because we didn't have any cuts in god of war we had to make sure that every animations traveled smoothly from gameplay into a cinematic and back out and everything on this checklist i mean you don't have to read it but it actually helped the animators before they exported anything to make sure that when they exported it and put it in the game engine there was the least amount of pops and troubleshooting we had to do this was very crucial to the success of our no-cut camera all right let's try a little organizational audience activity i'm going to ask you guys to do a little flow chart a quick and dirty three-step workflow of your position where does your work come from if there are any students your work might come from a teacher or something like that what work do you do and who do you send your work to for example as an animator i get my work

from the writers they give me the scripts i talk with the level designers to figure out where my cinematic is going to take place i work with my director of photography to figure out the staging of the scene and then we shoot it and then the animator takes it and assembles it all together and animates it and makes it look awesome we then export that and send that to our implementation team we send that to our lighting team effects and audio i mean this is a pretty generalized workflow but you guys get the idea so go ahead and make your own flowchart and then share it with your new best friend and colleague sitting next to you some final takeaways about organization really everything that you're doing is helping you get the big picture by understanding your flow your place within the production process and also learning just how much time each of those steps take so you can run smoothly on the cinematic team we've charted out like i mentioned that was a general workflow and this is really our our full pipeline here and it's really it looks scary but what

it's doing is it's helping us identify our handoffs between all the different departments it's identifying any potential pain points and figuring out areas where we can work simultaneously across disciplines to save time such as right here so that's being really that's that's really beneficial for us i'd like to take a quick moment just to talk about outsourcing since this is becoming more and more common in aaa game studios and it was definitely a skill that i had to learn on the fly as a first time lead first up get to know your vendors every studio is different some like to take your work and really run with it and get creative others prefer very specific direction from you so they can get their work done to your specific advice some are good at working at a variety of tasks and others are more specialized little boutiques that are really good at doing one thing in particular some like to present their own schedules to you and some prefer to work with you to establish timelines so just get to know your vendors learn how to give very specific and

detailed feedback because it can be harder to communicate across time zones and across different languages so really use images videos skype calls if possible here's an example of one of our outsourcing notes where we listed a very specific time frame and a note and drew on top of a still frame so people got a good idea of what we wanted from them also time management becomes even more crucial when working with outsourcing because when you're dealing with your internal team you sit next to them you see them every day it's cool you're communicating but with your outsourced team it can be easy to lose track of them you might forget to send your timeline to your feedback in a timely manner you might forget to check in and see if they're blocked by anything if they have any roadblocks and they're stuck on work and they might not have communicated with you so don't leave them hanging make sure you keep track of them what helped us was having an outsourced coordinator because he really kept those lines of communication open would give me reminders would help make sure that our assets were sent out and come back in a nice smooth manner so

he helped us a lot all right moving on to inspiration this is all about keeping your team members motivated and growing probably not the way that kratos does it what you should do is be a source of positivity because let's face it stuff's gonna happen that there's gonna be decisions made that your team doesn't like that you may not like you may have to scrap some work you may have to start over there's going to be tasks that nobody likes to do there's going to be things that make you just want to rage out but what happens is that your team members are watching you and they're going to gauge how you're feeling so if they see that you're frustrated or worried or complaining then they're going to see that as permission to act out as well so be a source of positivity i know this is very cliche i've actually already heard this a few times at this conference but fake it till you make it you know it might seem disingenuous to put on a happy face when you're actually upset but this

really does go a long way to boosting your team's morale if they see that you're keeping pushing forward even under stress it also can actually help prevent your own negativity from spiraling into something larger than it needs to be now if you're really feeling upset you just don't feel like you can hide it under a happy face then find an outlet to let off your steam you know talk to your producers or managers or just find a friend that you feel like you can talk to them about and just let it out or find an activity to do i like to sing in a choir when i was at ucla our choir director's motto was leave your baggage at the door you might have had a worse day in the world but when you come to rehearsal you leave that at the doorway and you come in and you put on a smile and you sing now i mean part of singing is that you're you're performers you're acting you know so it might seem a little fake but by the end of rehearsal we actually were all genuinely feeling better and we would leave with a genuine smile on our face so having that outlet is very important

ah feedback you could do a whole talk just on feedback in fact people have and are doing that it falls under inspiration because giving good feedback can really help keep your team motivated something that's that's good for for feedback is just getting to the point because you are an expert in your field and you are responsible for the end result being shipped to the rest of the world so don't lose your feedback amongst too much fluff now as an animator we love to use our bodies to demonstrate feedback as you remember from the beginning of my slide it's very direct and to the point we even have a box full of prop weapons near our desks for very important research yes now getting to the point means being honest but not putting people down because again your team is looking for someone they can turn to for help and if they feel that you're just going to yell at them or whatever when they come to you then they're not going to come to you and then how can you help them so don't be belittling be encouraging

