We’re about a month away from the VFS 2009 Summer Intensives! Due to the high demand, extra dates have been added for the Writing for Film & Television, Film Production, Acting for Film & Television, Sound Design for Visual Media, and Animation & Visual Effects Intensives.

The Game Design Intensive and the 2nd date for the Writing for Film & Television Intensive are almost sold out! Don’t miss your chance!

As announced in March, these 5-day creative boot camps put those who are considering attending Vancouver Film School in the trenches of their chosen program, where they’ll gain hands-on experience under the guidance of VFS’s staff of industry professionals.

Check out vfs.com/summer2009 for more information and to register.

We’re happy to announce the winners of the Game Design Expo 2009 Scholarship, including the recipient of the first-ever Women In Games Scholarship!

The scholarships were first unveiled at Game Design Expo as an opportunity for aspiring game designers to join Vancouver Film School in its acclaimed one-year Game Design program. Alongside six scholarships ranging from $2,500 to $7,000, the full-tuition Women In Games Scholarship, valued at $30,000, was launched to support and foster talented female game designers.

The generous scholarship sponsors included G4TechTV, EA, Big Fish Games, AnnexPro, Obsidian Entertainment, and Radical Entertainment.

VFS is proud to name the following recipients of the 2009 scholarships:

Shannon Lee, Vancouver, BC, Canada – Women In Games Scholarship

Katharine Craig, Vancouver, BC, Canada – $7,000 G4techTV scholarship
Jessica MacGaul, Surrey, BC, Canada – $5,000 EA scholarship
Denver Thomas, Parsippany, NJ, USA – $2,800 Big Fish Games scholarship
Thi Bao Vo, Hanio, Vietnam – $2,500 Annex Pro scholarship
Sara Moore, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada – $2,500 Obsidian Entertainment scholarship
Bunthita Nijathaworn, Bangkok, Thailand – $2,500 Radical Entertainment scholarship

Women In Games Scholarship Winner Shannon Lee

Shannon, who hails from Vancouver but has been teaching in Japan, already has a BA in English Lit. But she’s also a lifelong gamer looking forward to pursuing Game Design at VFS.

“Returning a few days ago from a volunteer trip in India to my current home in southern Japan to be greeted with this amazing news is completely overwhelming,” she says. “It is an honour to have been chosen, and I am so thankful for this chance to fulfill a long-held dream of mine. I cannot wait to start the Game Design program and to take advantage of the opportunities that the Women in Games scholarship has afforded.”

Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to all the incredibly talented applicants! If you missed the deadline but are still interested in taking the first step toward a career in games, speak to a VFS Admissions Advisor now.

Game Design grad Nick Halme is writing a column for preeminent game-related site The Escapist.

Nick, who you might also know from the consistently excellent Vancouver Game Design blog, started at The Escapist with a guest spot in early March, which led to an ongoing column called Play Fighting. He posted the second installment this week.

Check it out on your way to getting your Zero Punctuation fix!

Dave Warfield, Head of Game Design, is one of three finalists nominated for a PopVox Award in the Individual Standout Awards category of Digital Education. An industry vet of more than 15 years, Dave has worked as a Senior Producer for EA, where he developed over 24 game titles.

Entertainment Business Management Instructor and Raincity Studios President Kris Krug is also nominated in the Individual Standout Awards category of Social Media.

Congrats to both of you!

In its third year as a New Media B.C. initiative, the PopVox Awards recognize B.C.’s best and brightest minds in the digital media industry. We’ll be crossing our fingers during the awards ceremony that will take place on May 13th, the second day of the Vancouver 2009 Digital Week.

Also occurring that week is the Game Developer’s Conference, the largest conference in the game industry. And guess what? Dave Warfield will be there too, as part of a panel discussing the question: “Can Academics Partner with Industry?” (SPOILER: The answer is “Yes.”)

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II.  It was met with critical praise when it was released in February  and gamers have taken to its fresh answer to traditional real-time strategy gameplay: the game, developed by Vancouver’s own Relic Entertainment (also known for the acclaimed RTS Company of Heroes) has landed at the top of the global PC sales charts. Dawn of War II (or DoW2) has even pleased longtime fans of its source material, a dystopian tabletop wargame so popular it’s spun off a shelf’s worth of novels.

The setup almost doesn’t matter: a war-torn future (that would be the 40,000) and spacefaring races at war with each other, from your standard Space Marines – the focus of the single-player campaign – to Giger-esque Tyranids, elfin Eldar, and brutish Orks.

