The Passion Project: Catalyst to Creativity and Cure for the Stagnate

[Music] all right cool well i gotta say first of all that um i'm really stressed because this is not really what i was expecting i was expecting a much smaller crowd thank you thank you hello my name is joseph snabria and i'm an art director and a concept illustrator working in the entertainment industry and for the past 23 years i've been fortunate to have worked at some great studios throughout my career developing some epic intellectual properties and in recent years i've begun freelancing expanding my work into film commercials and a variety of projects thank you for coming to my talk which is the passion project the catalyst to creativity and a cure for the stagnant it's a talk about how my passion project has impacted my work and why having a project patch sorry a passion project can be one of the best things for an artist looking to grow so when i was approached to speak at gdc i asked what would they be interested in me talking about so the response was maybe i could talk about my experience working as a freelancer and i thought sure i could probably talk about freelancing but most of the time folks are interested in how i got there so i thought i would focus on those opportunities and how those opportunities came to be and talk about what i did to expand my work to other fields now this is a conversation i've had numerous times over the years with artists usually who are trying to break in but there's also artists who have been in the industry for a while and have a few years of experience but they're frustrated with their current situation they either want to go into leadership uh perhaps work another type of game or they just kind of feel like they've been casted in a way so i thought this would be a great form to cover this subject and talk about how one passion project led to a number of great opportunities and so thinking about how things have gone for me in the past i realized that most of my achievements and gains gains over the year they stem from a personal interest in the work that i put into pursuing those passions on my own time and over the years i've noticed this also been the case for a few other artists like i've met artists at dreamworks a story artist and he had an interview with dreamworks and really what got him the job was his personal comic book that he had been working on it's not really what he was being hired for but they were impressed by the passion and what drove him and essentially that's what people are looking for you want passionate folks you're not looking for folks who can do a job and i think that's one thing a lot of students miss or folks who are frustrated with their situation they say to themselves well i could be doing that well that's not really the point the point is are you passionate about it so this talk is not just about passion project it's really about how i as an artist adapted and rediscovered a passion and how that passion led to unexpected projects and connected me to a new audience like you guys and also made me a better and more effective visual artist for me i was always working on some personal art but the work i put into it was sporadic and the results were kind of lackluster not having any structure and not really clear on what i was really interested in or passionate about it was difficult to really make any progress on developing skills a little background information over the years obviously roles and teams have really changed a lot so i've done just about everything on the art team um i started as an animator then did backgrounds then uh character art then technical art and then eventually lead artist and then art director and then that's when i started doing concept art so the concept art is more of a recent thing so going back what i really needed to do was to change my whole attitude and approach to personal art what i needed to do was just draw what i was inspired by and focus on what interested me at the moment rather than chasing fats uh max and and all the things that may be hot at the moment then i started thinking in terms of a project rather than just work so i could manage it a lot better and create an overall plan ironically i was really good at organizing big teams and keeping them motivated and making sure that we're always making progress because these games are very expensive to make but when it came to my own work that just didn't happen so these two things working together well they basically made me a lot more consistent with my efforts so what i learned was honest hard work done consistently over time that would be the thing that would grant greatly ramp up my skill it wasn't the tech sorry i know this is gdc but it was just consistent work and i wasn't doing all-nighters i wasn't just basically pushing myself into the grave i just tried to be consistent now like most artists i started sketching when i was a little kid and i would sketch comic book heroes space rockets just everything but as i grew up i found myself sketching less and less now this kind of happens naturally as kids we just do whatever no one cares uh and as a result you're not self-conscious and you don't edit yourself you're just enthusiastic but as you grow up you start to realize especially in my experience that sketching maybe is not a good thing you should be doing my dad got really pissed off one day when he found out i had filled up my notebooks with all these uh sketches of of uh spider-man and so um that kind of like always made me feel like maybe i'm not doing something right here so it would be years later that that passion for sketching would reignite now i use sketches to help develop and refine ideas oops sorry and i would sketch events and record the moments and then i would start to explore ideas and just have fun filling the pages basically learning how to improvise so this image here is one of those inktober sketches just started in one not in one corner but one spot and just kind of built out and this kind of happens really with all the hard work that you put into it all the studying you're doing you don't need to have the reference in front of you but i've done lots of environment sketches and paintings and that's what allows me to improvise just like a jazz musician let's say they they study their scales they know their instrument inside and out once they're got the mechanics down uh they're they're free to just kind of express themselves and i think that's the main thing here and naturally those uh my uh then i extended my studies to lighting and