when you're in art school you know you get graded on your work and if you do really well you get an a and that feels awesome and and in the studio setting it can be harder to come across that kind of positive reinforcement so make sure you call out the good stuff especially for your young people who are just out of school and maybe struggling to adapt to the work environment on god of war we had an intern who during reviews would end up getting a lot more notes just because he needed more experience but i always made sure to point out what he did well and gave him lots of encouragement and he ended up taking on some of the most ambitious scenes on our project and just did an amazing job so that was awesome finally follow-up some artists can be introverted i mean that's why they're artists they want to express themselves through their art and not talk about it so just stop by their desk make sure they're going in the right direction and let them know that you're there for them let them know that they can ask questions they can give their own opinions and you'll be a good listener and listen to them

and don't forget to request feedback too especially as a first time lead you probably have very little idea how effective you're being it can feel kind of awkward asking for advice but it's important to get your team to be honest with you you can show them that you care about them enough to want to be better you can also talk to your producers or managers and see how you're doing from them this is really about inspiring yourself to keep growing now this is a little scene from god of war probably the only time in the game where kratos asked for advice i'll go ahead and play that video for you i mean i get angry at you sometimes do you i mean sometimes yeah a little when are you angry what with me when oh i guess sometimes when you don't think i can do something but i can't [Music] so you see kratos asked his son for advice like when do you get angry with me why why am

i making you angry you know and if he hadn't asked then he wouldn't have known how his son is trying so hard to prove himself to his father to show that he is grown up enough and he can handle some more responsibility so that was really cool moment that i thought was cool so remember that artists come in all different kinds you know if this is our animation team pretty diverse and understanding what they love to do lets you let them work on what they're passionate about so give them what they want to work on but also remember to push them out of their comfort zone because that's really going to help them grow okay i'm not going to make you guys do an activity right now this is more of a take-home test called inspire your team i'm going to give you kind of a role-playing scenario where you have a team of artists and your job is to keep them happy and figure out ways to challenge them and keep them growing your first team member is a scrappy new kid fresh out of school ready to soak up information like a sponge and needs more experience then you've

got your seasoned veteran those game people who've been in the trenches for over a decade they know all the ropes maybe they're a little bit jaded you know but they want to do the work they're in if they're in it to win it you've got that super fast insomniac who comes fresh from another aaa studios really fast cranking out assets but ends up working themselves to the bone and refuse to go home even at one in the morning how do you keep these people happy how do you challenge them how about someone who comes from film or television they're super good their stuff is such high quality and they give great feedback to everybody but maybe they've got some extra difficulty working with the game engine your final team member is an indie jack of all trades maybe they came from commercials maybe they came from indie games they know a little bit about everything they love wearing lots of different hats they love to branch out and experiment but maybe they lack a little bit of polish in focus this is your team so do a little bit of role-playing and think about how you might help them keep them happy and help them grow

i'll leave this up here for just a second in case you want to write it down all right inspiration is really about learning to speak each of your teammates language everybody thinks differently so if you can figure out how your team members think you can help them stay motivated and happy you can tailor your feedback and help them stay motivated on god of war we had a series of meaty scenes cinematics featuring stunts and big creatures all that cool stuff that animators love to get their hands into my task was spreading them out amongst my team so i would go to each of them and ask them what they wanted to work on while also keeping in mind their experience levels their speed what they're passionate about and made sure that in the end everybody got at least one big meaty scene that helped keep them happy and it also helped keep my schedule happy because i wasn't piling all the big scenes onto one animator

alright accountability is about taking ownership of your impact on your team and on your team's impact on the game because the decisions that you make affect other people they affect your teammates they affect other departments especially your downstream departments so make sure you always keep them in the loop that's getting back to communication again here i'm speaking to our dialogue coordinator leilani audio is actually a very important downstream department for cinematics so we needed to make sure they always had what they needed from us most often it was just play blasts of our cinematics with the time frames or the time code on it so they could properly sync up the sound but keep your downstream departments in the loop set the bar for quality you've trained your whole career to know what looks good so make sure you can set expectations for what you want from your team because when your team understands what's high quality what you want from

