Art Outsourcing Benefits and Challenges
Author of this post: Ee Leng Chang | About Blog Authors »Art outsourcing is a highly debated topic in the game industry. For one of our projects, we outsourced these tiny cut-scenes to an artist in Canada (we’re based in Australia). We got benefits from the arrangement, but also faced challenges that we didn’t predict.
Benefits:
Time – It freed up the time of our animators.
Challenges:
Communication – It was really tough because he wasn’t around to give feedback to very easily. So the turnaround took much longer. And the work had to go through several passes. If done in-house, it would have been much easier to look into what was going on and change the direction on the spot if needed.
Relationship – In this case, we were working with someone who had worked previously in the studio so there was that slightly more personal relationship already established. Sort of like, he was already friends with us, and we also wanted to help him out job-wise when he had to move back. So that made it a bit harder when it was time for us to say “this isn’t working out, sorry”. Just a bit of background on it, it didn’t work out well because it was taking too long and our schedule was brought forward.
Managing Outsourcing:
One thing we did was to only give him cut-scenes that were bonuses in game. So they were the “nice-to-have” cut-scenes. Which meant when our schedule was shortened, it wasn’t hard to just cut the entire feature.
These cut-scenes were meant to be old-school 50s style toy commercials. This style was established so that it would be easiest for him to work on it, even though we were still settling on environment styles for the game. Also we asked for black and white commercials, so that we could easily re-skin the assets in different colours for the game without much impact on these commercials.
That was our first try at outsourcing. For our new project, we’ve outsourced our big intro and outro cut-scenes to a local animation studio. That is going a lot better as they sent an artist here before they started on any work, so that all concepts, discussions, ideas could be hashed out together face-to-face.
Outsourcing is definitely getting more and more common and has heaps of pros, as long as it’s managed well. Communication and process are the most important things to get right.
Tags: Art
