Exploring an Artist's Journey from Film to Mobile

Vincent Toscano is a 3D and Pipeline Development Director at GREE International, with  20+ years of animation and art experience. Starting in the film industry at Lucas Film and now overseeing 3D art for GREE’s broad portfolio of titles – Vincent is passionate about bringing his film expertise into mobile games and is here to discuss tips, tricks, and challenges that people may face when making a similar transition.

1. Tell us a little bit about your background and what is your role at GREE now?

My passions have always revolved around a mixture of art and engineering. If I look back, I think my career path was chosen for me the day I tried to animate a cartoon sword fight on the Commodore 64, the first computer I ever owned. Working on that was the right amount of artistic and technical hacking that would inevitably define what I would be doing for the next twenty years professionally in the entertainment industry.

Right out of college, the entertainment industry was fairly fertile grounds for new innovation in computer graphics. A new generation of graphic computers was hitting the market, and lots of theories and research papers were being discussed in the field of computer graphics. The computer graphics software that is commonplace to today’s artist just didn’t exist then.  It was about to be invented.

I jumped right in, and found myself over time specializing in designing digital paint, compositing, camera tracking, and world building software for the visual effects film studios.

One of the first pieces of software I wrote for Industrial Light + Magic, was a paint system for use in their film dirt removal department. We did some early tests with it cleaning up the digital scans on the re-release of “The Empire Strikes Back”, and after refining it some for the artists we put it in production cleaning up the footage coming back from the location shoot for the movie “The Lost World: Jurassic Park.”

As an engineer, most of my time was spent closely working with the artists, discovering what their problems were, and designing solutions for them. For the movie “Small Soldiers” some of the artists I was working with were struggling to lock the cg toy soldiers feet to the live action plates. I hacked together some tools to help automate this for them, which then turned out to be the basis for the software we would use on the movie “The Mummy” to help lock the cg prosthetic pieces on the actor Arnold Vosloo’s face for the mummy transformation sequences.

During these days, there has always been a mixture of working with the artists and also as an artist. I found early on, that to design the best tools for an artist, was to be an artist that used them.

My role at GREE is to work with the Art Department; build a 3D art team to help launch a new evolution of mobile games; and to manage the technical artists, whose responsibilities are to design the tools and workflows to “enable” the artists and to allow them to deliver the best art assets to the engineers for our games.

 2. How has your background in film helped your career in mobile and specifically in mobile games?

My time working in the film industry was a great experience for learning about the art in entertainment. Some of the high lights of what I learned include the camera, and how you can use it to compose scenes, and tell stories; all about color and light, and how you can use them to create mood; and I learned how a smudge is as good as a detailed rendering if its far enough away.

Creating good entertainment on mobile devices uses the same principles as in film. Even though the mobile screen is much smaller than the silver screen for film, all the same techniques apply.

3. Do you have any advice for people who may want to make the switch from film/entertainment to mobile games in the future?

I would hope that everyone has the good fortune to work in the industry that they are passionate about. If someone wishes to make the jump to mobile games, the first thing they should do is understand that the games industry has a very rich past. It has it’s own star players and major franchises. You should be knowledgeable about how to design fun!

Take advantage of the fact that there is a wealth of information online these days about making games. Most game engines are free to try. All the major software packages have demo suites. You definitely need to try and make a game on the computer if you have never done so before. This will take some time, but it the best investment of your time if you want to make a leap into your new career.

4. Describe a day in the life of an artist in a mobile games studio

An artist spends a fair amount of their time: in design, iterating, reviewing, refining, and optimizing their art in the game. Getting feedback from peers and referencing other art is always on the schedule. But, at the end of the day, their main priority is figuring out the best quality to performance trade off for each piece of art that they work on so that it can all work together on the device.

5. Are there any new technologies that you are playing with now or see may be popular in the near future?

I’m a huge fan of augmented reality. I like technology that helps us extend our playable surfaces from the device into the real world; things that help facilitate the player’s actual intents when playing the game; and technology that ties the mobile devices to our other electronic devices.

6. Any last thoughts?

Iterate fast and make sure it’s always fun for the players!