Scan DoW2’s credits and you’ll see a lot of VFS alumni. From Animation & Visual Effects, Senior Artist Ian Cumming, Lead Animator Nathan Hocken, and Artists Claire Roberts, Allan Dilks, Jefferson Takahashi, and Christine Hubbard. From Sound Design for Visual Media, there’s Dialogue Editor Allan Levy. From Game Design, Designers Francois Chaput, Mike Wilson, and Brock Robin, and Assistant Producer Mbuso Radebe.

Game Design alum Francois, who graduated in early ‘07, took time out of his busy schedule to talk about designing Dawn of War II, walking in the popular tabletop game’s considerable footsteps, and reinventing the RTS.

Hi, Francois! Thanks for taking the time to talk DoW2. First of all, how does it feel now that the game’s out?

Honestly, it feels pretty good. Reviews have been great, and sales have been strong, which obviously makes all the hard work feel worth it. But really none of that matters in comparison to when my brother in Manitoba calls me to tell me how much he loves the game, and that he’s skipped a few online Halo 3 matches he had planned just to play DoW2 instead.

Could you describe the broad strokes of what you were responsible for on DoW2? When readers play this game, what can they watch out for and say, “Hey, Francois did that”?

I was responsible for the creation of boss battles in DoW2, and their implementation.

This was a lot of fun, even though I felt as though I would have needed more time. It was a tough challenge, but one that forced me to improve as a designer as well, one that brought us a wealth of feedback – good and bad – from the community, reviewers and friends, and I look forward to putting what we’ve learned to use in the future.

I was also involved in many of the gameplay meetings as well, and contributed to things like the pacing of the game, how the game played out on the battlefield, and even what archetypes each of the squads would follow.

Warhammer 40K is pretty huge, with a rabid fanbase, novels – everything. Were you a player of the tabletop game? What was it like, as a designer, to translate a property like that into a video game experience?

Honestly, I had never played the tabletop game. Nor had I read any novels, or codices, or anything on this universe.

The only exposure I’d had prior to Dawn of War II was the original Dawn of War games and expansions,which I was playing before my interview at Relic to familiarize myself with their works other than Company of Heroes. In fact, the only exposure to tabletop Warhammer was when I bought some wood elf models to use in my D&D games.

So first thing I had to do was understand the tabletop fanbase, and what they tend to like. Then I had to do the same with the original Dawn of War’s fanbase. I did a lot of reading, a lot of research, I read so many forums, reviews, fan work and so on.

Eventually the universe became kind of a mindset, and I began to see how things could work as a game. Really, the vision the team had created before I joined the team in December 2007 was very strong and very clear to me, and I was able to contribute to that vision and help it evolve into what Dawn of War II came out.

So all that to say that it was very tiring, but very inspirational and challenging. I feel now as though I have, in a sense, lived the universe and time that everything takes place in, and if I could change anything, I would only want to do it again the exact same way as I did it before, only to experience it all over again.

DoW2 has been getting a lot of praise for its single-player campaign – although it gets away from what one might consider the traditional RTS model of base-building and so on. Even the notion of bosses – it’s not unprecedented, but it’s still sort of unusual. As a designer, how do you handle that challenge of meeting gamers’ expectations while trying to do something new?

Read the rest of this story »

Wondering about what it’s like to take a full-time one-year VFS program, but want to try it out before making a big decision about your educational future?

Introducing the 2009 VFS Summer Intensive Programs – 9 five-day programs beginning July 2009 that will allow you to experience our acclaimed one-year programs in a week of learning, doing, and having fun.

The curriculum will be delivered by VFS’s faculty of respected entertainment industry pros, and participants in each program will come away from their week with hands-on experience and real insight into what a one-year program at VFS can offer.

VFS Summer Intensive Programs include:

Experience VFS (a week sampling all of VFS’s programs) – July 20-24
Acting for Film & Television – July 6-10
Animation & Visual Effects – July 13-17
Digital Design – July 6-10
Film Production – July 13-17
Game Design – July 13-17
Makeup Design for Film & Television – July 13-17
Sound Design for Visual Media – July 6-10
Writing for Film & Television – July 6-10

Also, after completing a VFS Summer Intensive Program, students enrolling in a full-time VFS program will have the cost of their Intensive Program applied toward their tuition.

Summer Intensive Programs are open to anyone 17 years of age or older. Spaces are extremely limited and are expected to fill quickly. For full details and to register, visit vfs.com/summer2009. Hope to see you in July!

Nadia Lohan already knew what she wanted out of VFS: to study Game Design and ultimately bring her art to the game industry. But she also knew she needed a little time first, so instead of diving right in, she began her VFS tenure in Foundation Visual Art & Design.

Students have countless reasons for beginning their studies in the one-year Foundation program, whether it’s to strengthen and develop vital art skills like life drawing or to simply get a chance to dive into multiple disciplines – film, design, animation – before committing to one for the long haul.

