I’m an industry veteran with 30 years of experience in games and animation. I’m currently Sr Director of Creative dev at 2K games in Dublin. After studying Art & Film and spending the early part of my career in France, I moved to Northern California in 1996 with an opportunity to work for Dreamworks Animation, on Antz and Academy award winner Shrek. Then I moved from animation to work on AAA games at the EA Redwood Shores HQ. The next chapter was with ILM/Lucasfilm, to work on animated TV series and films, as games with LucasArts, I had the unique opportunity to directly collaborate with George Lucas on feature films as on Emmy award-winning animated series. With ILM R&D, I contributed to developing innovative real-time-based previs processes.
I then moved to Los Angeles in 2010 to work for Activision Publishing in Santa Monica. There, I was the head of cinematics productions, supporting the worldwide studios, contributing to 20 AAA games, directing cinematics and managing outsourcing studios for the mega-franchises such as Call of Duty, Skylanders, Destiny, until 2017. I kept directing cinematics and trailers with my own production company Spacecargo for Ubisoft, Warner, HBO Interactive, Axis before moving to Dublin in 2018 to work for Hasbro animation at Boulder Media. I recently was Executive Creative Director at Virtuos, and Technicolor Games where I led their India studio, as managing distributed teams Art teams in Asia, Europe and North America.
WHAT I HOPE TO ACHIEVE (AND WILL FIGHT FOR)
I’d like to focus on what I’m familiar with: Craft excellence. I’d like to target few well defined areas of improvement and help the Irish games industry to upskill and gain maturity.
Identify and reduce the games skills gap between Ireland and other EU nations - As a hiring manager in Ireland, this is one of my main concerns I’ve been struggling with: France has amazing animation & games schools. Artists, Designers, Animators are production-ready and fully employable before they graduate. Germany, Holland are strong too, Spain’s also catching up fast.
None of our schools offers a five-year program with a preparation/leveling year, students are not production ready, and we have very low international attractivity for foreign students. We are not UA5 proficient in our schools, game programs are very “generalist” and don’t offer full game art courses.
Animation and VFX had gained more maturity in Ireland over the last 10 year (VFX over the last 5), games are still unfortunately trailing behind. We need to identify what is missing, work with schools on specialized games Art curriculum and lobby with the government (Screen Ireland/Skillnet) to have the same training support for games than Animation and recently VFX had: There is currently a National Talent Academy for Animation and VFX, but not for games … let’s work on this!
Gain more international exposure - Work with government agencies (IDA/Enterprise Ireland), to promote our industry, tax credit, and quality of life to foreign publishers and developers: Create and promote success stories.
Developing the ecosystem upwards - As I mentioned in my bio, I have years of experience with large publishers and dev studios, as on the Games service side. So, how could we become more attractive to mid to large foreign publishers and developers, as with service studios, and have several major industry actors building outposts, publishing offices, and development studios in Ireland? People can Fly moving here is a great story, Black Shamrock story’s also successful, Romero is a landmark, but what is the multiplier, and formula to expand our growth? That’s what I’d like to investigate and improve.
Cross pollination with the Animation/VFX industries - The ecosystem also needs to expand locally and horizontally, by creating a pool of cross over artists who could work with dev studios, animation studios, and VFX. There’s a convergence around Unreal workflows that is favorable, but training needs to catch up alongside education. Again, it’s all tied with education and training, we need to work with Animation Ireland/Skillnet/government agencies on game animation and VFX education, as high end Game Design courses.
Promoting Irish games in industry events: Aim big, but also starts locally - We, of course, have to be present at major events like GDC, Gamescom, XDS, but also need to have a strong insular presence, as in the UK. There was a strong IMIRT presence at NEXUS this year, next year it’ll become bigger and more European, it needs to become our GDC! Render festival in Belfast is to be also interesting, as Develop Brighton. On the Animation side, I’ll be Jurying again the game sting awards at the Dingle animation festival, and this year we created a new game trailers competition that will draw foreign entries and attention to our industry.
It takes a village!
