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Gary R Boodhoo

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Adobe Acrobat PDF document
Case Studies

User Interface &
Franchise Identity

Adobe Acrobat PDF document
Resume.pdf

always first steps

ABOUT
Who or What is he?
  • He is a kind of artist who designs interactive systems…
RESUME
His career
  • Game Credits
  • Employment
  • Resume
ARCHIVE
The mindfield
  • Experiments?
  • Other Great Stuff?
  • Gifts?
Gary R Boodhoo is an interactive designer and artist recognized for contributions to the game industry.
His interface designs have provided rich media user experiences for best selling videogames by Electronic Arts and LucasArts Entertainment. In a previous life he designed motion graphics for broadcast and corporate clients including Turner Broadcasting, The Golf Channel, Westinghouse and MCI-Worldcom (in retrospect, the Worldcom production budget seemed unusually large.)
Why interactivity?
“Interactive media, for me, has always been about figuring out why people behave as they do. On the one hand you have to take users seriously, but on the other hand users want to be told what to do.... Is user experience the end goal of the design, or does user experience conform to any design we care to make?
On the production side of things, UI design for games is easily the dirtiest job in the industry, full of opportunity though. Its not so difficult to imagine doing things that have never been done in this field, yet getting things done is as much political, conceptual and technical as it is artistic. Rewards my obsessive-compulsive-ritualistic tendencies, you see.”
How did you become a part of the design culture industry™?
“Well, arguably, anyone with a wallet is part of that particular game, but there are civilians and then there are what I guess you could call hackers, although the distinction is certainly less clear than it used to be. After artschool I worked as a broadcast designer. Some time later I began designing for interactive media. There's been a deep involvement with interactive systems since the TRS-80 era when it became apparent that the inside was larger than the outside.”
As far as being part of the industry - I've never been the one transmitting the signals. I was just following orders! The scale of these projects, the money involved meant it was always someone elses's message that I was sending. For me, the next generation of gaming won't have arrived until game development is much smaller.
It can't keep on this way. More people and money has hit dimishing returns. My hope remains that mature 3rd party tools will emerge and allow users a far greater role in game development. For console titles in increasingly seems to me that we are in the business of making artifacts rather than the ecosystem you see on the web ”
Where do the ideas come from?
“From a need to understand human behavior. Maybe from the effort of adapting to a new life when my family moved to the United States. The unspoken codes underlying American consumer culture are profoundly mysterious; enough so that years later I still don't fully understand. Baseball cards for example, or Disney entertainment… what's that all about? Graphic design is a way to decode those messages and feed them back into the culture. The illusion of control.”
What is your working method?
“It changes. There was a time when I worked in isolation for the most part. Currently, productive collaboration is a major concern. Design by committee, even worse, design on the fly leads to all the wrong compromises. So I previsualize everything and create prototypes early on. By working the prototypes and taking a hands-on approach I’ve found you go into production with reasonable expectations. I’m a realistic optimist—sometimes major breakthroughs happen in response to unknowns and I live for the happy accident! I strive to create a situation where I’ll recognize it when I see it.”
Are you working on any personal projects?
“I'm constructing a body of work for a project called Model Villain Factory, utilizing photography and image manipulation. It’s about glamour and false persona and how the mask is more real than the face it conceals. I enjoy staging photo shoots and the planning that goes into it. It’s a way of combining the real and the synthetic that I find fascinating. Is the synthetic implicit in the real or is it the other way around?”
“I’m rethinking my expectations of motion graphics, experimenting with synthetic rendered imagery and typography. I’ve been questioning my intentions quite a bit. Why should the image be in motion at all? What is the added value? There's a literalism to animation which bothers me. The fact that there's a beginning and end bothers me. Still figuring out what animation means to me other than eye candy.”
Do you show work at galleries?
“I've exhibited work but don’t fully understand public display of artwork. I do my own work because I have to. When I go to galleries or museums I usually experience a complete lack of involvement like there's a glass wall between me and the work. By comparison, live music is a lot more visceral. The experience of seeing someone in tears at a concert years ago left me wondering why I'd never seen anything comparable at a gallery opening.”
“Unless I have the opportunity to see the same artwork over a period of time and can form a personal relationship, I'm not really seeing it. Looking at something is easy, seeing it takes time. The gallery space rewards novelty not memory—but if the purpose of displaying work is simply to place a product, on the market then of course I’m all for that effort.”
The Colors
  • Black
  • White
  • Red
  • Yellow (sometimes, like here)
The Typefaces
  • Didot
  • Frutiger
  • Helvetica
  • Conduit
  • Trade Gothic
  • Univers
  • Verdana
The Books
  • TCR Standard Guide
    for Xbox 360
    Microsoft
  • TRC Standards Guide
    for PS3
    Sony
  • First and Last Men
    Olaf Stapeldon
  • The Mind Parasites
    Colin Wilson
  • White Noise
    Rudy Rucker
  • Oblique Strategies
    Brian Eno
    technically not a book
The Music
  • Cabaret Voltaire
  • Skinny Puppy
  • Diary of Dreams
  • Kate Bush
  • God Module
  • Lost Signal
The Cats
  • introducing: Tibault
  • introducing: Wallis
Senior Interface Designer
LucasArts Entertainment
San Francisco, CA
2006-2008

