Items tagged with 'Kareem'

Mark, Alex and Kareem were at Develop in Brighton last week talking about things past present and future in their keynote talk with Phil Harrison. Some interesting factoids came out of that talk and spread onto the internet, including Mark’s analogy about how moving on from LBP is like a parent watching their child grow up and leave home, and afterwards the guys spoke to some press folk too.

One of the outlets that got their grubby paws all over our directors was GamesIndustry.biz, who have published an interview with Kareem and Mark about creating a successful start-up, how to look after creative people, and the love / hate relationship that goes along with starting up a company.

Ettouney meanwhile suggested looking after the more creative members of staff was essential to a productive team. “A big part of the investment, in my opinion, other than doing the good work and the creative work, is understanding how to work with creative people.”

“It’s kind of like an entertainer by craft, a person who does something and gets their kicks from the happiness that comes as a result. So if they’re not getting that their cycle is broken and they get weaker and weaker. So it’s important to remember these things and not just be completely objective.”

You should also expect and prepare to handle disagreements. Healey especially remembered times when the close team struggled to get along.

“If you’re going to do a start up with a bunch of other people take it for granted that you are going to hate those people at some point,” he warned.

Why not read the full article on GI.biz!

In this spotlight edition of the Media Molecule Podcast, Kenny, Daniel and Spaff sit down with Mm Art Director Kareem Ettouney to discuss his influences and passions, and how they affected the look at feel of the weird mish-mash that is LittleBigPlanet. We discuss generalities of art in games, games as art, how Mm works as a studio, how you can only be as mad as how serious you are, and Kareem sneaks in his obligatory Beatles Analogy.

After the podcast Kareem attended his art class, where he painted this picture… we include it here as a great example of Kareem’s personal interests, influences and non Mm work. There’s plenty more Sphinx magic for those who are interested, just visit Kareem’s website - kareemettouney.com

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Kareem gave a talk recently at Learning Without Frontiers, an international festival of learning and technology. It focusses on LBP as a tool for learning, something we are always really interested to hear about! The new tools in LBP2 could lend themselves towards teaching things such as electronics, logic, physics, or music - so if you have any stories let us know!

Check out Kareem’s talk below!

Kareem was worried that he’d scared the world with his previous piece of Found Art, and felt so bad about it he drew us a new piece especially, a new piece that is especially awesome.

A piece of art like this needs a name - why not tell us what you think it should be called in the comments below, we’ll send the piece of art to whoever comes up with the best name! Go!

We have a winner! Kareem looked over the full list, and the name that made him laugh the most was the least highbrow of them all, this piece of art is hereby entitled “Bob”  - Well done to Marc, @napero7 on Twitter! Thanks everyone for entering,  there were some incredible entries there, I think Kareem is hooked on this idea now.

Kareem drew this fine specimen whilst in a meeting… I’m not sure who the meeting was with or what it was about, but I’m fairly happy I wasn’t part of it. It must have been Weird.

The Guys from G4TV came to hang out recently at Mm towers, and interviewed Dave Kareem and Alex talking about some of the new tools from LBP2 and how they came to be. They also coupled it with some exclusive footage of some of our Story mode levels that you most likely haven’t seen yet. Unless you snuck into the studio with G4TV when we weren’t looking, naughty you!

There’s also some tasty information about a new setting that will allow people to tweak Sackboy’s jump to be just how they want it in their levels…. enjoy!

Last week was the annual Develop conference in Brighton, and we were there to give some talks, come a cruel 4th in a games quiz, and win a nice stack of shiny awards!

Mark and Kareem gave a talk entitled The Art of LittleBigPlanet - A Big Medley discussing how the visual style of LittleBigPlanet was decided upon and evolved, how the feel of the game was defined by the materials, and everything being bolted together. They also discussed how you guys have been using the game to make all kinds of different visual treats for us to enjoy. Highlights of the talk included peeks at early sackboy sketches, prototype videos such as the famous YellowHead demo, and some screenshots of some of your levels and sackboy costumes.

Kenny gave a talk to the audiophiles of the conference entitled Real-time Audio: Context Is Everything in which he apparently ‘explored the history of game audio to establish how and why we’ve manipulated audio in the past in order to help understand many of the inherited methods and problems we now take for granted’. When I asked him what that meant he said ‘stuff’ and then said ‘it’s about the why, and not the how, of audio manipulation’ so there you go! Sadly I wasn’t there to see the talk, but knowing Kenny, it would have been fairly awesome, insightful and full of bonhomie.

