Emailing different gaming companies

After getting all my key research done I decided to should email a couple of people working in gaming companies and ask them a few questions as It would be nice to hear from them personally.
The first person I emailed was Ken Wong, the art director who worked on the game 'Alice Madness Returns'. This was a little nerve wracking for me as I am a huge fan of this game, but I wrote a polite and, as professional as I could make it sound, email about a role of a concept artist working at 'Spicy Horse' and then waited for a reply. Ken replied surprisingly quick explaining that as he was the art director he only did a small amount of the concept work and gave me the email address of his friend Luis Melo who was one of the artists who worked on the game as well. After thanking Ken for his response I set about emailing Luis. Unfortunately I still haven't heard anything back and I knew I couldn't hang my whole essay on waiting for his response so I had to move on.

The second company I emailed was 'Split Path Studio' as I wanted to know a little more about the role of a concept artist working in a indie company. Similarly with my previous emailing attempt there was so sign in getting a response soon so I cracked on with my essay, working with all the information I had already collected and I ended up with a word count of 1098. A day after writing my essay, Dom Littler from Split Path Studio finally got back to me. What he told me was really good solid information that I knew I needed to add to my essay but as my word count was so high and I wanted to keep everything I had already written I had to do some serious editing to squeeze a little more information in bringing my word count to exactly 1100.

Dom was very kind and said that I could pop his email to me on my blog as reference to research so here it is,



"Hey Harriet,

Sorry this reply has taken a while :) we are all mega busy. if i miss anything or if you have any more questions though do ask!
We are quite big for an indie start up (there being 7 in the core team with a couple of extras for contract work), so we are by no means a typical example. In fact, there is rarely a "typical example" at all when it comes to indie studios, you just do what you have to to make it work. :) We don't have anyone who's job title is "concept artist" because like i said, the team does what they need when it is needed. We have two people who are designated as "2D artists". which is probably the closest thing to concept artist. There's myself (Dom Littler) and i'm lead artist (but that means i guide 3D as well), i think i went over my role a bit at our talk to you guys, and Lee Gregory who is a 2D artist. However we both do our fair share of 3D modeling now the "concept" stage of our pre-production pipeline is done. it all depends what part of the process the game is in. most of the concept art for a game is produced before production of the game itself stars to get the visual design and art style worked out.
We still do mood paintings and sketches occasionally when they are required to put an idea across quickly though. We call ourselves just "2D artists because we don't just produce concept art (by which i kind of mean mood paintings), i also gather reference images, determine the art style of the game, thumbnail and silhouette painting, everything a general concept artist would do. but we also do texture art, Character/ creature design and sculpting. 3d modelling, we all have a bit of a hand in the story and game design, though being a lead i'm a bit more involved in that, in fact i end up spending less time actually doing art than the other 2D and 3d artists. We also handle the visual aspect of stuff like UI design, logo design, art guides for stuff like the website. Lee also animates the animatics for in game cut-scenes and trailers which we both do the storyboards for.I hope this helps, sorry it might be a bit jumbled up, i just rambled onto the keyboard.

Dom"