About me

After many years in the computer games industry working as the Art Director at one of the top studios in the UK, I'm searching for a role that makes best use of my varied skills and experience while providing a fresh challenge.

After joining the Microprose UK Studio in 1993, I was promoted from Artist to Senior Artist then Lead Artist and finally to Art Director (Art Manager). As well as being Lead Artist on the BAFTA winning 'Geoff Crammond Formula One Grand Prix' games I was involved with a number of other hits including the X-Com series and Chris Sawyer's Transport Tycoon games. Following the closure of Dreamforge Software I opted to take a sabbatical. I've used this opportunity to work on projects of my own including writing prose fiction (I was short listed in a national short story competition and successfully completed the NaNoWriMo challenge writing a 50,000 word novel in a month), writing software reviews for a technology website, researching my family tree and writing and illustrating my own ‘How to Draw' book.

My time at Microprose allowed me to work in a broad range of areas. Starting as an Artist, I designed and created various types of Art assets for the projects I worked on. These included, 2D designs, storyboards, 3D models, textures, videos and so on. Later, as Art Director I took over an established team, growing it to fit the requirements of the Studio. I had to combine their day to day management with long term planning to fulfil the creative needs of the Artists while satisfying the business objectives of the company. This was on top of my responsibilities as the project's Lead Artist to deliver work to time, cost and quality while acting as liaison to the other departments on all Art related aspects of a project.
My duties included ensuring the correct Art assets (3D models, textures, interface design, animations, videos, fonts etc) were researched, specified, prioritised, planned, created, reviewed, amended, approved and, finally, ‘checked in' to the project to produce the finished game. My role also required a great deal of diplomacy and negotiation to pin down the demands of various project stakeholders such as the Designer, the Studio Head, the FOM (Formula One Management) license holders and so on. I also needed to liaise with many others in order to get various parts of the project completed successfully including the Formula One personnel, Motion Capture staff, Journalists and various members of upper management.
Though much of my time was spent as a Lead Artist and Art Director, it also included a great deal of Project Management work such as scheduling the Art team, tracking their progress, organising and running the Motion Capture work plus the management of the outsourcing of artwork. I also had Design experience at both Microprose and Dreamforge.

My online portfolio can be found here: *
I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Regards,
Andy Cook