By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Chad Greene’s career in digital arts took him a lot of places. During his presentation Friday at Bowling Green State University he projected a map that showed his travels from his hometown Sandusky, to Bowling Green to Detroit, and across the country and back a couple times. Greene now lives in Seattle where for the past six years he’s been senior art director for Xbox, a division of Microsoft.
Chad Greene
That map didn’t capture the digital artist’s adventures in ancient Rome, futuristic dystopias under the sea, the North Pole, and the land of Far, Far Away.
Greene, who was in the first class of digital arts majors to graduate from BGSU’s School of Art, was speaking as part of Milestone activities. The event was a reunion of graduates of the School of Art with a special celebration this year if digital arts’ silver anniversary. An exhibit of alumni work is on displays at the School of Art galleries through Nov. 5.
Before the BGSU grad went so far, he spent many, many nights in and days in the fledgling computer arts labs on campus. He and his best friend Mark Shoaf spent hours a day in the lab. “We were lab rats. I’m sure we stank and had bad breath.
“We knew this is what we wanted to do. … We knew the hard work would us where we wanted to go.”
When he graduated in 1992, Greene put together a demo reel including an animated band The Ungrateful Dead and sent it out to Industrial Light and Magic the company that was working to bring dinosaurs back to life for “Jurassic Park.”
He never heard back.
Instead he and Shoaf went to work for a Toledo company for a promise that once the company started making money they would share in the wealth.
The company never made money, but the pair spent more nights in the studio working with good equipment. It was a low point of eating Saltines with peanut butter and sleeping on the studio floor. When they left they had a better demo reel that secured them jobs with a production house that worked with the automotive industry.
It was Greene who suggested the company branch out to do promotion work for the local professional sports teams. The company was thrilled to expand into a new market, and Greene won an Emmy, and now had a much better demo reel. That landed him working on the first 3D baseball video game.
That was another step to where he wanted to go – Hollywood. And he landed there as a lighting artist with Dreamworks, working on the Academy Award winning movies “Antz” and “Shrek.”
He had to realize the textures of Shrek’s skin and his clothes. “Everything on Shrek I was directly responsible for,” he said. One executive was obsessed with the monster’s fingernails and kept having Greene redo them.
Throughout his career, he bounced between working on video games and films.
Video games present technical challenges of working with a much more limited amount of memory and sharing it with other elements of the game. While he said he enjoyed that challenge, he wanted the challenge of Steven Spielberg asking him “to create a dinosaur so real, people would ask how you got the DNA.”
Greene’s tale was also one of ever evolving technology, which he had a hand in, far removed from the cutting edge floppy discs of his college days.
Computer animation is pushing the limits particularly the ability to capture facial expressions. The challenge for the generation of digital artists coming up is to move that technology the last few percentages to get beyond “the creep factor” when faces are close, but not quite realistic.
But as Greene found out, often the film jobs, even if they are the most satisfying jobs, don’t pay enough to live in Silicon Valley.
That accounts in part for his peripatetic career.
The most recent work he can talk publicly about is “Ryse: Son of Rome.” He lovingly described the aesthetic pleasures of the work as the characters hacked off each other’s limbs.
Asked to give advice to students seeking to follow in his footsteps, he said they needed to decide what specific discipline they wanted to work in and focus their demo reels on that whether it’s modeling, lighting, shading, texturing, or animation. “You have to figure out what you do best, and work it out. You have to stand out,” he said.
When Greene started the field was still in its beginning stages. Few colleges offered this training. Now there are hundreds of programs graduating thousands of artists.
“You have to hold yourself to a high standard,” he said. Students need to constantly ask “what do I need to do to get better?”
Also, they need to work well with others. The business is a collaborative one, he said, and it’s easy enough to find out that someone is difficult.
For all the high tech gadgetry he uses at work, Greene keeps up with his traditional art, painting from life every day and participating in company-sponsored figure drawing sessions. “Art is the soul of what I do.”