On the Wednesday night a small gang of Molecules attended the Develop awards, where we had been nominated for five awards, all of which we won, thank you Develop! Look at all these great things we won:

Media Molecule

• Best Independent Developer
• Best New Studio

LittleBigPlanet

• Artistic Achievement
• Technical Innovation
• Best New IP

The trophies are apparently really shiny and will look great in our new trophy cabinet, but Mark took them home with him and immediately buggered off on a tropical holiday somewhere (jealous!), so the report of just how shiny they are is pure hearsay at the moment. We shall confirm in coming weeks.

Thanks to everyone who voted for us, we are very humbled, and overjoyed!

Shininess update! One of the awards arrived in the post just now, and they are indeed nice and shiny, also very heavy, provoking some scary murderous comments. Check it out!

If you are in or near to Brighton, UK, why not pop down to the Fishing museum on the seafront this weekend, and take a gander at the Pixel Hail exhibition, where art by our very own Jim Unwin and Kareem Ettouney will be on show. We’ll be heading down tonight to a private showing, ooh aren’t we fancy?

22nd May – 24th May 2009 – The Art of Videogames
An exhibition of art from, and inspired by, videogames

For three days, the annex of Brighton’s Fishing Museum will be taken over by a multimedia exhibition of art from, and inspired by, videogames. Award winning videogames artists will exhibit, alongside artists who’s lives are meshed in someway with the world’s largest entertainment industry: videogames.

Private view: the Friday night opening event will play host to the UK and Brighton’s games luminaries as well as artists and members of the press. A mobile phone auction on the evening will give away an exclusive one-off piece of game art, with all proceeds going to charity. The following two days will be a public exhibition with a special kids’ cosplay event on the Saturday afternoon outside the Fishing Museum.

Venue: Brighton Fishing Museum on May 22nd (private view on the evening), May 23rd and 24th (open all day for visitors).

A number of heroes from our merry band of warriors will be heading down to Sunny Brighton this July to speak at Develop 2009. Some others might be there to just enjoy some ice cream. Others of us may or may not live there all the time anyway, because we’re cool. Gamasutra reports… on the conference, not the living in Brighton thing.

On the art track, Media Molecule’s Kareem Ettouney and Mark Healey will present a wide-ranging discussion on the art of LittleBigPlanet, and how the team integrated the game’s visual style with its functionality to serve its user-generated content goals.

Kareem and Mark will touch on a broad range of subjects, from the desire for LittleBigPlanet to be a collage of visuals mixing the ancient with the contemporary; how the look and functionalities of LittleBigPlanet are highly integrated; and how cutting-edge visual technology was used to serve the vision of user-generated content.

Kenny Young, the lord of the sound booth, will also be representing us and giving a talk, although unrelated to LittleBigPlanet. His talk is, he just told me, all about real-time audio type stuff, and will ‘explore the history of game audio to establish how and why we’ve manipulated audio in the past in order to help understand many of the inherited methods and problems we now take for granted’. Fun!

Develop will be held between the 14-16 July, and there will also be speakers there from Microsoft, Nokia, Real Time Worlds, Traveller’s Tales, Mythic, Hansoft and Ubisoft. Maybe see you there?

Our loveable Egyptian Art Director Kareem has been interviewed by Edge Online, where he talks about things with three letter acronyms –  LBP, DLC and ART. Wait that last one is just a word…

LBP to the general public was a hot game at Christmas and now it’s old news, and yet it’s now a far better game than it was when it came out. Do you in some ways regret LBP being so early on in this evolution from games being something you buy in a box to being an online, extensible platform?

Well no – we are so humbled and excited by that, and wait until you see what’s coming as well. As long as you inspire people hopefully they’ll keep on enjoying it. But what I really want to say about that is that the game industry for a long time was so powerful as a technology-driven kind of platform, and in the last 10, 15 years you start seeing cinema taking over games – huge cutscenes and lip-synching and trying to make immersive stories and believability of the world. But what we’re trying to do in LBP is to focus on expression, not impressiveness. We’ve given the bits to the people and people have – for example, the guy who made a wedding proposal. That is never going to be topped for that particular person because of the personal aspect. If we get the best studio in the world to do that level, it’s not going to mean to that person’s partner as much as his one because of the personal element. This is what LBP is all about. It’s the power of the personal and the indispensability of the individual.

Read the full interview over at Edge Online.