[00:00:13] Speaker A: Hello, and welcome to the martial arts podcast. I'm Rick Marshall.
In the last episode, I interviewed drag performance artist John Macdonald, also known as Noel diamond. For this episode, I sat down with Ben Green, art director for Gearbox Software, the video game studio responsible for Borderlands, one of the best selling game franchises of all time.
The Capital Region based artist has worked in the video game industry for nearly two decades now as a concept artist and art director, giving him a unique perspective on the way video games use art to immerse players in stunning interactive worlds.
[00:00:55] Speaker B: Ben, before we dig into your art and career, it'd probably be helpful to some listeners if we explain what it is an art director does at a video game studio.
[00:01:05] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a great question. Let me think about it.
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Do you know what you do?
[00:01:09] Speaker C: Yeah, I don't think I know what I do. What do they pay me for? So it's gonna be. The interesting thing is it can be a little different from studio to studio. It can be a little different art director to art director.
Everyone, as an individual has their own strengths and their own comfort levels around what they take on at the studio, what the studio is looking for from the art director versus. Some studios will have an art manager and an art director. A lot of times I end up being in roles where I'm both managing the artists at the studio and creatively directing the games that we're working on, which is something actually, that I really is part of the passion. Part of my passion for art directing that led me into art directing was being people management, helping create positive creative environments, as well as pushing the envelope on what we could do creatively in the games.
[00:02:17] Speaker B: So are you sort of overseeing the look and the visual side of the project that you're working on? Is that part of the sort of art director job description?
[00:02:28] Speaker C: Yes. Yeah. So you can work on preexisting IP.
You know, we're talking about Mario Bros. Something that already exists that people know.
I work at gearbox software. We're known for making the Borderlands franchise. So there's a lot of pre established visual language already.
And what a lot of times the art directors are doing on products like those is finding ways to continue to enhance them, bring them into modernity or into a modern technological space so that we're keeping up with the games that are coming out now and not just rehashing the same technologies and the same visuals and everything that we've done in the past, caretaking for the franchise, staying true to it, but also finding ways to, again, just mature it. And I I like to say surprise and delight, as opposed to, if you're working on an original IP, then you're building something fresh from the ground up. And depending on your skill as an art director, you might be creating the visual language yourself, or you may be hiring particular team members who are good at creating visual language. And you're simply saying, oh, yes, I like this, or I would like to try this. Can you try this next? And this is working, but this isn't working for me. And you sort of guide other people through the process.
And art directors come from different backgrounds, too. Some are coming from a more technical background, some are coming from more three d. A lot of.
[00:04:12] Speaker B: What was your background?
[00:04:13] Speaker C: My background was concept art, which was being a person to help discover the look and feel of the games we were working on. So a concept artist is in charge of receiving information about what the game is and what we want it to look like or what the company wants it to look like. And exploring visually what the characters look like and what the environments we're going to go into. The world that we're going to go into looks like it's all drawing and painting and visual discovery and then helping to, over time, hone that into what the final product is. And in that case, depending, again on the art director as you're working with, they're going to be like, yeah, I like where you're going with this.
Let's make it more stylized or more colorful or less colorful, more gritty, more realistic, more things like that, and kind of pushing and pulling.
[00:05:12] Speaker B: What was your path towards? I know you said you started out as a concept artist, but what was your path towards becoming an art director?
[00:05:18] Speaker C: Yeah, I actually went to school for comic books.
That was what I wanted to do originally, and I was doing a lot of comic, just for myself, comic work, and went to school to continue into that pursuit. I got burned out with it. In the middle of school, I discovered concept art. I was like, what is this? This is really interesting.
And sort of like, changed trajectories in the middle of school and had to ended up doing a lot more work because of that.
And so when I, when I was.
When I found myself in the role of a concept artist, it took quite a bit of work to get into that role.
[00:06:03] Speaker B: How do you get started as a concept artist? It feels like that's like, I've got this concept. Here's the art. I mean, I'm sure it's not that simple.
