I’m on a major feedback-writing pass this week and I had seven feedback maxims I’d like to share:

1. Make subject lines COUNT. Be as descriptive and meaningful as possible, especially when dealing with contracts. Use special easily searchable key words like “ArtStudio signed contract AS-0004” or “(2008-05-15) Feedback for Fat Stinky Orok.”
2. Everything MUST create its own context. Act as if the feedback you’re writing is the only feedback you’ve ever written to them. Never create dependencies on past feedback! If you need to, re-paste relevant feedback from a previous email. Be specific, and don’t say “do it like that one time” when you could say “In the 2008-05-12 feedback revision when I asked you to adjust the size of the legs.”
3. Official feedback comes from one place ONLY. I’ll answer very basic work-in-progress questions in an instant messaging app, but for me, OFFICIAL feedback is only for email. Feedback comes from only ONE place! This establishes a consistent approach with the artists, gives you a paper trail, minimizes your contact points and gives everyone only ONE place to search.
4. Save feedback to its OWN directory. I have a directory for each individual contractor I work with. It’s divided chronologically by their asset deliveries and my reference and feedback drops. Every piece of feedback I ever send them gets saved into a text file and dropped into the appropriate dated directories. This makes it blazingly easy to refer to whenever I need it.
5. Save ALL work-related instant messaging chat logs. If a casual IM conversation turns into something work-related, save all the relevant bits from that log into the same feedback directory. Every piece of correspondence is important, especially for potential legal issues that may arise in the future. Keep everything in one place!
6. NEVER include a hyperlink to an image. The site can go down. Always save it, name it meaningfully and attach it in the email, forum post or FTP drop.
7. ALWAYS specify filenames. In the feedback, never say “check the attached image” without giving the image’s exact filename! This will aid searching later. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone through old feedback and seen that and thought “WHAT IMAGE?!?” and had to search through old emails.

These tips will make all your feedback ridiculously easy to search through and refer to anytime you need, ever. It DEFINITELY pays to be smArt and organized. Leave nothing to chance and let absolutely NOTHING slip outside of the organizational systems you create! A system is only as effective as one’s continued adherence to it. Making even ONE exception defeats the system’s purpose. From there, it’s a slippery slope, and the system falls apart.

If I’d known these tips going into this job I’d have saved myself countless hours of pain and struggle. 🙂 I’m wincing to imagine the HOURS I’ve spent trying to find “that one email where I’m SURE I asked you to…”

Agh, sorry for my slowness to respond to comments lately… I’ve been crunching on something big ever since GDC. I only have time for a short post relating to a thought I had tonight. I’ll expand a bit on my “Outsourcing Concept Art smArtly” article…

I’ve found an approach working with one of my outsourcing partners that I’ve liked. When putting together the thumbnail color roughs, something I love to see is a layered PSD file with different layer groups showing alternate color schemes that let me mix and match.

For example, if it’s a character, I can toggle between Red, Black, and Blue color schemes for the Helmet, Chest Piece and Boots. All are individually toggleable. With the varied layers that I can toggle on and off at will, I can mix and match them as I like, fiddle with my layer settings, then pick out the colors I like. Let’s say I choose Red Helmet, Black Chest Piece and Black Boots.

Leaving only those layers visible, I can lock down those colors I prefer, save out that PSD as a layered example for them to use. 🙂 They can lift the exact colors and settings I want from the layered PSD instead of second-guessing.

One additional VERY useful tip that I learned from a mistake is to ALSO save out a JPG from that, and deliver BOTH to them. Why? To make sure no one accidentally unhides the wrong layer and delivers the wrong color version to me later. So they have the layered AND flattened reference to ensure everything is solid.

I’m quite happy with this arrangement so far, and will be using it again moving forward. 🙂

Hope that helps you crazy smArt managers out there! And smArtists that are paying attention…

One really interesting trend I’ve found in the last couple years is that artists are *far* more motivated to keep working if their contracts are structured so they get paid bi-weekly. The “big fat contract” high wears off after a week or two on average, and productivity goes SHARPLY down after that.

