The Pop Quiz, Monday is a fun little exam that we love to give to savvy professionals. The examination is not a surprise after all since the interviewee already knew about the questions in advance. However, we can always pretend and have fun with the scenario of a young professional sitting in class nervously biting on their pencil. They are ready to take a pop quiz on a chapter they were supposed to read the night before. Instead, they played Metroid all night on their SNES (Oops, this was me in high school). 

The real purpose of the pop quiz is that this is a fun way to introduce tips from real-world experiences that you can not learn in a classroom. We want to thank our professionals for being a good sport and volunteering their time to answer a few questions to help our community grow from their knowledge.

I want to introduce you to our guest today who will be taking our Pop Quiz Monday.

Would you please tell everyone your name?

Rasmus Poulsen

What is your job role?

Franchise Art Director

What do you love most about your job?

Getting the chance to play a crucial role in the ideation of a project or IP, to help develop it, as well as the establishment and maintenance of its visual style. Ensuring that all crafts get a chance to affect and strengthen each other over the development period and seeing it all come together in the end.

Who in the past or present in the industry has inspired you in your career path?

In terms of inspiring me as an artist there are lots of influences; Ralph McQuarrie, Joe Johnston, Ron Cobb, Syd Mead to name a few. And of course countless nameless creatives producing inspiring work that would transport me to other worlds as a kid. In terms of inspiring my career paths, my art director during my first professional project, Martin Guldbæk, gave me huge creative freedom and offered me a lot of trust, thusly growing my skillset and experience vastly and I am very thankful for that. Karsten Lund and Mads Prahm, some important colleagues from the following project nudged me into taking of the responsibility of an art director, by asking the question: "Would you rather do good work for somebody else's project, or would you rather help ensuring that a project is good by helping to guide it properly?" Obviously a provocative question that served many purposes. It did the trick though, and we ended up making Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days where I was the art director.

What are some of the professional tools you use to perform your work?

In terms of technical tools I use Powerpoint for vision, and other presentations, Photoshop for concept art and overpaints, Blender for mockups and pre-viz, Pureref for references, as well as a few others. I am not sure of you can call it "tools", but in my leadership I focus on sharing my joy of the craft, a positive outlook, buy-in and co-authorship from my team and honest feedback even when its difficult. It's important to understand that a great idea can come from anywhere in the hierarchy, but so can a bad one.

What motivates you to get up every day and go to work?

The chance to build worlds with talented and aspiring people. To do more than what I could possibly do alone and to push onwards against challenging odds, trying to achieve the endless possibilities we see in our minds eye. In other words, making cool shit! 

What are some lessons learned from a past project that you can share with us?

Well, there are many lessons really. For today I will focus on the balance between creative openness and creative integrity. One the one hand, it's important to be open minded. To listen with the purpose of understanding, rather than listening simply to have a smart comeback or to be right. If you are open minded, the people around you can help you grow the ideas you are sharing into new and grander things. If you don't listen properly you will end up as dumb tomorrow, as you were yesterday. To put it to the extreme, you will end up alone with your so-called perfect vision, and no-one around you to build it with. So openness is important. On the other hand we have the integrity part. You can also be too open. So open that you risk having your ideas get obliterated or critiqued to death before they have a chance to flourish. If the people around you aren't as open as you are, there's a high risk that they will not see the creative dance for what it is, but rather as an argument to be won. In that situation it's important to either stand your ground or part ways. Stand your ground and defend the subtleties of the creative process and your ideas in particular. To see if you can reach a creative understanding, vision wise and process wise. Or part ways knowing that it wouldn't have worked. After all, if your instincts aren't being welcomed, what are you doing there? And this isn't about being insulted or taking things personally. But simply about recognising if a situation or a project is growing you as a creative or if it's stifling you.

What advice would you give to someone new and starting in your industry?

Just do it. To quote Nike. I don't mean just start a game company. But start with just doing what you find interesting. Use Unreal, Unity, Blender etc, and start creating and exploring. Learn off of YouTube, patreon and the other channels and get started. Keep at it often and regularly, like you would with anything else that's important to you and that you love. See where it takes you. Maybe you will discover that you have certain skills that you are better at than others, some areas where your talent flows more naturally. If it feels good, go for it. And then remember to do a few of the difficult things too, so you get a good rounding off. Talk to people online. Engage in the craft of your choosing by discussing it on forums or elsewhere. By forming connections naturally and bonding through a shared love for the craft, you will most likely build a useful circle that might lead you somewhere bigger. Talk about your dreams once in a while. Someone might share them.

Thank you for taking our pop quiz today. You get an A+ for effort. You can learn more about our interviewee and their work by visiting them on the web:

https://www.instagram.com/technouveau/

http://www.technouveau.net/

Artwork by Rasmus Poulsen

All artwork is owned and copyrighted by the artist, Rasmus Poulsen