[00:06:12] Speaker C: Yeah, you need to be. Concept art is not for everyone. There's a lot of people that want to do it. There aren't a lot of people that are.
There are. There are people that just like with anything, there are people who are more skilled at creating, visually interpreting ideas, basically, is what you're doing, and not just one for one, taking the idea and being like, you asked for a car. I made a car. But creating a variety of options and a variety of ideas that nobody else has the time to think of. So the concept artist needs to. A good concept artist needs to say, hey, you asked for a dune buggy that fits into this world.
I created eight to however many ideas. I had. Sketches of dune buggies that fit the parameters of this game that we're making. I had these, all these ideas for what it could be. Some of them are dumb, but I just got them down on paper. Some of them are too fantastic. It's always good to go too big and too low and kind of find that medium, and then you never know what's going to spark inspiration.
[00:07:25] Speaker B: Giving people options.
[00:07:27] Speaker C: Yeah, and you want to give options because a really powerful tool for the concept artist is being able to actually influence what ends up happening in the game. Concept artists have a lot more power than a lot of times they realize that they have.
[00:07:42] Speaker B: Well, how did you go from concept artist then, or actually even taking a step back? Where was your first work as a concept artist?
[00:07:50] Speaker C: So I did some freelance.
I started out as a freelance concept artist, and I was terrible at it.
And eventually I got an in house, full time position in Annapolis, Maryland, at a studio that no longer exists. It was called Blue Omega Entertainment.
We put out two games that did not do well, and the studio doesn't exist anymore.
But it was the start to the rest of my career, really.
[00:08:27] Speaker B: It was the foot in the door.
[00:08:28] Speaker C: Yeah. And ever since then, I've moved around. I've lived in seven different states just following my career to the next opportunity that existed. And of course, now there's so much more opportunity for staying put and working remotely that you're not seeing as many people relocating in the last handful of years as you used to. But I relocated a lot, and I'm very fortunate right now to be working with gearbox remotely from here in upstate, because I love it here.
[00:09:01] Speaker B: A lot of people don't really realize how big a part of the capital region the video game industry has become. You spend time at Vellin Studios, the Troy studio that was created by the founders of Carious Visions. It eventually became Blizzard Albany. There. Now you're with Gearbox. As you mentioned, you've worked for a few other studios. You've mentioned what has it been like to work on video games in regions sort of outside of California or the big cities, or even specifically here? Because you think video game studio, you think California, you think West coast, you think big cities?
[00:09:35] Speaker C: Yeah. Well, the east coast in general is pretty sparse, and all of my work has been east coast. Now, I've done a lot of interviewing on the west coast, and I've been out on the west coast several times. There's a lot of activity out there in entertainment.
Texas, California, and Washington. Seattle, the Seattle area, are the biggest hubs, I believe, right now, and we've got some nice spots continuing to grow here on the east. Raleigh in North Carolina, has several big names. One of the biggest names, Epic Games, is there in Raleigh, and they create the Unreal engine, which is used all over the world. For a lot of the games that we play here in Upstate, we've got a handful of prosperous and strong studios that it's kind of like a little hidden hub.
I know that there's a lot of passion for growing entertainment, especially the video game industry here in Upstate.
[00:10:43] Speaker B: Is there a particular type of art you really enjoy working on? Maybe a particular genre or a project or character or environment? What's the sort of project that you really jump at when it comes across your desk?
[00:10:55] Speaker C: Yeah, well, it's interesting because you've rarely. I have found you rarely get the opportunity to work on what you are truly wanting to pursue. You a lot of times, take on what studios need help creating. They come to you and they say, hey, you've got this skill. We've seen your previous work.
You know, we see your personal work, but this is, this is what we're trying to make. Can you. Can you make this for us? And so you. You end up taking on the parenting of that project, and you find the best way to bring.
To wrangle the challenges of that particular product to fulfillment.
[00:11:48] Speaker B: Getting it to the finish line.
[00:11:49] Speaker C: Getting it to the finish line. And a lot of times, it's not what you would have chosen to create if you had.
