Programmer Art vs. Artist Code

Posted on August 4, 2010 by Bucky

I am pretty damn frustrated right now.  I hear you ask “Why would that be?”.  Well I will tell you, I am a fish starting at a pair of running shoes.  I know that I need to figure out how to use them, that the future is really connected to them (evolutionarily speaking, which is connected to my survival) but I just can’t seem to get an handle on them.  Might be the lack of thumbs, dunno.

When I started at Skywalker Ranch the contract programmers were in one little room next to the office I shared with the boss.  I sat a desk just inside the door of said office so every programmer who went into the “Elite Artist and Programmers annex” (also called “The Pit”) had a clear shot at my screen.  There I sat in all my analog glory, laying down 4 colors with a Joystick (Mice were not available and tablets were expected to arrive around the time of the flying cars) all my work laid bare to an army of DIGITAL MEN.

I had been around programmers all my life so I was used to the basic genus, but this was a new subspecies that had only recently crawled onto land.  These guys weren’t doing breakdown programs on the assemble/dis-assemble routines for a C-130, these guys were making stuff for ordinary people to use in their ordinary homes.  These guys were creating WORLDS in the computer for people to escape their drab wretched lives, and they loved telling that particular fact to anyone who would listen.

At the beginning that was me.  I was in awe of where I was, which a pretty exciting place you have to admit.  I was working in the hidden valley retreat of an eccentric creative genius in a group tasked to press the outer envelope of current technology.  George Lucas might as well been Doctor F**king NO and I his willing Art Minion!  That having been said as a junior Minion it was only natural for me listen in rapt awe to the stories of what had gone on before my arrival.  Additionally the SENIOR Minions were obviously much more experienced and in not only games but everything worldly.  Since I wanted terribly to succeed and be accepted into the TRIBE I shut my mouth and opened my ears.

In truth I did learn a lot because these were, and remain, some of the smarted guys I have ever worked with. After awhile though I began to notice that there was a gap between them and me, a gap that was primal and seemed insurmountable. Realization of this fact came slowly, bit by bit.  There was the time one of the Senior Minions came into my office and stood staring over my shoulder for a good fifteen minutes, cocking his head like Nipper (The RCA Dog) while he looked at my screen.  Finally he told there was a pixel out of place.  I looked at the mosaic of Pixels on my screen and inside my head my airbrush artist’s brain screamed DUH!  I didn’t repeat that out loud of course but enquired as to where.  He pointed, I fixed, he said no, I fixed again.  Finally he got frustrated, took my joystick out of my hands and did something on the screen.

“There!” he exclaimed and handed me back the joystick as he triumphantly left the room, kinda like Elvis would I think.  I watched him go, then turned to screen.  I saw no change. I had the urge to cover each eye to see if my vision was faulty and there was some subtle nuance that was escaping me.  My brain screamed in agony and I took out a pencil and turned to my drawing board until the pain went away.

The next incident came when one of the middle level minions from the Pit asked for my opinion on something.  He was working with the art of another artist who wasn’t on site that day and he had made some changes for a technical reason.  It had taken him an hour but he thought he had improved it by leaps and bounds. I looked at the art.  It didn’t look any different. I stared.  Obviously there was something wrong with me (I thought).  Finally the Middle Level Minion, who was standing next to me with his eyes darting back and forth between my slack jawed stare and the monitor like a first grader spoke.

“You can see it right?” he said, trolling for my approval “I think it made it a thousand per cent better”

I muttered some sort of affirmative sound and he smiled like an Inuit boy who has killed his first Walrus.  Later I learned from the other artist that he had added a single line of white pixels to add a highlight to the superstructure of a battleship.

The final straw came one morning when I arrived at work to find one of the senior Minions using a screwdriver on the closing mechanism of the office door on one side of the courtyard of the Stable house.  I greeted him and he responded cheerfully then returned to his work.  I crossed to the other side of the courtyard, where my office was and went to work.  In a few minutes I noticed this same Senior Minion was doing something similar to the door on our side of the building courtyard. He let the door slowly close.  Then he went back to the door on the other side of the courtyard and started on that door. Lather, rinse repeat, screwdriver, adjust, close, back and forth he went.  Two hours later we were going to the main house for lunch and I finally asked what he was up to.  He cheerfully told me that it had been driving him crazy that the doors on the opposite sides of the courtyard closed at different rates and he was going to work at them until they closed at exactly the same rate.

