Bethesda Softworks Inside the Vault Q&A
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How did you get into the industry? Do you have any tips for breaking in?
Before I went to college I'd never particularly wanted to be a visual artist, I was planning on living a rather uneventful life teaching little children how to punch each other in a local Tae Kwon Do studio. Cue traumatic elbow injury. Well, I liked drawing silly little gothy anime comics, so I decided to go to art school. While I was there I fell hardcore in love with art and got a new stable of influences (Phil Hale, Marko Djurdevic, Wesley Burt), and I realized that the stuff I was drawing was absolute garbage. So there I was two years into school and I realized there was no way I'd be able to improve my drawing skills to a level I'd want to be employed at in the time I had left at college. I was brimming with self-loathing and cursing myself for not spending my high school years getting my draftmanship on.
While I was floundering around deciding what to do with my life my best droogie was a game design major, and I started looking over his shoulder and saying, (Hey, maybe i could do that.) (Previously, I'd been looking over his shoulder and saying, (Ha ha, you have to UV unwrap things, sucker!) Ironic!) I'd always really loved videogames more than comic books, but my desire to actually make them faded out when they went from 2D to 3D. Too boxy, too many jagged lines. Fortunately, just then Half-Life 2 was coming out. Videogames suddenly looked a whole lot better and I swapped majors. Turns out even if you have no experience, 3D is a good place for an artist with some decent foundation skills, a good eye, and a dog-like tenacity. My best droogie became my boyfriend and got out of school slightly before me and got hired at Bethesda as a character artist thanks to his awesome skills at modeling monsters with bizarre pelvises. I followed him up to Maryland and submitted my portfolio to Bethesda, which got me completely ignored. So I was unemployed a bit and continued working on 3D stuff at home. I also wanted to throttle my boyfriend because he was very good about his NDA. We were both Fallout fans, and he wouldn't tell me anything except obvious lies about how you could recruit an idiot man-child and ride him around like Master-Blaster, and maybe also you could get a talking radscorpion buddy named Citizen Snips.
When a character art internship came up I jumped at it. Once I had that internship, I worked my ass off, not with any thoughts about winning permanent employment, but just because it was Fallout, and I was going to do the best I could on any task no matter how small or obnoxious it was. I guess someone noticed how much I cared, which can't have been very difficult because I was really more vocal than an intern should be . Eventually, I got hired as a more permanent addition to the team. Then I did a little dance.
As for getting into the industry, consider dating someone already in the industry! I'll give you all a moment to post an ad on Craigslist. Seriously though, it's really hard to get a job in the industry fresh out of school with zero experience. The company has no idea what kind of person you are and unless your portfolio is absolutely stunning, it doesn't say a hell of a lot about what work you'll be putting out on a regular basis. Having someone vouch for you being a hard worker makes a big difference, too. I highly recommend getting an internship if you don't have much experience in the industry, and if you're having a hard time getting noticed, I'd recommend making a presence for yourself on some of the 3D forums out there and maybe making some friends that way.