If you had your way. If I had my. If I had a magic wand and I could just switch it through the air and work on what I wanted to work on, you know, in the way that I wanted to work 90% of the time, it's not going to be that I had this really wonderful opportunity with gearbox, where it was exactly what I've always wanted to work on.
So I've been in my career for 18 years. Now. And pretty much I've gotten close a couple times, but I think it was the first time I really got to sink my teeth into something that I was fully passionate about, fully on board with, fully hungry for. And interestingly enough, during the interview process, I learned that part of their interest in me had to do with the work they saw from my own personal project. My own personal project, of course, is going to be exactly the kind of content I want to be creating, which is kind of an amalgamation of dark fantasy and mysterious Sci-Fi elements. I like to create things that don't, that have rules, but don't put limits on what's possible to experience.
[00:13:11] Speaker B: Well, I'd imagine that your background as a concept artist, as a comic artist, has got to help in sort of figuring out where there needs to be guardrails to in a universe like that, and where there needs to be sort of a path forward with bringing a project from concept to, hey, people are playing it now.
[00:13:34] Speaker C: Yeah, a lot of times it starts with a much smaller idea or I or the beginnings of a narrative, and they're like, let's build a game out of this narrative. Or there's this particular mechanic we made at Velen Studios. One of the big games that we made and that I directed was called knockout City. And it started with the simple idea, the simple mechanic of the interaction of throwing and catching.
It's pretty, pretty basic, pretty central to a lot of our growing up. And they were like, how do we take this mechanic of this human interaction of throwing and catching and turn it into a competitive, fast paced, frenetic gaming experience that people can get together and have a lot of fun with? And what kind of world do we build around? What kind of world do we build that makes sense that people are doing it and it's not just a sport. We didn't want to make a sports game. So there's a lot of questions to answer there right off the bat. And so you just start chipping away at it. And it works the same way with world building in general or creating new narrative, new kinds of visual experiences. You have to start with a simple idea. It may be an idea that's been done a million times, but the interesting thing is that once you start working on it, you start influencing that simple idea, because you are an individual with your own experiences and your own ideas and your own influences, and that starts creating complexity. And then you bring other people into it, and they all start chipping away at it, and you start talking about what is and isn't working, and it starts to blossom into something unique.
[00:15:28] Speaker A: Hi, it's Rick again. I just want to make sure you know about the Daily Gazette's other podcast, parting shots. Sports editor Ken Schott has been highlighting the latest and greatest news from the sports world for nearly 400 episodes now interviewing coaches, players, and broadcasters from around the industry.
Like the Martial arts podcast, you can find all of the episodes of parting
[email protected]. and wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the martial arts podcast.
[00:16:04] Speaker B: I know that video games aren't your only outlet for art. You've illustrated a children's book. You have a sketch club that meets in the region. You have this personal project you've been working on a very, very long time. I know a bit about it already, but can you talk a little bit about it?
[00:16:19] Speaker C: Sure. Yeah.
So I like creating stories and worlds from the ground up. I love the challenge of creating something from nothing and from getting a spark of inspiration, like, oh, that's an interesting idea. And then again, just like I was just talking about, just chipping away at that until it becomes more than an idea, until it becomes something that other people can get excited about, until it becomes something that makes sense on a broader scale, whether that world is located on earth or located in another dimension or located on another planet or located in a pocket reality.
This is how you get your narnias and your Alice in Wonderlands and your neverwheres and all these stories that take us one step behind the curtain. And so I had this idea. I was already working on this one big project, actually, that I had started in high school. Fortunately, it matured quite a lot, uh, over the years since high school, so it no longer felt like a high school project. I'm still really excited about that. But I had to, I had to put a pause on it due to some, uh, uh, life events. And in the middle of that pause, I got this idea for just a fun illustration. I was like, oh, it'd be really, it'd be really cool to have this western style, uh, illustration of this, this cowboy firing their six shooters off the back of their horse, you know, very, very standard, except it's not a cowboy. It's a wizard in garb that kind of mixes western and wizardry styles, and they're firing wands instead of six shooters. And, like, what would be, what would be the, the visual challenge to sort of pull that off, where at first you go, oh, it's a, it's a western illustration. And they're like, no, it's a fantasy illustration, you know, and, um, it's not like western and fantasy. That's not, that's not a new idea. It really became a new idea as I started going, well, this is interesting. What kind of world would exist to make, uh, to make this image make sense? And I just started asking that question because I can't help it. And I started, uh, just creating all these sketches in a sketchbook.