color this is the subject i was really interested but i just never had the opportunity or i guess made the time to study it and so i would take any opportunity to practice and as i improved so did my passion for sketching so this is something i would do like lunchtime because i'd done a few years of painting outdoors i was comfortable being i'll do it in that time frame and because i was doing it more often you get better you get better it's you have more fun it's just like a video game you know you can't just go straight to level 50 and decide that you're going to be successful or really be realistic in those expectations you have to start small and build up now the project well that took some time to figure out and that was until i visited uh stuart ng's bookstore which is uh down in torrance california for the first time now for those who aren't familiar this is a book store that specializes in illustration imported graphic novels and collectibles from the animation industry and one of the things that they carry at the convent are the convention sketchbooks for those who don't know what those are these are small small self-published books by usually by the artist and they're sold at conventions that would be my passion project so i made it a goal to make my own sketchbook and sell them at the cte and animation expo this is basically a ctn animation expo is kind of like think of comic con's artist alley meets gdc and so but it's it's mostly feature and television animation and some game studios uh and and a bunch of artists from around the world and so in doing this i learned a lot and uh yes i did struggle for a bit but i i made it i got it done and i was there for for that first year and i've made it a goal each year to put one together and show up at ctn and lo and behold three years later uh stuart ng swung by my desk and he picked up picked up volumes two and three and so i made my goal to try and get that work into his bookstore and so what i learned from that was having a definitive goal and a product really helped me fund my efforts and get the most gains out of my time now my early experiences were not always positive like i shared with you before with with my dad and later on um like i said i drew less and less and part of that was the frustration the frustration of blank pages i'm sure this is something that we all can relate with uh and the other thing that kind of really frustrated me a lot of times but i would just have a poor start it's kind of like what i was just saying it's like you're not thinking you're just kind of jumping and like i'm gonna do a crazy sketch like well it's crazy nobody gets it so in general i didn't really understand how sketchbooks helped the bigger picture i remember i got uh in school they asked me to to carry one but i never filled it up and it was just something i didn't understand uh my thought on the whole art process was that the real work was in the painting or the 3d rendering uh the details and all that stuff that was until i got this book as a present and it really changed my view of sketchbooks now it's a collection of sketches from pablo picasso and over the 70 years of his uh his career he created 174 sketchbooks and this is a collection of some of those sketches from his book believe it or not that one in the back there i think he did it like 12 years old or 14 years old and you can see in barcelona it's insane what he was doing as a teenager um and so what was really striking to for me flipping through this book was it was the first time i really kind of flipped through basically an artist's lifetime of his work and a sketchbook is really an intimate view of that person's work so for the first time i really realized the impact sketching has over an artist's lifetime um i'm a strong believer that art is a life lifelong endeavor this is not something that happens you know a year a few years in school and then you're an artist like it's constantly evolving and then i saw this movie uh this is a movie about robert crumb and there's a scene where he's lamenting about which sketchbook is he going to pick to trade for a chateau in france and so i was just floored when i saw that because then i saw the value not only artistically but monetarily a sketchbook could have now i was starting to think about sketchbooks in a different way now when i'm talking about sketching in my mind and this is how i kind of try to approach it it's really including drawing from life doing visual research this could be like drawing armor or suspension for a vehicle just so that you can build up this knowledge it's also the process of idealization taking an idea and really expanding as far as possible the if you guys caught the the dem or the presentation for horizon um the all the examples that they were showing where they were just kind of trying to figure out the exoskeleton that's a good example of that so what's the big deal well i believe that sketching is like muscle building it's training and being disciplined that are essential to getting good results now observational scheduling is like taking that to a higher level and i think this is a good example because bodybuilders or or folks who train they don't they don't train 24 hours they don't train for 16 hours they they have very specific schedule but they they practice with intensity so it's not about time it's about your focus so you get faster gains less time and really you don't need much you just need a notebook and a pencil maybe gouache and so when i'm talking about observational sketching it's kind of a blanket term in my mind to plein air painting which is when you're going outdoors and you're painting from life it also includes live drawing and urban sketching which is kind of similar to plein air but it's a little bit more of like everything that's happening in front of you like people and all that stuff now observational sketching is just a really robust exercise where the hand and the eye and the mind are really working together you're going to observe the scene and you're going to be studying it for extended amount of time and because of that you're going to learn and catch what a lot of folks fail to notice the lessons that you're learning out in the field give your work authenticity and confidence this is down in laguna beach summer day done in oil and then what you're going to be doing is analyzing really trying to understand all the structures and the surfaces and but most importantly trying to figure out how they all correlate to each other and then you're editing you're emphasizing some