Career tips

Career tips from axis animation art Director on Dawn of war iii, Gareth hector

I find art directing an exciting challenge – it’s all about interpretation and implementation. Nothing was more true on Dawn of War. It was an incredible learning process for all of us. Taking the director’s vision and turning that into something visually tangible was a hard-earned process. However, it was exactly because of the team’s commitment to creative exploration throughout the project that we ended up with a final film that I think we were all proud to work on.

Tip 1

Quality of brief for the artists is important – the more information artists are armed with, the more chance of a smoother pipeline. For

Dawn of War this was particularly the case with regards to the overall style. There were core choices we made that were extremely important to maintain creative cohesiveness throughout the project, therefore we tried to arm the artists with as much relevant information in the brief as possible.

Tip 2

Listening is vital. On many projects there are a number of voices to be heard during development. As art director you bring your own creative spin to the project, but equally vital is the ability to listen to feedback from client, director and team. It can be a balancing act. You need to be able to filter through the information you’ve been given and then decide the best approach to implementation while staying true to the core art style. Sometimes this means compromise, sometimes it means pushing back. However, by being willing to listen you put yourself in a much better position to make an informed choice.

Tip 3

Try to avoid assumptions during the creative decision-making process. Sometimes it’s easy to fall into a default position since something has not been talked about. It’s rarely the case that you can create carte blanche, so it is important to follow up any ambiguity to avoid issues further down the line.