Professional practice

I write after a long time again, after working on 3 projects at the same time, struggling with each one, and completely forgetting about my professional practice work. However, despite me not actively writing about it and working on it, I have been thinking about it intensely and in this post I want to sort of reflect on what's been on my mind the past couple months regarding my professional practice module. Hearing our guests talk about their experiences and paths, and successes gave me quite a lot to think about. It just once again confirmed to me that maybe it's totally worth shooting for the stars, going for my dreams. Our guest who talked about her experience setting up a successful advertisement animation and special effects studio just confirmed to me that I want to start up my own games studio eventually. I might end up going for some other smaller entry level jobs before then to, sort of get a feel of things for myself, see how other companies run and how they do things, and then eventually, with my university knowledge and hopefully some professional practice, found my own games studio and direct some of my own projects. I have also been looking at other successful games companies, especially around my parts, where I am originally from, in Eastern Europe. One of the multinational treasures in the East Europe area is the Mafia series of games, which started in Czechia, by Illusion Softworks which is today known as 2K Czech, a studio that is closely related and tied to Hangar 13 in America, which leads the Mafia series today.

I have been looking into artists who worked on the Mafia series, specifically 3D model artists. The artists who have caught my attention are Dominik Regec, a 3D vehicle and building artist at Hangar 13 and Pavel Koten, a 3D interior artist at 2K Czech, who worked on Mafia 2. Regec has 2 works that speak to me personally - the Tram for Mafia 3 and a Cadillac inspired car, also for the same game.

Koten has worked on many many interiors for the Mafia 2 game, all very impressively detailed, for the time especially, as they, in my opinion, still hold up today. Koten started his game level design career by creating mods for Half Life. He has ever since worked on projects such as Mafia II, Silent Hill Downpour and Dead Island.

Both these artists I found on Art Station, and seeing how well you can present your work and how convenient a tool it is for artists to run a portfolio online, I have decided that this would be my main portfolio. I also wanted to use my Sketchfab page as part of my portfolio, as I upload my works there, both learning experiences and finished models. Combined with a CV format that I was helped with writing in art college in England, and a cover letter, all I was missing was a showreel. I decided to use parts of my animation from 2019, that I did with my team at university, as well as some turntables and shots of my own personal 3D models and environments.

Within the animation industry, while working for other companies, my dream job would probably be to be a vehicle artist, or just general prop artist. Vintage vehicles and vintage aesthetics are my passion, and if I could do that for a living, it would be happy days. If I got the chance to found my own games studio, I would love to be the creative director of a smaller team, working on several things involved in the creative pipeline, including idea generation, sketching, etc. all the way down to 3D modelling, level design and sound design. I have even written a script for a radio station that I wish to implement in my own project, with a radio DJ and all. That about does it for this post. You can see my showreel and access links to my portfolio down below! Until next time, Robin Mikkelson https://www.artstation.com/robinmikart https://sketchfab.com/robinmikart