things and omitting when it's appropriate being selective i think one of the things i've learned as a painter is that it's more important what you leave out rather than what you put in and that's uh because there's really not much time to render everything that you're trying to convey so focus all that really changed my whole mindset to sketching and it would greatly impact me and it would allow me to get comfortable with the whole creative process and get into a creative flow so here's a good example where i'd been painting down on laguna beach for maybe two or three years so i kind of had to understand the rock formations and how things looked and so now when i go and sketch it i don't have to study that photo in front of me i know this already and so i would spend maybe like five minutes for each one of those five ten minutes but i also learned a few other benefits most notably you connect with others you're sketching in a public setting so you're probably going to meet lots of folks and a few of them are going to be fellow artists i'm here because probably more for more reasons uh because of all this private work that i've been doing this personal work um i'll give you another example so one of the paintings i was doing laguna beach on that day it was a cloudy day and the lighting wasn't going to change too much so i was feeling kind of confident i wanted to push myself up and and do something a little bit challenging so i wanted to do a city scene and i ended up having to paint because of the view i had to be right on the sidewalk basically like the boardwalk down laguna beach very intimidating to have hundreds of people just walking by as you're working on a painting but ironically a manager from a gallery was walking by and saw my work and that's how i ended up getting into a gallery in laguna so it's just an example of how by sharing your work lots of things can happen now in the studio i could also initiate collaborations and kickstart discussions so what i mean by that is a lot of times you would walk into conversations where designers or tech are debating or discussing things with artists and a lot of times what i would find out is that they're really saying the same thing but they believe they're saying different things and the only way you can kind of make sure that they're all on the same page and kind of uh kill that is to just start sketching sketching something on the whiteboard or in a sketchbook and so being able to sketch those ideas quickly and help move the conversation forward that would turn out to be a valuable skill set for art directing and visual development development and soon i would discover how uh other opportunities would discover me or i would say oh sorry they i would discover other opportunities or they would discover me and that's all thanks to social media it's how it's connected to all and by sharing my work i've made it possible for other companies to find my work so just post it don't be shy then the other thing i realized was rather than using solicitation tools to like mailing lists or going through linkedin connecting with folks and bugging them for a job i really just focused on marketing my work sharing the work on various platforms and posting on a regular basis and lo and behold eventually i started getting calls and emails and work inquiries negotiating rates and terms well that would be much easier in that in that scenario and then i started to really learn a lot about my audience about my work and by myself so a few things i want to share with you that i've learned along the way is that rough rough sketches equals viewer participation so i'm going to give you an example um first time i was really doing sketches for production was for fallout new vegas um prior to that i'd only really shared sketches if they were really heavily cleaned up and well one day chris avalon he's the of one of the big designers down at obsidian or was there uh he was a project director for one of the dlc's that we were working on and so he drops in my office and at the pri around that time i used to be really obsessed with perfection everything had to be perfect and i think a lot of that was just insecurity and so i was terrified to have him check out my rough sketches i was not ready to present them but to my surprise and delight he didn't wrinkle his bra with frustration and confusion instead he was excited and gleaming and so what i saw was that there was enough structure to the sketches that he could read them but a good deal left undefined that he would then project into those blanks just like a roshack test or those ink block tests that psychiatrists use he saw what was what he was hoping to see now and that meant that he was not just a viewer but he was a participant in the story and the meaning of it so what i learned was leaving some things undefined that can make for a much more interesting image for the viewer my second lesson is that the concept is the biggest thing not the design um great ideas that are cheap that's what people are looking for so i'll give you an example um there's this company called the mill new york they do a lot of commercials uh their visual effects studio and this was something i did for them for a nestle hot pockets ad they needed a wind tunnel that a bunch of college kids constructed themselves and so what i did what i learned with working the director was we created a great relationship because i could deliver a bunch of ideas real quickly and so what i learned right away was that the sketches were his preferred way or their preferred way of finding the right design for a job a poor design won't be saved by a great render so it's really important that the idea is is solid third lesson narrative no surprise that the concepts that i would post that had a narrative component well they would do a lot better and i think like this is an example where i can put in little things that aren't um that big or complicated and they can pull your eye in more so the fact that everybody is looking away from the camera except two people that kind of creates uh moments that people can kind of lock into and so what i'm trying to do is retain your attention as long as possible and by doing so i think you're gonna be you're gonna remember it for sure but you're drawing folks in and that's essentially what we're doing in games we don't want people just to kind of i get it you want them to pick up the controller and run around that world now that effect would get magnified when you put one image next to another so part of my process at some point was