It was then that I finally realized that the Senior Minions I was working with/for were not only brilliant but at time they were ALL as Mad as a Hatter.

It was also then that I realized that the addition of artists into their world was new to them.  We weren’t that far removed from ASCII STAR TREK at that time and they were used to doing EVERYTHING, including the art.  Part of me thought they were somewhat intimidated when they saw my portfolio (and those of the guys that followed me), but another part of me felt that they looked at us as a necessary evil.  They did NOT accept me (one of us!).

Still I did get some amusement out of my new realization. Coupled with my growing self confidence (that came from my settling into my job and not only doing it, but learning to enjoy it) this paved the way for much hilarity.  In design meetings I am not sure if it was my Art Director or I that coined the phrase “programmer art” but it came into general usage after a time, first as a defensive weapon and later as a consensual joke as the programmers and artists settle in working together and realized they liked each other.  The competition eventual dulled.  It is always good to work with smart, talented people everyday.

I did have on bit of fun though with a particular middle level Minion who kept asking if he could do “just one pixel so I can say I did art for the game”.  It was a joke between us for weeks until finally I told him sure…but I had to be able to make ONE CHANGE to the code on his project and not tell him where I did it.  By then the programmers had started calling me “Speaker to artists” in deference to my ability to relate technical issues to artists while the artists called me “speaker to programmers” for the same reason.  Either way he knew that I knew JUST ENOUGH to be dangerous in his code (and Debuggers then were nowhere NEAR as good as they are now).  The subject was tabled indefinitely.

So fast foreword to today and here I sit with my XCode open, a “iPhone Development for Dummies” book open and perplexed by the very term “Objective C”.  In the world of the New Media the Wagons have come full circle and I realize that I am having to struggle through the creation of what can only be called “Artist Code”.  The gods are laughing from on High at Skywalker ranch.

I gotta go, the front and back screen doors are driving me crazy…

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The Job nobody wanted

Posted on July 28, 2010 by Bucky



The burgers in Austin were pretty damn good last tim I was there, especially at Top Notch which was a favorite eatery for the art crew at Critical Mass Interactive.  The decor was like something from an Andy Williams special when I was a kid and the meat was like warm succulent lipid joy held together with love and connective tissue.  The cheese ran like lava from a Hawaiian volcano, further spackling things together.  The Lettuce is as crisp as packing styrofoam and the buns as soft as a cheerleader’s thigh.  All of this is accompanied by a chocolate Malt that would make Andy Hardy weep and crinkle cut fries.

In this fine establishment I would gather at least once a week with the kids who were working for me in the art department at CMI and we would share this sumptuous repast.   I have always had problems talking about what I have seen and done in the industry.  I have been lucky enough to see and do some pretty amazing stuff and work with some pretty amazing people so when I just mention who I shared offices with and who I drank beers with it sounds, in the game world, like I am dropping names.  As a result I just don’t talk about it a lot. In Austin I leaned on this odd affectation to sit back, munch and listen to the artists who came after me, this chatter often reminded me of other conversations I had taken part in years before.

In “The Elite Artist and Programmer Annex” at Skywalker ranch, otherwise known as the “Art Pit” we talked about pretty much everything and speculated about the same.  I was, for the most part, the sole real “Nerd” in the group.  The guys I worked with were artists above all else, I was an OK artist but I also came from an engineering background so I was more technical than most.  This latter earned me the appellation “speaker to programmers” (never was sure if that was a complement or an insult).

One day in the pit we were all trying as hard as we could to create art using 16 colors in 320X200 pixel resolution. The other guys were much more comfortable with a pencil in their hand than with a mouse (or “bar of soap”) and the conversation was ranging far and wide to speculation about how work could be done in a more traditional manner and ported to the computer. I was drawing NAZIs that days.  I always drew NAZIs.  I actually was credited as the “Nazi Wrangler” in one Indiana Jones game.  As everyone talked about the new WACOM tablets that ILM was using and scanners I interjected a non-sequitur that shut the room down.

