New Job!

Posted on by mattg73

So after 6 weeks or so of looking I’m really excited to say I’ve got a new job, and I couldn’t be more thrilled with who it’s with!

Before I go on to say who, it’s worth saying that I’ve held back from posting any updates about the whole job searching process as, given the url for this site is on my CV, I didn’t want to prejudice my chances or a potential employer’s opinions by musing on how interviews and applications went in blog posts here. However, I can now summarise the process fairly succinctly…

  • There were a lot less jobs for Creative Technologists than I hoped there might be
  • 3D non-technical skills pay really (and in my view unfairly) badly
  • There’s a lot of interest in Unity/Unreal/VR developers but you generally need to have experience in gaming studios
  • Creative Director roles still(!) assume you were at one stage an Art Director or Copywriter so my more digital specialisations worked against me
  • I saw most interest from recruiters for Technical roles but…
  • A lot of those look for either full stack skills or enterprise platform architecture experience, not really my thing!

So, you might be able to tell that I did quite a lot of job applying but not a lot of job interviewing. In point of fact the company who has hired me was my first and only interview. I think I fell into a pattern of applying for something every day to attain a sense of achievement but it’s a short-lived fix. On reflection I’d have been better focusing on only applying for the jobs where I really stood a great chance of being in the top 10% of applicants (LinkedIn Premium is really good for giving you this insight). Focus on quality not quantity of applications would be my advice.

So, to the role in question. I’m really thrilled to say I’ve been hired as Technical Director at Stink Studios. Stink Studios! Of Honda ‘The Other Side’ fame. Or ‘Inside Abbey Road’, with Google. If you’d asked me on the day I first finished up at MRM who my top companies to work for would be, Stink Studios would have definitely been in the top three. So much of what they produce and the way they go about it is exactly what I’m passionate about creating. I guess that must have come across in the interview! 😉

I don’t want to say too much about the interview process itself other than that I think the Showreel got me to the first interview and my PowerPoint deck got me to the second. My new line manager was kind/patient/interested enough to sit through the entire deck so even though it meant the interview overran, it obviously achieved its intended purpose!

So my career has seen me rise up the ranks to Creative Director and now transition through Creative Technology Director to Technical Director. I don’t think many people get to do that and I’m both grateful for the opportunity and proud of the work I’ve put in to make that story a credible proposition to my new employer.

So, excitable selfies in the new office to follow. In the meantime I hope these blog posts prove useful to someone else looking for work. Hang on in there, you’ll get something you deserve with a little focus and perseverance!

 

PowerPoint deck. Done

Posted on by mattg73

Well I’m just about all wrapped up on my PowerPoint deck. It’s taken longer than expected partly because PowerPoint is just the worst software in the world when it comes to precise layout (obvs) and secondly because I’ve had to grapple with some fairly fundamental questions about the positioning of Creative Technology in the industry and my role in relation to it. It’s currently running to 96 slides(!) which would undoubtedly be Death-by-PowerPoint if presented linearly. However I’ve taken a modular approach to the content, the idea being that no two interviews will be the same and areas of interest to different companies will vary so it would be better to jump between them as the flow of conversation dictates. I’m quite prepared that some interviews might focus around only one or other section but the other content is there if needed.

I’ve been lining up conversations with some former colleagues who have gone on to great things so this afternoon I’m off to meet up with Andrew Day of Douglass/Day for a bit of a catch-up. I’m not sure everyone will take kindly to being served up a PowerPoint presentation but I’m hoping to get a bit of feedback on some key sections.

Take your pick, dazzling content lies within!

New toy

Posted on by mattg73

Well the reel is now live and, I’m happy to say, being warmly received on Facebook and Twitter. I was particularly pleased to get a nod from Dan Shiffman and Jaume Sanchez Elias who have been two particular sources of inspiration over recent years.

