Rock Band Series

Rock Band 1 through 4, plus the LEGO and Beatles spin-offs.

Studio

Harmonix

Publisher

MTV Games and Electronic Arts

Years

2007–2015

Platforms

Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii and PlayStation 2; Rock Band 4 on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One

Role

Environment Artist; Lead Environment Artist on Rock Band 2 and 3; Art on Rock Band 4

The venues carried the fantasy of the band's career, and had to hold up under constant camera cuts and lighting changes driven by the song.

I started as an environment artist and became lead environment artist on Rock Band 2 and 3, building the venues and stages behind every song, and wrote the environment and cinematic style guides for both. For weekly DLC, I directed and helped author a system that gave each of thousands of songs its own lighting, post-processing and camera cuts, delivered every week. DLC art staff went from four people to one. The franchise passed $1 billion in North American retail within 15 months of its late-2007 launch.

I helped establish the visual style of Rock Band. By the end I owned venue design, cutscenes, lighting, visual song authoring, menu backgrounds, the Logo Builder and nearly every 3D environment.

My early work set the venue styles: how camera, lighting and post-processing would behave at every size, from basement clubs to arenas. I oversaw building and hooking up the stages, then designed, documented and built the system that drove them. Through MIDI we hand-authored camera cuts, picked animations, set lighting palettes and graded the whole image to fit the song. Gritty punk anthems. Dark, moody goth. Bright, energetic pop.

By Rock Band 3 most venues were reused, so the team turned to the tour story. We built a run of cutscenes tied to the campaign's big unlocks, each one starring the player's own band: on stage with fans, stepping off a helicopter, on a magazine cover. Anything the player made, we used. Their logo went on banners and fan shirts, and their band name lit up the marquees.

The menus got the same care. Behind every settings and customization screen sat the band's own spaces, practice rooms and hangouts stacked with gear. Never clean, always night. Touring the world as a rock star.

I also ran the art side of optimization on every platform, tuning the content to get the most look out of each one.

I made sure licensed gear looked right in the world: official products, logos and signage for Fender, Gretsch, Ludwig, Shure, Vic Firth and the rest.