[00:18:47] Speaker B: I know some of those sketches you've actually posted online.
[00:18:50] Speaker C: Yeah, there's a lot. Yeah. A lot of what I post actually is just related to that. Because when I have time to work on my own creative output, I am investing in this project because my goal is to get it into people's hands. Just a couple years ago, I got it to a point where I was able to pitch it professionally as a video game.
That was a huge achievement. It went really well. It's not currently going to be a video game, but it was a great pitch session and I am focused on putting it out as some sort of physical media to be seen. Currently, I'm writing the prose for it and I have a lot of illustrations and I have this vision of having a full narrative book that has spot illustrations and sketches sort of embedded in between the text and so that you get like a visual journey as you get the narrative journey as well. But we'll see. We'll see what it ends up doing. But I'm, you know, bringing that into some form of fulfillment that can be experienced. I want people to experience, have experience with it. That's the ultimate goal.
[00:19:57] Speaker B: Well, having seen quite a bit of these sketches and talked with, talking with you about it quite a bit, I am excited to see where it goes. I do want to ask you about one thing that also really impressed me about you and your career. Your willingness to sort of mentor and work with young creatives and aspiring game designers. You spoke at Virginia Commonwealth University, I think, earlier this year, and you're always willing to share the work of other artists. What motivates you to provide that kind of, sort of supportive force in this industry?
[00:20:33] Speaker C: First and foremost, because someone provided that for me and it made all of the difference between me. When I, when I was trying to get started, I had so many questions. I didn't have. I didn't have answers. I didn't know anyone who could answer the questions.
I was overthinking everything. I was trying all kinds of approaches with my art and with just tactics in starting my career.
And one person, I emailed a lot of different artists, one person who was a professional fantasy illustrator and working as a game developer at Ensemble studios, which no longer exists. A gentleman by the name of David Cherry was very gracious with his time and emailed back and forth with me. I would send these very complex, long winded emails, just like exasperated, asking all these questions and talking about everything I'm trying and what I where my background and like, I'm a better artist than this, but I'm just not putting out art good enough or I'm not catching anybody's attention. And I just, I don't understand, you know, what I need to be doing. And my art's getting worse because I'm overthinking it and I'm trying to, I realized I was trying to be other artists as opposed to being my own artist, which is a big lesson that I learned and like to teach other up and coming artists about because it is a thing that we do. We often do. And he took the time to respond to me, and really, it only took like a month or two of corresponding a couple times a week for me to reorient my way of thinking and my approach and gain clarity and confidence in what I was doing. And it wasn't long before I got my first full time concept job. It's amazing the power of even just a little bit of mentorship or someone just to come alongside you who has been through it and say, hey, let me show you some, show you reveal the secrets or just clarify some things because there's just so many questions and.
[00:22:43] Speaker B: Just to tell you it's going to be okay.
This is part of the process, what you're going through.
[00:22:49] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, it is still up. Just like in college, a professor can't make you good at what you're studying. You still have to put in the work, you still have to have the passion, you still have to identify what it's going to take for you as an individual because we all have different ways of processing information because of that experience and seeing what that did for me and what I've been, I still had to work really hard, but I was able to take the information and put it to work and, and find an amount of success that started bringing in consistent money, at least being paid for what I wanted to do. I can now pay that forward, really, and turn around and I have these awesome opportunities to. I have worked with the Savannah College of Art and Design, some with Virginia Commonwealth University, with Champlain College, and have, you know, been to a variety of other smaller venues and functions. I love it. I really love being able to talk about it. I love being able to open up and be very genuine with the students about, hey, this is not easy, and this is what it's going to take.