“You know guys,” I mused out loud as I tried to remember the correct number of buttons on an SS officer’s Tunic, ”one day there will be artists in this industry who won’t worry about such things, drawing on the computer will be more natural to them then drawing on paper.”

The silence in the room made me think I had farted in church.

Fast Forward 20 odd years to a now grease soaked diner table at the Top Notch.  I was breaking bread (well more like breaking BUNS) with those very artists whose coming I had predicted like John the Baptist.  Between bites of burger and slurps of Malt I asked the crew how they had come to be there while thinking about my own path to that table. The bright young faces around me told me with unabashed enthusiasm about their own journeys to the table at the Top Notch.

Their tales all started with them in front of computer counsel games when they were young staring at the dancing lights on the screen. What my artsy friends had sneered in the past this new generation had found magical. They didn’t see the blockiness of the pixels and the limited color palettes they saw a whole other world populated with friendly locals and easily delineated bad guys. Rather than a complicated place where they were learning all the strict rules of a society they didn’t understand it was a much friendlier place. In that world they knew the rules and they were given quests to do with clear goals and stimulating tasks along the way.

Those pixels had fascinated them so much that they decided that it was what they wanted to do with their lives.  The art that my ARTISTE friends had turned their noses up at (God forbid that things should change between the time of Titian and the Wild West that is the internet) was stimulating a new generation of artists. These were the artists whose coming I foretold back in the pit, that made me smile…which also made me wipe my mouth off as a little cow juice trickled out.

If I went around the table I saw bright eager faces who were working their asses off for very little pay just to be in computer games.  All of them had a free flowing tap of enthusiasm and love for their work.  All of them were start and talented and eager, happy to be where they were (despite the hardships). All of them had one more thing in common,  All of them had mountains of student loan debt from digital trade schools where they had been taught by guys of my generation, some of them the same doubters I had originally worked with “back in the day”. This led me to think about where I had come from and made me even LESS likely to share it with them.

Before I got into the computer games industry I had spent a lot of years hanging with a bad crowd.  Ravening artists with only one thing on their minds, doing art.  Their second priority was studying and researching art.  Beyond that they ate a little bit and maybe found some cute fan girl (or guy) to make out with, but not for long…soon they were right back into that whole art thing.  Lather, rinse, repeat, make out etc.  Their lives were wrapped around their pencils (and you can take that any way you want).  They ate macro-biotic, drank coffee before it was cool and wanted to do comics (or book covers or editorial stuff).  The LAST thing they wanted to do was draw with blocks of color as big as your head  using 3 colors and a joystick.

One of our crowd though, a more practical artist than most, had gotten a job working at the silent Mother of everything that is Geeky, ATARI, where he started the long tradition of being “brick artists”.  He realized that the work though not as ARTISTICALLY stimulating as his traditional work had something attached to it that the others did not.  It had a regular paycheck, and a good one at that. Being a good chum he wanted to share the wealth with his pals who he KNEW could use the money. At that time though there was something else he had to learn, It wasn’t just hard to get artists to do this type of work then, it was nearly impossible. There was much scoffing and sneering when he mentioned it to them.  Noses were turned up and obscene gesture from indy French films exchanged at the mere thought of doing “commercial” art for “computer games”. If any of them had smoked they would have fired up a Gauloises, blown smoke in his face and forced him to retreat to hails of derisive laughter and squeaky bandoneon music.

On the other hand though there I was, freshly spit out by the Hollywood animation world and packing to head back to Nor Cal, probably back to a print shop.  I had made enough of a dent in the illustration world by then to start getting regular assignments from a couple of magazines in New York so returning to So Cal hadn’t been a total loss.  Another artist who knew my situation mentioned me to the Practical artists, who was now Art Director at Lucasfilm. He approached at a Science Fiction convention in Oakland California and asked if I would be interested in coming to work for for him.  They had to peel me off the ceiling and I immediately said yes, but for a different reason.  See I wanted to get into the special effects and animation business and I figured that if I was working in the company I would get a chance to jump ship to that division.

The simple fact of the matter is that I became a computer games artists because no one else wanted the job (including me).

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