Created graphic design studies and animations to explore themes proposed by the art director. Extensive research in the Lucasfilm archives. This work provided assets and layouts for my initial interface prototypes.

Solved screen layouts by first describing what the game controller does. Modeled these descriptions with in-game prototypes authored for game design reviews. In particular, revisions based on this method greatly improved the user experience of power upgrades after leveling-up.

Introduced usage of the authoring system as a presentation tool for weekly design reviews on the Xbox 360. Running demos on the game console showed how design elements worked together under real world conditions.

Created visual effects and animation. Procedural animations of object and texture transforms were widely used throughout the UI. This approach greatly reduced texture memory usage and often provided novel results.

Collaborated on font and icon systems with the compliance team to deliver a consistent user experience for the game in multiple languages, on standard and high definition displays, for Xbox 360 and PS3.

Senior Designer
Electronic Arts - Tiburon
Maitland, FL
2001-2004

Large scale UI development on AAA sports titles for PC, PS2, XBOX and NGC

  • Feature prototyping
  • Graphic design
  • Graphic design
  • UI scripting and integration

Designed 2005 studio style guide

  • Designed screen elements, components and low level behaviors shared by EA Sports game teams
  • Created templates for common screen types after a comprehensive study of all EA Sports games
  • Reconciled unique needs and edge cases with higher level goals of the shared design
  • Collaborated with EA-Canada to design EA Sports online network game modes

Interface design lead on Madden NFL™ 2003 & 2004

Interface design for studio intranet

Interface design for internal studio tools

Senior Broadcast Designer
Creative Chaos
Atlanta, GA
1998-2000

Motion graphics and 3D animation

Graphic design and storyboarding

Graphics support for online editing

Client presentation

Broadcast Designer
The Golf Channel
Orlando, FL
1996-1998

Motion graphics and 3D animation for on air promotions and brand identity

3D motion capture data processing and editing

Daily graphics and animation for live programming

System administration of UNIX based graphics hardware

3D Artist
JHT Multimedia
Orlando, FL
1993-1996

Technical 3D animation for military CBT projects

Broadcast design and animation for corporate video projects

Graphic Designer
WCPX-TV CBS
Orlando, FL
1992-1993

Daily graphics and animation for live programming

Credits
  • Electronic Arts™
  • Madden NFL 2005
  • NCAA Football 2005
  • NASCAR 2005
  • Madden NFL 2004
  • Madden NFL 2003
  •  
Education
  • Full Sail Center for the Recording Arts
  • 1991-1992
  • The Massachusetts College of Art
  • 1986-1990
Adobe Acrobat PDF document
RESUME.pdf

June 2008

42K

Microsoft Word document
RESUME.doc

June 2008

203K

The archive is generally empty at the moment.

 

[ site design + code | © 2006 Gary R Boodhoo ]

 

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