It's okay if it's not right for you. Also, like, it can be unhealthy sometimes. Our pursuits, we think that this is the only thing for us. We think that if we're not achieving this one thing, that we're failing at life, and it becomes actually a toxic element in our growth, stunting us from finding other potential. There's so many things we can do with our lives that is just as important as video games or creating art, or we can create art without being paid for it and still surprise and delight people online.
[00:24:33] Speaker B: You know, I feel like it's valuable for people to know the pivot you made early on, too, from comic books to concept artists, because there are probably a lot of people who feel like this is what I have to do. Like you said, this is, if I don't do this one thing, I failed. But a slight pivot in other directions sometimes can change your perspective, change sort of where you're going with your art.
[00:24:57] Speaker C: Interestingly enough, I vocalized several times that I never wanted to be an art director. Never wanted to be an art director. I felt like being an art director was a failure of my goals. I wanted to be focused on creating art. I wanted to be continuously creating art. And then I had this opportunity. I was offered this opportunity to art direct a project that I was a lead concept artist on many years ago. And I was really passionate about the project, and I had a lot of ideas for how to push it to the next level of creative experience.
And I shared those ideas with the heads of the studio during a demo review, and they turned to me and they said, do you want to be the art director for this? And I was like, oh, shoot, turning point. I had to actually tell them. I had to get back to them because I had to go home and process that. And I realized that I absolutely did not want to experience somebody else taking on this project, and I. And not realizing the full potential of it that I saw it had. And it also gave me an opportunity to lean into making good on all these philosophies I'd been building around people management and creative environments, and I'm still learning.
Every new studio, every new group of people, every new project has new and fresh challenges to fail at and to learn from and to, you know, failure is good as long as we are taking those lessons and we're growing from them, and we're not repeating those failures.
[00:26:42] Speaker B: Well, Ben, this has been an amazing conversation.
I knew you well before we sat down for this conversation, but I have learned a lot from it while we've been talking here. But I do want to make sure that people know where they can find your work, whether it's your upcoming work, whether it is your past work, what have been some of the games and projects that are out there where people can find work you've already done?
[00:27:08] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a great question. Unfortunately, there's so much that I have made that doesn't really exist anymore. The first game that I.
The first game of scale, of significant scale, I guess, that I art directed, was called Dungeon Defenders two.
And every once in a while, I'll mention that, and I'll still get someone that's like, I grew up playing that. My brother and I. I can't believe it was you. You know? And I was like, wow, you know what that is? Okay. Neat. Every once in a while. Yeah. And then Knockout City is the most recent and most well known. I mean, we had millions around the world playing it again. It no longer has active public servers. You can still play it on PC and create your own server and invite your friends to play it. It's still available, but you kind of have to do a little bit of your own footwork. We also made Mario Kart live, which was a sizable success. We're very proud of that. And currently, I can't disclose the particulars of what I'm doing working with gearbox. And you know that we're known for borderlands, and so lots of cool stuff happening there.
[00:28:23] Speaker B: And maybe you can tell us, too, where to find some of your work online.
[00:28:26] Speaker C: The easiest thing is to look me up under Mister Black cap. M r b L A C k C A P. You'll find me on Instagram. Artstation. If you're familiar with artstation.com, comma, check it out if you're not. Tons of. Tons of artists on there.
[00:28:43] Speaker B: Well, Ben, thank you so much for chatting with me here. This has been awesome. I love conversations like this.
[00:28:49] Speaker C: Thank you for having me.
[00:28:56] Speaker A: This has been the martial arts podcast with guest Ben Green, art director for Gearbox Software. You can find Ben Green on Instagram and art station as Mrblackcap, where you can see some of the art we discussed during this interview. Thanks for listening to this episode of martial Arts. If you like what you heard and want to hear more, make sure to subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. And for more coverage of the regions arts and entertainment scene, head to DailyGazette.com and Nipper Town. This episode was produced by me, Rick Marshall for the Daily Gazette. If there's a local art story or artist you'd like to hear more about on this podcast, you can contact me at r. Marshallailygazette.net or via social media.