just to create um random formats or ratios for my panels because a lot of times i would see that that would influence or inspire me to do different sketches now none of these sketches relate to each other they're just all random ideas that i'm trying to fill in in a couple hours so that i can see if anything in there is worth pursuing and doing a full render so before i'm going to spend a few days working on a high end illustration i want to make sure that the one that i picked is one of the strongest ones that i can come up at the moment now like i said before i've had this conversation with lots of folks over the years usually at ctn and when they see the work i hear a few common things from folks i'm not talented well the truth is talent is built it's not inherited and other work others are going to judge your work differently than you do so just allow yourself the time to learn and have fun i think you will be surprised the other one i hear a lot is i don't have time well truth is everyone has time but we just struggle man managing it adapt and scope your work so it works with what you have so i think someone was mentioning before that they just tried to do like they were going to do a massive game and it was just one student who's still in college and so the thing is just to keep it simple you don't have to do a whole lot and i don't have money so that's why i focus on sketches and simple materials because really this is how you can develop your skills money is one of those things where it's easy to resolve and so the time is really your biggest cost because you can't buy more time and really all you need is just good materials and the equipment to be simple and effective you don't need it to be fancy or elaborate exquisite work can be done and has been created with limited palettes you'd be very surprised i um zorn is a good example he used three colors and he would create amazing paintings so just remember that it's the idea that really matters not the rendering or the technique at least that's been my experience now you're going to want to avoid points of friction so i think or at least i believe at least in my experience that balancing that passion with life is just part of the process you got to figure it out i can't give you a formula each one of you has a specific goal and and obviously going to have roadblocks so what you need to do is just figure out how to get around those things in my case a lot of times why i wouldn't do work is because it's just too too much in the way like oh i got to put everything together before i can go out and the lighting is going to change so i won't go out today so what i started doing was just basically packing things up i also changed my year i used to have one of those french easels which was like 20 pounds and i was like no i don't want to go out painting today because i just i don't want to carry all that stuff so i just simplified everything shrunk everything down so it's hanging on a hook backpack's all loaded i can just grab it and take off at any moment so what i started doing was you know i was i would sketch with pencil or pen when i just needed to work fast and light if i was traveling like like i am here i'll take a gouache kit with me that's really small and it's super light easy to travel with but if i have the time and the opportunity i'm going to go out with oil because it's the the one medium that i prefer the most and also i'll spend more time so these are some of my favorite ways of brainstorming that i want to share with you guys because ultimately i want to i want you guys to be able to walk away and hopefully be able to do some of these things so i call this the 360. it's probably a better term for it but basically i'm taking one idea and i'm creating as many designs as possible and then i'm going to see what stands out of that group i think one of the things that kind of helps with something like this is that the negative spaces around the areas as you're filling them they can influence the design so some characters are really stretched out others are more square and bulky and then when you're trying a theme you can experiment different things and borrow from one design and try a different take on it and so what that's going to allow you to do is really kind of iterate and iterate on a fast level but without starting from scratch each time i call this the repurposed design basically you're inheriting something from from something else now in this example what i did was there was a sketch that i done on the back of that page and it was marker that's bleeding through so using those marks i'm kind of just riffing off of it and using it to influence what i'm going to draw on top of that and that's just to get me started so the other one's a little bit more complicated this one i borrow from andrew loomis he has a book called creative illustration i really highly recommend it for you guys and so what in this example you have a frame a red square and what i'm doing is i'm running a blue line it's kind of faint but it's going from the top left corner down to the uh right bottom corner and uh just about uh near the halfway mark but not exactly i'm trying to stick it to a quarter to a third there's a vertical line that's being drawn from the top to the bottom now where those two lines meet now i draw a horizontal line now what that's giving me is four uh squares or sorry rank tackles but they're all different sizes as i continue doing that it's going to subdivide the frame even more and so what the result that i get is and the reason why i use this it's going to give me non-uniform sizes for all these shapes i'd show my work to a few folks and one thing that was kind of common was that i my compositions were poor because i was using the same shapes and without realizing so this gave me a framework not a rigid one but one that i could kind of just have there so that way i would uh avoid that bad habit of creating all these even sized things so once i have those primary shapes in place well then i can spend the time to render things out because i know that the composition is a good design or at least that's the hope so i would like to conclude this with a quote from vincent van gogh in spite of everything i shall rise again i will take up my pencil which i have forsaken my great discouragement and i will go on with my drawing thank you so much you

Channel: GDC

Views: 11,734

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design

Id: 8qnon5buKL8

Length: 29min 47sec (1787 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 02 2021