Jonathan Reilly - Creative Director @ Inner Freak Ltd

The third week saw us with the massively talented Creative Director at Inner Freak, Jonathan Reilly. For this Guest Lecture I was really excited to finally meet and talk a fellow artist all about his experience and work within the games industry and what got him where he is at this moment in his career.

To start off the Lecture, Jonathan started by giving us examples of where he started in his career and also the games that he has worked on in the past. Jonathan was hired at Bizarre Creations as a Junior Texture Artist, during the early stages of his career at Bizarre he was assigned to create window textures for a current project they were working on, he described this as something that “paid the bills” but his desires were to someday create Character’s for games. This is where he described how during all of his personal time he devoted himself to learn a completely new software, Zbrush, which helped him work on some of the biggest characters in games and film. The key part of the Lecture that stuck out to me was how much Jonathan was trying to put across that working on personal projects in your spare time is absolutely crucial. Jonathan described how due to him learning and mastering Zbrush outside of work, this allowed him to create amazing characters at a very fast pace which made him more valuable in a job and also helped doors open in the gaming industry that would not have been there without his decision.

During the presentation Jonathan decided to give us a little feedback on what to expect when we are working in the games industry, for example, reputation is everything, everybody knows everybody and also prepare to work long hours. These multiple factors were something that has to be taken seriously when it comes to getting a job in the games industry, for example be prepared to work long hours. For example Jonathan described how he had to leave a certain job due to the amount of time that he was spending in work, and also trying to balance work and family time together was very difficult for him at the time due to the amount of hours required for the project. I decided to do a lot more research on the amount of hours required of a games employee today and I come across an article that was written by The Guardian which described the crunch within the games industry and one part stood out to me massively which was a blog written by an anonymous wife of a Electronic Arts, reading through the blog she described how her husband was working extortionate hours every day, even weekends. “The current mandatory hours are 9am to 10pm – seven days a week, with the occasional Saturday evening off for good behaviour (at 6:30pm).” - (EA Wife Article) As you can see from the quote above, the wife of the EA employee describes that the hours are 9am-10pm, seven days a week with the occasional Saturday evening off for good behaviour, this shows the amount of dedication that the team of successful game companies will put in during crunch to make the game as successful as it can be. References: LiveJournal. 2004. EA: The Human Story. [ONLINE] Available at: http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html. [Accessed 20 February 15]. Jonathan Reilly, (2015), Photo [ONLINE]. Available at:https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B8b1ypRIYAAPsk6.jpg [Accessed 13 February 15]. Inner Freak. 2014. Inner Freak Blog. [ONLINE] Available at: http://inner-freak.com/#blog. [Accessed 13 February 15].

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