But, if I make sure they get paid every couple weeks by changing how the payment invoice schedule works, they stay happier and more productive longer. Having some semblance of a normal schedule and normal-seeming payment schedule has surprising productivity benefits.

One week is too frequent (who wants to split up work that finely and invoice that often, anyway?), three weeks is too long (productivity falls after week two ends), and two weeks really seems to be the sweet spot.

I’ve noticed this trend enough times and in enough artists and studios that I finally paid heed. I try *VERY* hard to make sure the blocks of work I give my artists last roughly two weeks to keep things moving smoothly.

Artists, take note and push for this if you can. You’ll be happier and more motivated.

Art managers, this is something definitely worth considering and experimenting with.

Anyone have any thoughts on that? 🙂

I made a forum post this week on what information I provide to the studios I outsource my animation work to, and I thought I’d repost it here.

The speccing process for animation work needs to be detailed and thorough, as does as the reference. However, most of this work only needs doing once, and the rest is easily templatable. If you have a basic list of animations per character or creature type to start with, outsourcing animation can be a surprisingly simple process once the rest of the groundwork is laid.

This is everything I provide my animators:

• All the source MAX files for other creatures of that class and race for comparison.
• A specific document for each individual creature I’m having animated. It contains the following:
1. A two-paragraph description of the character’s backstory, attitude and movement style, referenced against his racial traits.
2. A description of his preferred idle state, walk and run movement, and attack style.
3. A detailed list of every animation, description of which hands and feet do what, what default position it needs to revert to, the exact number of frames required per sequence, a copy-pasteable copy of the animation scripting needed in MAX, naming convention guidelines, and all other technical specifications and style descriptions.
4. Specific instructions (where applicable) of what needs to happen on specific frames to match ingame timing.
5. An explicitly detailed list of technical constraints and guidelines.
6. Any immediate references I can make (“similar to X creature’s attack or movements”)

On all my feedback to them, I provide extremely specific information on which limb or bone I want to do what, on which frame, for how many frames, and the style in which it should move. For extra information, I offer screengrabs of what’s wrong (if anything), and offer AVI or MAX file source art reference when available. I generally have 1 to 2 iteration passes per individual animation, which is pretty badass. 🙂

One of the real value-adds I’ve found in assembling all this information is that most of it can be classified easily and packaged into a generic “Monster Animation Kit” or “Player Character Animation Kit” complete with references, tech specs, etc. The only specific information that needs to be transmitted with each asset is the backstory and movement style. In other words… I really only gather *all* that information once. It’s far less daunting than it sounds. 😉

To the managers and artists out there — is there any other relevant information you can think of that would be useful to provide in this packet?

Based on the last ~15 months of contracting out concept art, I’ve
refined my style a bit and just made a dramatic change in the way I
parcel out work.

I used to price out concept art per piece. Everything from initial
roughs to polish to ink to color to turnarounds was a single asset at
a single price.

I noticed a tendency, though — the artists, in their desire to get
paid sooner rather than later, would rush through the initial roughs
too quickly and try to finish each piece of art as fast as they could.
That’s totally natural and to be expected, since I’m not paying them
for their time, but for the finished result. But I felt like I was
losing out on a lot of potential ideas. So I asked myself, how can I
get the most out of the initial idea-generation process?

Then it came to me. It’s simple: Break it into two phases: Rough Phase
and Polish Phase.

The initial Rough Phase can include a pre-set number of sheets of
rough ideas and some basic pencil tightening and ink, but no color. I
spend a reasonable amount of money and time on this phase, and I make
the Rough Phase its own end, instead of an annoying stepping stone to
a finished piece. I get a wide variety of ideas, then determine which
rough concepts to move forward with and polish. The roughs get done,
and they get paid.

The next and final phase, the Polish Phase, is where I take the ideas
I selected in the Rough Phase and finish them off. I get color
thumbnails (to experiment with a wide variety of potential color
schemes), final coloring, the turnarounds and the inevitable last
minute spit-shine.

Voila, you have a finished concept! You get the full benefit of the
rough idea phase where you can bounce around ideas all you want
without the “finish the entire concept” pressure, and then once that’s
wrapped, you approve it and pay him.