For Nadia, it paid off. She had hopes of working for game industry heavyweight Ubisoft. After graduating, she instead signed on with Vancouver upstart Action Pants as a Front End Artist.

Well, if you follow the game industry, you probably know that Action Pants was recently acquired…

…by a little company called Ubisoft. Life’s a funny thing.

We asked Nadia to turn the clock back a couple of years and revisit her time in Foundation, to see how it all began.

People go into Foundation for a few different reasons. What was yours? Did you always know you’d be going into Game Design?

My reason for going into the Foundation program was that I just didn’t feel ready enough to go into Game Design. I had only graduated high school a year before and didn’t have any post-secondary training, so when I looked into the program, I thought that it would be a good way for me to develop a broader range of skills to bring to the table in Game Design. And honestly, I’m really glad I took it. I learned a lot of valuable things not just from my instructors, but from my fellow classmates as well.

And yes, I always knew that I would be going into Game Design. In fact, when I was a little girl I constantly emailed companies like Nintendo asking them what sort of courses I should take in school to get in the game industry. It was awesome because they always replied!

Part of Nadia's Discovery Project in Foundation: a hypothetical game world.

Let’s talk about the Foundation program itself. How did you find the experience?

As a traditional artist, I was opened up to the world of digital media and felt like there were so many more things to explore, and different ways I could grow because of it. It was the first time I really learned that the process is just as important as the result… if not more! I’m really glad that I took the program, because not only did a learn a lot, but I met a lot of really good friends there.

Any highlights from the year that really jump out at you?

One of the best times of Foundation was doing my Discovery Project. Essentially, it’s a project that’s assigned to you for a whole term in which you have no limits to what you want to accomplish, or discover.

I chose to make my own concept art for an imaginary game world, but in order to do that, I had to come up with backstory for everything in order for it all to make sense as to why it all looked the way it did. In fact, it ended up being a lot more work than I thought it would be. And that was the point where I actually learned how important my process was.

At a certain point in their year, Foundation students specialize in a certain stream depending on what area they want to pursue afterwards. What was your focus?

It was a tight race between the Animation stream and the Digital Design stream. I ended up choosing the animation stream because it dealt a lot more with things like character and environment design, or how to compose a frame properly. That certainly translated over well with what I was doing in Game Design. The Digital Design stream also would have been a good choice in that they dealt a lot with Flash and ActionScript, which is a program you may or may not use a lot in Game Design.

Foundation students most often end up in Digital Design, Film Production, or Animation & Visual Effects – both 3D and Classical – but you went a different way… not that you’re not the first to do that. What do you love about being an artist for games in particular?

Nadia's concept art for Synchrony, the final Game Design project on which Nadia served as 2D and 3D artist.

The art in games has always been so inspiring to me. It’s what pulled me into games as a young girl and really made me think about a career in the game industry.

I think the reason I love it so much is because I want to be able to give that same feeling to someone else when they play a game I helped with. And actually seeing something you helped to make inside an honest-to-goodness game is really an awesome feeling.

What, to you, is the pinnacle of great game art?

That’s a really good question. There’s a lot of games out there that have great artwork that I wish I could mention, but for the sake of brevity, I’m going to say Final Fantasy X. It was because of the artwork that I was drawn into the world of RPGs, which is my favourite genre. In fact, the CG was so good that I remember thinking for years after that there weren’t that many games that could compare to the quality of it. On consoles, at least!

And your personal influences?

I’ve always looked up to people like Tetsuya Nomura, Hyung-Tae Kim, Nik Ainley, and Scott Robertson. Just to name a few.

Thanks, Nadia, and good luck at Ubisoft Vancouver! Canadian high school students interested in taking the Foundation program at VFS should check out the 2009 Cross-Canada High School Scholarship Competition, where they could win one of three full-tuition scholarships.

Game Design grad and recent Game Design Expo Women in Games panelist Tara Mustapha was interviewed at the event by NextGen Player. It’s 17 minutes of Tara discussing her VFS experience (she was in the program’s very first graduating class), her role as a designer at EA, and life in the game industry. Well worth a listen!

With world economies in turmoil, what’s the outlook for the video game industry?

That’s the question we asked when we started compiling The Game Industry: Now & in the Future, a report on the state of the game industry which also features the results of our VFS Game Design Graduate Survey, covering job satisfaction, earnings, and more.

The report finds that game designers and industry observers remain extremely optimistic about the game industry’s long-term health. And we learn that 84% of our Game Design grads are currently employed in the game industry, and 93% enjoy their jobs, among many other findings – encouraging news!

Click here to download the full report in PDF format.