I’ve since moved on to creating a PowerPoint deck to take to upcoming meetups, chats and interviews. I’ve also made a more concerted effort to start reviewing LinkedIn, Glassdoor and other job postings to see what’s out there. Early signs are promising, with quite a few job vacancies in my general ballpark but nothing immediately enticing. I’ve also found it’s very easy to end up heading down a rabbit warren of white papers, Medium posts, GitHub repositories and the like in the process so I’ve implemented a bit of a schedule to maintain focus. I’m splitting my days in half with the mornings spent on job hunting activities and the afternoons spent on learning and prototyping with new tools. I’ll post more on directions there in a future post.

Work on presentations is all well and good but I needed something to display them and my shiny new reel on so I’ve taken the plunge and invested in a new laptop. No, not a MacBook Pro. After so many years working on the Microsoft and Intel accounts I’m pretty heavily engaged with the PC ecosystem, and also because all the software I own is windows based. I considered the Surface Book but feared the 13 inch screen a bit small for serious productivity and with the second one coming out in a matter of months it didn’t seem wise to invest in soon-to-be-outdated hardware.

I’ve instead gone for the Dell XPS 15 with the 4k screen option. Early impressions are pretty favourable: build quality feels solid and the 4k screen and particularly the colour gamut are very impressive. At nearly a grand cheaper then a lower-specced MacBook it also feels like a lot of horsepower for the money. I’ve yet to try any serious rendering on it but the NVidia GeForce GTX 1050 is much faster than my current desktop GPU so I’m looking forward to seeing how it handles some of the heavier scenes I’ve built.

 

Reel. Done.

Posted on by mattg73

Feels good to write this post. So after three months, 5.74Gb (not including source files), and ~9,000,000 vertices I’ve finally uploaded the reel to Vimeo. Get in! It’s set to private for the time being while I make some key additions to this site – not least an About section, always useful when you’re looking for work. 😉

In reflecting on the work I’ve put into the reel, and the time it’s taken, I’m struck by two things. First, it has undeniably been an indulgence. I doubt many people get to take 3 months out of their career and devote so much time and energy to polishing something to this extent. The pressure to find work doubtless means ‘good enough’ wins over ‘perfect’ in most cases. I’ve been fortunate in that my tenure at MRM meant I’ve had a bit of financial breathing room on leaving and I’ve been able to translate that into really crafting something I could be proud of.

And that brings me onto the second observation: I honestly don’t think I could have done any less. I haven’t striven for perfection: my relative novice experience with After Effects and some VFX techniques means shortcomings in those areas will be obvious to more experienced specialists. But I have absolutely wanted to ensure the work featured is at the highest level of execution I can offer. There are still a hundred things I could change in it but the return on investment at this stage is not worth the additional time spent. It’s good enough for me, and I’m likely to be its harshest critic. We’ll see what people think!

My MoSCoW spreadsheet, finally all green! The fact the Could column has all been completed possibly reflects project management in absentia

 

Branding development

Posted on by mattg73

So with the visual elements of the reel finished I’ve spent the early part of this week finalising the music. I’ve got a candidate mix for final integration but I need to live with it for a few days to see if any niggling issues emerge. In the meantime I’ve turned, somewhat reluctantly, to development of a visual identity for this site, presentations and the like. I have to say it’s the task I’m least comfortable with. It’s not that I don’t know colour palette theory or how to set up a grid system or the qualities of a Grotesque typeface contrasted against a Humanist one; it’s rather that I really struggle to settle on a selection that will represent me. I’ve been doing some background reading and doing some trials here and there but to date nothing has really gelled. It’s one of those tasks that I’d really appreciate having the support of a graphic designer!

However, I hit upon something this afternoon that I’m feeling quite good about. I’d already done some font selection for the reel titles and had settled on Googles webfont ‘Lato’. The font is described as…

“Male and female, serious but friendly”

…and I felt that was a good match for the duality of Creative Technology. I also liked the way my name looked set in the typeface so it was a good starting point.

As regards the colour palette, I wanted to have a fairly neutral canvas for the site that would allow work to speak for itself. So I started with a cool off-black and a warm off-white. I developed some intermediate shades and then turned to Adobe Color CC and Coolors for help finding some accent colours. I knew I wanted some vivid, contemporary colours that would provide strong blocks and gradients. A strong blue was going to be good for hyperlinks and action buttons and was based on the same hue as the off-black base. The contrasting Magenta had a real punch and could create some strong gradients. Finally the orange-yellow offered up some rich palette combinations and a contemporary counterpoint to the other accent colours. I developed dark and light tints of each of them and worked through some of the common UI elements to see how they held up.