them that helps them function more autonomously that helps them take ownership of their own stuff and that helps your team run more smoothly even if you have to step away like i did i went on maternity leave right before alpha which is probably the worst time in the world to have a baby while you're trying to wrap up your game development but what i did was i met with all my producers and my senior animators and discussed how i was going to hand off all my stuff i wrote up some detailed current state documents for all of my unfinished work to help transition all of those scenes off to other owners and i was able to step back in after a few months and see that work had progressed pretty well while i was gone in fact later on in production when one of my contractors had to leave midway he ended up doing the same thing for me he gave me a detailed current state document for each of his unfinished scenes so that i could make a smooth transition handing it off to other owners so that was a nice warm fuzzy feeling

ah yeah accountability nobody's perfect but don't sweat it you know but do talk to people hone up if you mess up and work to fix the problem your team members will respect your honesty and your commitment to grow with them but don't dwell on it i mean most times people everyone else will have moved on before you so don't let it eat you up inside really just let it out like when you make a crappy drawing just toss it out and move on to the next one so you can get to the good stuff part of accountability is also making sure that your voice is heard and your team's voice is heard since you represent them now we know artists are usually the cool kids in the back of the room doodling on their notebooks but as a lead you don't want to sit in the back so take a seat at the table don't let other people make decisions that affect you and your team without your opinion being heard so be visible come prepared to those meetings be aware

of the subject matter make notes bring questions be an active participant this has the benefit of making those meetings more engaging and then you don't get bored and start watching the clock and start doodling your sketchbooks or whatever go to bat for your team remember your team members are counting on you to represent them so make sure that you get what you need for your team to work well from others and give back to the other departments as well this is a little bit more of an introspective exercise you can do on your own time sort of a personal accountability checkup first off pledge to speak up at meetings like actually take out your calendar find out when your next meeting is and write down that pledge like really write it out i pledge to speak up at this tech art meeting and maybe take some notes like what am i going to say at it what questions am i going to ask like make a pledge if you haven't synced up with your downstream departments in a while set a date to sync with them

ask them what you can do to help make their jobs easier finally write down a name or two of people that you maybe need to own up to some you want to talk to one on one figure out when you can schedule it it could just be like a casual walk around the parking lot or a coffee break or something but you know be open take some time remember that when you are accountable to others they will be accountable to you that'll golden rule finally and perhaps most importantly as artists creativity this is all about finding that delicate balance between all that leadership stuff we've been talking about throughout this whole session and finding time to do what you've trained for your whole life as an artist of course don't try to do everything yourself it's tempting to think of lead artists being able to solve all the biggest problems doing all the biggest art tasks taking

everything on yourself just don't you're going to be overwhelmed with the sheer amount of work to be done and you'll have no time to achieve that high quality bar that you want to set you might get so bogged down in leadership stuff that you have no time to work on art at all or you conversely you might be focusing so hard on doing really good art that you're letting your team down and not being a good lead so get some help let your producers or managers or other leads help you out and give you advice remember to trust your team to take ownership so that everyone else gets a chance to shine as well art school is really about honing your skills and becoming a master of your craft while leadership is about helping others unlock their potential that being said do take some time for yourself because you are still an artist so tell your producers this is an important priority for you and schedule accordingly find a few juicy tidbits to keep for me this actually works best during

pre-production where i have a little more time before i'm wrangling a very large team i get to jump in the mocap suit i get to do a little pre-production stuff start assembling scenes it's a lot of fun for me if it helps you can schedule some me time in your calendar actual blocks of time that you put in outlook or whatever so you can focus on your work that way you don't get booked for meetings and you can actually get in the groove for a little while that way i was able to animate freya's turtle friend there and a few other things take some time to geek out on all that new stuff follow cool artists on twitter and instagram read up on the latest tech and trends share it all with your teammates our industry is changing and moving forward every day and you don't want to get left behind geeking out on the new stuff might also spark your own ideas to move forward so it's about inspiration and creativity so let's geek out a little bit share something awesome with your partner that you've seen or want to see

at gdc or anywhere that you've seen it also thank your partners for being awesome too go ahead all right let's let's wrap it up what does a lead artist do communicate organize inspire be accountable and create i'm not going to go through all these bullet points again this is basically my entire presentation this is just a slide for people to take a picture of or whatever in case they haven't been taking notes throughout the production i'll leave it up a little bit [Music] but let's think back upon that initial exercise we did ah you might notice that they fall into those five categories so i think that's pretty cool [Music] it's like i did it on purpose a little bit of last minute advice ask

yourself do you want to be a lead leadership is not for everybody it's not a very glamorous job it's more like a service job you are working for other people it's not about seeking the lime night it's about again helping other people achieve their potential so take some time to discern which growth path you want to follow in your career you might find that you prefer to be a specialist rather than a lead but if leadership is something you actually feel very passionate about then just remember that your first time can be kind of overwhelming but that's normal it's okay what can you do about it find a mentor think about that person in your life who you felt was a really good leader and talk to them or find other leads or you know people in your industry you can talk to remember that failures and successes are both powerful lessons so keep practicing you can even practice leadership before you become a lead in fact many leads get their roles because they were already showing leadership qualities before they were

