Resume

STEPHENLANGMEAD

Day 1 Studios (Sparks, Maryland)
April 2006-current

Art Manager/Art Director

As Art Manager, I managed a team of 30+ artist including; animation, cinema, level creation, character creation and effects, for the Xbox360, PC and PS3 versions of “Fracture” for Lucas Arts and “FEAR3” for Warner Bros. I also ran smaller pitch teams and produced several successful pitch demos and presentations for Disney, Warner Brothers and Sega, as well as an internal unannounced project. My responsibilities included; Art pipeline creation and documentation, Art staff management, scheduling and task assignments in JIRA, Hansoft and MS Project, outsource management and review, as well as asset specifications, performance management, marketing materials, and interviewing and hiring.

In addition to Art Management, I Art Directed several environments in both FEAR and Fracture and was the Art Director on all of the Pitch titles and the current unannounced title. I produced concepts for several environments, characters and assets in the games, including several tile set arrays and modular systems to speed production. I worked with the company’s proprietary Level building tool and the Xbox debug tools to help create and tune environments to achieve the highest visual fidelity, while ensuring proper rendering and memory performance.

Day 1 Studios is in 2 locations, Chicago and Maryland, so I created an internal message board system to help facilitate communication and collaboration between the 2 studios, and helped mentor and train many of the artists there.

BreakAway Games (Hunt Valley, Maryland)
January 2000-April 2006

Studio Art Director/Creative Director

As Creative Director, I was responsible for multiple Art Directors on up to 4 projects at a time and I lead our R&D and technologies team to create several technology demos and project pitches. As the Art Director, I worked directly with the Publisher's teams and the Managing Art Directors on each projects on several early titles and on later project pitches to clients such as; Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Sierra, Sesame Street, and Northrop Grumman. I had the opportunity to speak at GDC along with Doug Whatley on "Serious Games Development" as well. I helped grow the studio from a 5 person Art Department to a 28 person Art Department.

Shipped Titles:
Cleopatra: Expansion Pack for Pharaoh by Sierra
Antietam for Firaxis
Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom for Sierra
Tropico expansion for Take Two Interactive
Civilization III: Conquests for Firaxis
TESim for Northrop Grumman

TalonSoft Inc. (White Marsh, Maryland)
1996 – 2000

Studio Art Director

I was responsible for creating the Art Department for this start up company. Though mainly a hardcore war game company, our innovative designs and unique graphics earned us several War Game of the year awards and the Battle Ground Series was inducted into the Computer Gamming World Hall of Fame. I also helped produce several intro movies for our titles. Talon Soft was a self publisher as well and I was responsible for all ad designs, box covers, logos, and manual designs for all of our products. We were purchased by Take Two Interactive in 1999 and I stayed on as Art Director and helped release "Hidden and Dangerous" and "Mall Tycoon".

Shipped Titles:
Battle Ground Series
Age of Sail for TalonSoft
Tribal Rage for TalonSoft
Battle of Britain for TalonSoft
East Front for TalonSoft
West Front for TalonSoft
The Operational Art of War for TalonSoft

The Avalon Hill Game Company (Baltimore, Maryland)
1992 – 1996

Illustrator/Art Director

I was hired as an illustrator, but also served as a Graphic Designer and Art Director on several projects that included titles like the card games Guerilla and Assassin, board games like History of the World, Squad Leader and We the People, role playing games like Rune Quest and Tales from the Floating Vagabond and magazine publications like Girls Life Magazine. It was here I received my foundation in Illustration, Graphic Design and Project Management.

Skills

I have a BA from Towson State University in Visual Communications. I also have a strong background in illustration and I use this to help visually communicate my ideas to my team and the other disciplines. I also have a strong background in Graphic Design which has served me well in designing interfaces for projects and presentations to the company and publishers. I have 15 years of Project Management and Scheduling experience over a wide variety of project scopes and designs, and this has helped immensely in developing a good sense of completion times and anticipating the needs of the other disciplines. I have worked successfully in a team environment on over 30 products and have experience developing games that are split between multiple studios. I make it a priority to communicate with my team and make sure those lines of communication are open to allow the best flow for ideas. I am an avid gamer on both the computer screen and table top.

Software
3D Max 2011, Photoshop, Painter, Z Brush, MS Project, Perforce, Hansoft, JIRA and Power Point. I have worked in Maya and in Softimage as well. I have worked with Havok for physics and Day 1’s proprietary world building software.