And to the artist, he basically gets paid two times for one concept.
AND his earning potential increases!

Wait, what? How does his earning potential increase?

If you’re anything like me, the wide variety of ideas he generated in
the Rough Phase will find their way into two to four brand new
concepts that wouldn’t have existed if it hadn’t been broken up into
two phases. YOU get more ideas, HE gets more work. Not just that, but
since you priced each phase out differently, you can very quickly and
effectively amend the contract to add more Polish Phases at the
pre-agreed price terms!  No more time spent negotiating. Get that all
done up-front!

Could it get any better?

…no, seriously. If there’s a better way than this, I want to know
about it so I can scrap this and DO it! 🙂

If you get to be a manager of external artists of any kind, MAKE A NEW ACCOUNT FOR INSTANT MESSAGING that only your contractors have access to. No friends.

I’m trying to separate work and home life more now and this was a critical mistake I made early on. Now I can’t work without friends poking me, and I can’t be at home online without being pestered about work. It’s frustrating. Too much connectivity can definitely be a curse.

My next steps are to create new accounts solely for work that my friends don’t know about, then migrate all my contractors over to those accounts and block them from my old ones.

It seems so obvious in retrospect. 😛

I’ve been trying to come up with a simpler and easier way to structure my feedback on assets I receive that makes it easier for the contractor to focus on one aspect at a time, without being dependent on anything but plain text.

Most of my job is communicating ideas. And there are so many different ways to go about it that even the specific structure of the way you speak to someone can make the difference between doing it right and doing it wrong.

See, it’s easy to get lost in a lengthy changelist, or accidentally overlook a problem, or simply not know what I’m asking. It’s put a lot of pressure on me to learn how to communicate the most with the fewest words, and to arrange the data in such a way that certain parts of the feedback will pop out at them and really stick in their head.

In the example below, I’ve adopted a very specific, consistent structure for presenting feedback on art assets to my contractors. The human brain is a fascinating machine, and learning how to make the most out of the words I speak so they’ll get maximum impact in the mind I’m dealing with is a really fun challenge!

As an experiment I’ve briefly strayed from my numbered bullet points idea. Right now, this is my formula:

Orok_Chieftain_Run_Animation_01 – Awesome! Great sense of weight.
– CHEST: Some vertices on his chest poke into his body. Can you fix the rig?
– FEET: His feet dip below the floor in frames 14-17 and 28-31. Can you bring them up?

In other words…

[Asset_Name] – [Brief Praise]
– [SPECIFIC LOCATION]: [Brief description of problem. Ask for specific fix?]

My reasoning is as follows:

• [Asset_Name] – Obviously you’re going to want to specify which asset you’re commenting on.
• [Brief Praise] – I generally try to say something nice and positive about everything I get. I never put anything negative here. If I have nothing good to say, I leave it blank. But I always start out with praise. Studio or contractor, I feel like this matters.
• [SPECIFIC LOCATION] – This is the REALLY important part. An endless bullet list, even numbered, can be a bit much to look at. But if you can have an IMMEDIATE callout of the specific area that’s affected by the problem, it’ll be easier to go through the list of changes component by component. “Okay, chest, foot, leg.” When questioned, it’s a little easier to refer to areas specific to the asset itself instead of an arbitrary number that forces them to go back and look at the feedback list and remember what ‘3’ corresponded to. Granted, yeah, they should always have that available, but I have to look, too. 🙂 Every bit of time savings I can squeeze out of something, I will.
• [Brief description of problem. Ask for specific fix?] – The reason I describe it and end with a period, then ask the question, is because a question mark stands out in a sentence. They read the problem, and the proposed solution jumps out at them more readily than would a sea of periods. It also forces me to parse my thoughts very simply and clearly, which helps me. That, and I prefer coming off slightly nicer by asking a question instead of stating a list of demands. Sure, I’m paying them and I could be brusque if I want, but I personally prefer the softer touch unless I’m straightening someone out.

What do you guys think? I’m really curious to hear from artists what helps them keep track of changes better. And also from any managers that may have techniques of their own. 🙂