asked finally remember that every lead is different and that's not a bad thing because every team is different and the needs of your team are going to be dependent on what you guys are doing at any specific time so what are your personal strengths and how can you be the best leader thank you very much we have some time for q a if you're interested you can come up to one of the microphones there please state your name for the record oh yes hi i'm andrew hi thank you so much erica that was an awesome presentation i actually had a question for you okay essentially a bit of a tough one you mentioned a little bit right at some point like you're for example you're not gonna know if like an artist is at the studio at 1am because they just really want to make this one thing cool or because you messed up at some point and it's

kind of tough because the way you mess up as a lead impacts people in very non-trivial ways and especially sort of going through that first first time experience maybe you have some advice for people like how do you deal with letting people down sometime how do you deal with letting people down sometimes especially as a first-time lead i think the important thing is being honest just letting them know look this is my first time i could use your support and help you know and again being observant and just letting yourself see what's going on around you i mean if you don't catch it in time and you do let someone down make sure you follow up with them make sure you follow up with with your producers or whatever and let them know what happened and just make sure you know you can take notes or what whatever and document what happens so that next time it comes around you're better prepared to handle the situation just being honest fair enough thank you over here oh hey hi oh that was loud

yeah i was just wondering how do you deal with giving feedback to specialists that might be more skilled than you in a very specific field and you know that the asset is not living up to the quality standards that you want but yeah trying to give feedback to them that that is a tough one because again the lead is not necessarily the best artist in the room but it is someone who has the bigger picture and the context of what's going on in the project so what you can do with your specialist is just say you know what what we need from you right now is going to help serve the project as a whole and all of our team together and when we're in it focusing on on the game itself and not necessarily on this one asset so just keeping a bigger picture and working with them and and also just keeping in mind that yes they may be more skilled than you and you respect their quality and their talent and their their effort and their time that they've put in thank you hello my name is danny hi danny hi my question is about

how do you balance between keeping people happy and giving them harsh feedback how do you balance between keeping your team happy and giving them some harsh feedback sometimes people don't want to hear about it that's true and i think that comes back to the inspiration topic about knowing your teammates and knowing what what affects them the best you may find yourself speaking to different people in different ways because everybody reacts differently so if you need to give someone harsh feedback and you know they might take it personally just just make sure you you acknowledge that like look this isn't anything personal this isn't about you uh this is really about focusing on the game and how we can make the game better and you know if you're if you don't agree with me that's fine we can agree to disagree but at this point we need to get the game shipped and i i feel like we want to have a unified vision going forward thank you okay hi so

i'm a little bit confused about like what is the difference between becoming a lead artist and the art director ah that really depends on the studio you're at at santa monica studio the lead artists are more responsible for kind of the day-to-day processes of keep working with the team and checking in with them make sure they have everything they need to work our art director is kind of one step above the leads and they communicate with the leads and make sure that they're meeting one-on-one with the creative director and the other directors in the studio and really getting that super big vision and then they communicate that down to the leads who then communicate that down to the artist so it's really kind of a waterfall effective so that the creative director doesn't have to go to each person individually they can talk to the directors and then they can spread that information out to the leads okay thank you hi oh hi hi miriam how do you manage a super small team let's say you have only two to three artists in the room and it's a very

small independent uh game studio that may be currently be having some issues with ego so how do you manage that oh man ego that's that's the elephant in the room i think especially with smaller teams sometimes it can be difficult having kind of a leadership thing versus you know everybody being on equal ground and currently my team is pretty small because we're we're in a stage of production where we're not ready for a full team so i think it is more about speaking to everybody on their own level and and showing respect to each other i think again you're trying to keep the focus on the game and not your individual needs and wants and figuring out what is going to help this game come together and i mean just being honest with each other and and you know sometimes it takes getting out of the studio sometimes just having some chats outside of work just to get everybody feeling more comfortable talking to each other thank you

else okay hi hi so as a lead i know often you have to make really really tough choices um ones that you probably either way is really harsh and um what is the toughest choice you ever had to make as a lead and right as of now like do you think you made the right choices something that's like quickly oh i have to make this choice right you know what is the toughest choice i've ever had to make as a lead oh gee i think for me personally it's been about hiring and figuring out who the right people are for your team because those are the people you're going to be working with for a long time so making sure you make those right decisions and that that's you don't always know just from an interview what you're going to get but you try to you know gauge as best as you can and if you can give them a test you know and gosh in terms of production probably the