I’m pretty pleased with the results. There’s enough neutrality in the background and text elements to let content stand out but some visual interest in the accents to give blog posts and presentations some visual punch. Next step is to generate CSS for these elements and update the site to see how it all looks. Can’t promise I won’t change my mind but it will be an improvement on the current look 😉

Sometimes, I do website design

Reward vs Award

Posted on by mattg73

Back to work this week and I’ve finally, FINALLY finished the last visual segment of the reel. It’s a personal project based on some concept art by the very talented Simon StĂ„lenhag. I’ve spent a little over a year on it and it is by far the most complex scene I’ve ever worked on. I was keen to check that Simon was happy for me to include it in the reel so I tweeted a preview to him.

Now I won’t say I’ve won an embarrassment of awards in my career but I’ve won a few. It’s a great feeling, no doubt. But I can honestly say that recognition of effort you’ve put into a piece of work from someone you respect is worth a great deal more.

HDR Light at the end of the tunnel

Posted on by mattg73

Well the end of March has been and gone and I’m still not quiiiite finished the reel but now very much on the last few edits. Most of the last fortnight has been spent on final polish and rendering of some of the biggest 3D scenes so, when I haven’t been working, my computer has been tied up rendering, hence the drop in frequency of updates. Still, really good progress has been made and I’m now left with just one scene to hopefully finish today and then it’s a week’s break for Easter with my wife’s family before returning to finalise the soundtrack and then publish. It’s been a lot of fun (and hard work) but I am looking forward to getting it finished and sharing it.

Substance Painter really wants you to create battered, grimy objects

Object Tracking and Rotoscope prep

Posted on by mattg73

Spent the last few days trying various approaches to getting some solid tracking results for my last big outstanding section of the reel. It’s only a short segment of live action footage but its got some fairly fast motion and some tricky layered rotoscoping to contend with. I’ve tried many approaches to getting the best results including shooting at 60fps and 4K in order to get a clean read of the marker affine transforms. It’s nevertheless proved to be something of a black art but I’ve learned a lot in the process. I’ve got one last segment of simulation work to do and then it’s on to filming the final footage, tracking, rendering, rotoscoping and compositing.

Looks familiar…
Ready for tracking and rotoscoping

Music and Reel edit blocking

Posted on by mattg73

Phew. Been a busy week. Started off by tackling the soundtrack I’ll be using for my reel. I’ve decided to evolve the track I composed for the previous reel, partly because it reflects the evolution in my work and skill set, partly because it provides a thematic link back to the original, partly because I was really happy with it the first time round, and partly because it (partially) avoids the difficulty of coming up with a completely new track I’m happy with. A great advantage of being able to write your own track is that you can really tailor it to the footage you know you’re going to use. Equally, as I’ve moved onto blocking out the segment edits in Premiere, I’ve had ideas about ways in which the footage can lend ideas to the music so it’s made for a nice symbiotic set of exercises. On the downside, I’m kicking myself for not considering that, for the drop in the middle of the track, I didn’t make space for the project in which we actually dropped five guys off the side of a 12 storey building in Bucharest! Would have been cool. Ah well, next time.

Made good progress blocking out the bulk of the edit. I’m mostly left with a lot of rendering of 3D environments now and a couple of hero scenes that I really want to spend as much time crafting as I can. That said, aiming to be finished-ish by the end of March so it will be another busy week next week.

It’s going to sound something like this

 

An armchair, a rug, a toaster, a sculpture, a magazine subscription, a cuddly toy…

Posted on by mattg73

Ok, not a cuddly toy.

For those too young to remember ‘The Generation Game’, this week has involved a LOT of modelling as I’ve gone about fleshing out an ArchVis scene. Lots of Blender work, Substance Designer material design and a bit of Painter  work to boot. Happy with the results on this Eames chair though. Here’s to a relaxing weekend!

Eames chair with a view