Paul Jones · Art Director / Vehicle Concept Art Director, Foundry 42

We work together, but design basically works from a functionality point of view. Is the gun at the front, on the top or the bottom? Navigation, does this work well?

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

Over the years, we've changed the process quite a lot. It used to be designers would come up with a brief and we'd do white boxes of how we think it should be, and we'd be the ones sourcing reference. But that just ends up down a path where the people working on it felt very constrained by what it had to be. So we took a step back. We just do the brief. If we've got some really cool ideas on how we think it should work, then we just include that in the brief, but we don't do any more than that until they've had a good go at coming up with these shapes. If they want to confirm anything's risky in terms of, is this still going to fit the brief, then we work backwards and forwards on that. But by the time those three big shapes go to Chris, we know that they'll work with the design. Those three might have come out of 30 quick sketches. And quite often Chris will go, well, I want the front half of that one, the back half of that one, put the colors from that one. And then we go from there, and then design and art get much more hands-on as we build out from there. Because it's a waste of both departments' time if we spend a lot of time working on the details at those early stages, because two out of three are going to be completely thrown away at bare minimum. So we wait for the vision.

Paul Jones · Art Director / Vehicle Concept Art Director, Foundry 42

Generally we assign two weeks for that initial look dev, basically. So we've got two weeks, boom, let's go, let's see what we can... we know what it has to do, and then we try and think out of the box. And so by just having this spec list from design, it's just a wall of text and tick boxes, and...

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

Yeah, we changed the template quite recently. It used to be this huge long design document that was like six pages full of pictures and white boxes, and it's now one sheet of A4 paper with tick boxes of: it does this, it must have this, it must account for this many people.

Paul Jones · Art Director / Vehicle Concept Art Director, Foundry 42

So it's kind of like getting a recipe without the pictures, so then the artist doesn't have a preconceived image that can dictate how it starts. So basically, just by having this, they're free to come up with different ideas, and that's just part of the process. If you just look at any of the concept art that we do, there's always a large history of stuff that wasn't right, didn't work for X reason, didn't look quite right, but you start wide and then you just slowly narrow in and in. And at the start it's just rough and loose, and you know you're going to be throwing them away so you don't get attached, but you're just like boom, boom, boom, boom.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

And then just keep polishing, keep polishing. Sometimes we look back at them when we're coming up with other ones. We go, actually, do you remember the early version of this ship that everyone hated for that manufacturer because it didn't look like that manufacturer? Oh, it actually looks... Now that we're doing this one, we could look back at that one.