hardest choice is in is when we have to let things go or tell someone that they have to start over because it didn't work and you know no one likes to have their work thrown out but you try to just sit down with them and then tell them again it's nothing personal um and just let them say this is for the good of the game do you feel at that point like do you feel like maybe you failed to get direction in the beginning or that's usually how just reiteration works um i i think just yet uh knowing that it is part of the iterative process and letting everybody know that yes this is you know it's not like art school where you do a project and you get a grade and you're done it is about iterating and making sure that you know it is to the highest quality we can before we ship okay thank you yeah thank you hello my name is shannon hi shannon i was wondering what are some ways that you evaluate your own success as a leader and manager how do i evaluate my own success man i think for me the best part well at the

end of each project we do a postmortem so that's when i tell them hey guys write down everything that went well and everything that did not want go well and let's talk about it and figure it out and you know i try to get them to stay honest and give me that feedback and and what really helped me like feel good was at the end some of my contractors as they were leaving they said hey you're a really good lead sometimes it's as simple as that just someone's coming up and saying hey you did a good job so i think that's important to also say to other people's telling them that they did a good job too thank you uh hi uh thank you for the talk uh i'm miguel hi and my question is like uh when there are like too many ideas on the table like how more or less how do you coordinate so that like the like the amount of information overload um actually like does not bog down the the production of the project for example there's like many ideas of how things should move or something like how do you like kind of like just like condense everything into just getting to one solution let me see if i understand you

you're wondering when there's too many ideas on the table how do you make sure that you can move forward in a right pace and everything i think when you're in a meeting just setting goals for yourself like this is a one-hour meeting let's throw everything on the table but by the end of the hour we should narrow it down to what we really need going forward um or if it's something where everybody's emailing each other back and forth i know you should do it like this and no you should do it like that i mean that's where as a lead you have the authority to step in and say okay we're going to nail this down maybe i'll talk about it with the other leads and i'll get back to you guys you know it doesn't have to end right here we can we'll make the decision and let you guys know i mean sometimes you can pull rank like that okay thank you hello hi um so let's say you have a person under you um and i mean of course game is about reiteration right so how have you given the task to somebody below you and then after several reiteration and critique the

work's still really off the mark and you know the time is running out so what do you do that is a tough one what do you do when someone's reiterated time and time again and it just isn't quite hitting the quality bar i think first of all you have to acknowledge the work that they have put in so far so make sure you you let them know i appreciate all the work you've put in i feel like at this point we should talk about other directions we can go and maybe you're just very tired and let's see if we can put you on another task and maybe get those creative juices flowing again maybe we'll pass this off to someone just have them quickly wrap it up and get you working on something new that you know i'm sure you're tired of doing it six times you know let's give you something new to challenge yourself okay thank you are we good now one more okay hi two small questions first one what the amount of artists you consider healthy in your team to keep the balance you talked about like to be a manager and to keep you

know looking new stuff in the industry oh man what what do you consider like a good team size to lead so for example five artists is okay actually i think five is pretty good you know i was just at a talk where they were talking about a study that was done about ideal team size and i think the study said 4.6 people at the peak of production i had seven animators under me and it was a little tough i think five would have been nice but i think i was able to get to seven it really is about how you manage your time and if you feel like you can handle um scheduling enough time to get to each person individually then i think you're doing a good job but it's really about seeing like how underwater you feel for the amount of of team that you have depends on the project as well okay thanks and the second one what if you have a batch of work not interesting like uh fixing bugs for example from outsourcers and you have a great

team of different specialists skilled offshore so how would you how would you motivate them the question was uh what do you do when you get tasks that is not very interesting and you have a bunch of specialists that you you know you want to make sure that they're happy for me if it's a big task rather than trying to take someone down for a long time i might say okay everybody we're going to do this bug fixing everybody take five bugs and let's just get it out of the way as quickly as we can you know that whole many hands make light work thing because then everybody's in it together everybody can kind of complain to each other and then say oh i've got to do bugs but then everybody gets done at the same time and then we can move on to the next fun thing okay thanks a lot thank you all right if there's no further questions i'd just like to do a quick plug we have a couple of uh cinematic-related talks coming up this week first on wednesday doria rozzi is giving a talk called creating a deeper emotional connection the cinematography of god of

war and that's going to be a really deep dive into the staging and composition and cinematography for our cutscenes and on thursday i'm giving a talk called key frames and cardboard props the cinematic process behind god of war and that'll be of just kind of an overview of everything from script all the way to screen everything that we went through to make sure that our cinematics worked with no cuts thank you again very much we are hiring