Interview with Emei Olivia Burell:
What is your current position? What kinds of tasks/projects are you doing and how much time are you roughly spending on each?
I am currently a Senior Narrative Artist at Media Molecule. I'm working on developing a new project from a narrative/narrative design perspective and my days right now are highly collaborative, spent in meetings doing a lot of thinking alongside other people. A lot of compromise and teamwork. On previous projects I have been more hands on, doing writing, narrative design (such as branching dialogue and gameplay and art integration with story), art direction, illustration and art passing levels in our game.
Which of your tasks/projects do you find stimulating? Which less so?
Most things are interesting in their own ways even if some seem more tedious than others. I really enjoy when I'm in the room where it happens, being part of the groups making the creative decisions when it comes to art and narrative. It was great getting to do art/narrative direction on various projects but it's also high-pressure situations where you need to negotiate and instruct a team. (I never knew I would make so many power point presentations and must present to groups of people, so get comfortable with that if you wanna go into the games industry! That, and being a good communicator and collaborator, as you will never work alone).
The tasks I find less stimulating is just producing assets in a production line, not having much ownership over what you create and just feeling like a cog in the machine, and bug fixing (bug fixing can be great in the sense that you have a check list to tick off, but it can also be really hard when you have to optimise a level or encounter a gnarly bug you have no clue how to fix).
How did you end up in your current position? Which steps did you take to get from where you were when you started thinking about your career at GS to where you are now?
I never intentionally aimed for the games industry. I honestly just wanted a job; any job would have sufficed. I just knew that I wasn't really cut out for being a freelancer as just the thought stressed me the heck out. I sensed, I needed stability in my life. But knowing this made me really wanna cover all the bases, haha. So, I did a lot of research and prep work leading up to the internship period as this is one of the most important and valuable parts of your education at TAW.
Use those company contacts!! I researched good animation portfolios and tried to mimic/tailor mine to check the same boxes. I cast my net very wide, but focusing on places that could land me full time jobs, so animation studios and games studios first (as publishing is more freelance based), and I curated a list of around 60 potential internship places. I reached out to them beforehand to check if they even took interns and specifics about pay and such. And then sent out a lot of applications.
A couple of my top picks got back to me, and Media Molecule turned out to be one of them! I communicated very clearly with my boss that I wanted to stay once I figured out Mm was a great place to work, and did my best to prove that I fit in there (through being open and trying to learn as much as possible from everyone I interacted with at the company).
And going from an intern to a senior position has not necessarily been easy, I've had to do a lot of negotiation about pay and position/promotion but the thing that has remained the same is that I have been very vocal about what I wanted and done research to back it up.
Looking back from where you are now, what was the smartest thing you did to move your career in the right (for you) direction?
Personally, communicating clearly and directly has benefitted me. It's hard and scary but people won't ever know what you're thinking or understand what you want unless you say it out loud. And if people aren't taking well to you voicing your ambitions, it's worth considering if this is the place for you or where you want to be. When it comes to moving forwards in your career, saying it loudly, many times, and keeping on reminding people about it and being annoying (but not too annoying) about it. But remember you will also need to have done the research and have done the work to back it up.
If you could go back and correct one or more misunderstandings you had about careers in the creative industry when you went to GS, what would it/they be?
That you can make a pretty well-paid living off it and that you can find a job within the creative field. And most importantly that it is possible to have work-life balance. You don't have to be a suffering artist, you can be an artist that goes home at 5 pm and doesn't pull all-nighters if you learn to set healthy boundaries.
And especially for GS who specifically wants to go into games: understanding that it's highly collaborative, you will always need to work in a team so good collaboration and communication skills is a must.
How does your career affect your lifestyle? Does your job influence your opportunities in other areas of life, for example in terms of hobbies, social life, starting a family? (If yes: How do you feel about that - and would you want to change it somehow, sometime?)
The higher you go, the bigger the workload, so you will be more exhausted coming home from work. But opportunity wise, my full-time game developer job still leaves me with plenty of opportunity to pursue hobbies and social life outside of work, and if it's a good company it will also allow opportunity for starting and raising a family (although many game companies are notorious for their crunch culture, more and more of them now have healthy company cultures).
The main negative thing to point out is that if you end up working for a big company, they will try and limit your creative life outside of work through your contract, prohibiting you to work on creative projects outside of work or competing games/game projects. That's the one part I feel less fulfilled about, I can't make games in my free time and I'm too tired to pursue my own creative/comics projects after work.