Lead Artist
Realtime Worlds

Beau F

00:00:03 My name’s Beau F, I’m a lead artist at Realtime Worlds.

00:00:08 Well most recently I was working in the US and I thought that it was time for a change so I talked to my wife and we decided that it’d be fun to start looking for jobs in Europe and I came across the ad here and it seemed to fit my qualifications and next thing I know I was working here.

00:00:25 In my job here I’m a lead artist, which means that I have to sort of maintain the vision of whatever I’m in charge of.

00:00:35 We travelled a lot when I was a kid, so we, I think we started travelling when I was four years old and we went to places like Iran, Borneo, Singapore, we even came here to Scotland at one point when I was nine years old.

00:00:49 It affected my education sort of poorly at first actually. Jumping from school to school was very difficult for a young person especially dealing with different types of language.

00:01:00 At first when I was travelling I would come home and I would tell these fantastic stories about things that we’d done as kids, like, my sister getting caught in quicksand in the jungles of Borneo, but people thought I was bragging, they thought I was making these stories up. And the teachers even thought that I was making it up, so they would call my mum and I would get in trouble and I would be called in for these parent teacher conferences and my mum would say, yes, we did actually live in Borneo and his sister did actually get caught in quicksand. You know and it was very difficult at that point to deal with that so, of course as a kid the thing you do is you shut down.

00:01:42 I was doing fairly poorly in school and my parents thought I might have eye problems because my dad has pretty serious you know eye problems. And so they took me to an optometrist, and the optometrist actually said, your son has perfect vision but I do have a prescription for you and my parents kind of looked at him funny and, and he said buy him a computer, I did this for my son and it changed his world. And so my parents you know we weren’t making very much money at the time but we scraped together everything we had and we bought a little Apple computer. And it was true, my world completely changed after that.

00:02:27 I started to engage with math and words because I actually had a context for what they were for and I started playing video games and that was the end, I knew what I wanted to do.

00:02:42 I didn’t know what the best route to get into games was, I always loved art, and I’d always enjoyed drawing things and painting and doing things with my hands, but I, the only course I saw into games was through math, through learning to programme. So that was the path I started down. And games started to evolve as I was actually doing this and is started to see actual art appearing in these games and I though ha, maybe I can actually use my artistic talent to get into games.

00:03:13 While I was at the art institute I learnt that one of the instructors that took, taught a night course was actually working at a game company, and this was just sort of amazing to me, it’s like to actually meet somebody that works at a game company. So I actually went to his class just so I could meet him and talk to him and ask him how I, how he got in.

00:03:38 It turned out that he was actually the art director at this company and they didn’t have any positions for somebody who was still in school but they were looking for testers, so I was like, well I can test games, and that’s how I got my foot in the door.

00:03:56 The games industry when I started was just starting out. The previous to my entry into it, it was mostly guys in their garage who had done these projects together and I had no idea how I was gonna get into it. But I got in sort of through a lucky group of happenstance. But it was always my goal and it was amazing that you know I just believed in what I could do and I ended up there.

00:04:30 END