Lead during preproduction - what to expect?
Hey. So I was a senior artist for a few years just making the art and worked on a project from mid-base release all the way through dlc (still on the project). I got promoted mid way through dlc so have been a lead for about 9 months now. My team is small, 5 including me, and we're coming to the end of the dlc lifecycle.
In my current lead role my responsibilities usually are, giving feedback, providing cover for the team, juggling workload exceptions with production, weekly team wellness checks, maintaining the ad's art style, production scheduling, bug fixing/assignment, working with the render teams to flesh out new tech and doing the art etc.
In a few months I'm gonna be starting on a new project as lead from end to end production. Whilst I feel fine about the general lead aspects having already been on a production that had been established before, I've never been a lead on a project during pre-prod and I'm not sure what to expect so I wanted some advice on generally what things are like for a Lead during pre production.
I've got a meeting in a week or so with production to discuss my work and requirements on the new project. I'm assuming a Lead during pre-prod will be defining the pipeline, working with the render team, production planning, scoping out the work/asset complexity, looking at OS timelines, figuring out how assets should be implemented into game, hiring artists, working with the AD on understanding the art style etc. As I writing this stuff down I feel like it makes sense, but wanted some more advice from all the great leads on here on what's usually expected as I'm slightly nervous.
Thanks :)
Replies
Pre-prod is about two things.
1: establishing what you want to do.
2 : confirming that it will be possible to do the things defined by point 1
You should exit pre-prod confident that you know how you're going to do the things you need to ship the product.
You don't need to have set everything up but you need to know what things must be set up.
Your job as a lead is to make sure that your team can do useful work when production starts. For art this is heavily reliant on a lot of other disciplines sorting their shit out ahead of time and you need to make sure that they feed you with things you need.
A classic example of this failing would be not having concept art for floors and walls when design hand a first pass level blockout over.
This is a production issue - your responsibility in this case would be to ensure that Producers know what your team needs in order to work as early as possible - your producers are responsible for ensuring that work you depend on is done before you need it.