Staying positive and other such nowadays rethorics on how life should be faced are not beliefs of this article’s writer, but it wasn’t hard at all to find the mood that encapsulates AMC’s best times of 2020. Here’s just another resilience story of the infamous 2020.
Change was the key and we embraced it.
Togetherness and connectivity were the challenges.
Some stuff really mattered.
Togetherness during work from home
Our office in Bucharest remained open during #wfh, so our interns, their mentors and the management team could work together. Most of the year, the vast majority of artists practiced the fine art of not reposting caustic memes on Discord from home.
Joke aside, jumping from a video conference to another with your team in order to solve the same riddle felt, for us (mostly) gamers, quite natural. Communication went smoothly.
Togetherness in the park
We were mostly online, except for that one time when we all went out in the park ‘cause we really missed each other.
And that time on harvest day when we drank palinca. And that other time for Christmas when we had palinca, the natural remedy for almost all problems.
The time for celebration is all the time
We amused our Head of Art, Dan Cocină, our Captain in Arts for quite a while, by sending him a ‘we ❤️ you’ video with a little help from his all time fav, a cheeky Alice Cooper.
On this occasion, we kindly remind Sorin, our freshman Character Artist, not to hope to meet Slash anytime soon. Dan has served 20 years for AMC’s fame and glory.
Openness
The urgent use of online platforms for interaction opened our team to new audiences, starting with the 50+ students in the National University of Arts and expanding to 250+ members of the community gathered on Discord in one year of teaching and mentoring.
The opportunity of interacting online with large groups shaped our educational efforts.
The team of coaches expanded and specialised in teaching Games Art for higher education.
We got help from Melania Medeleanu in public speaking.
And from Matt Minnit, Senior Lecturer at Teesside University, Middlesbrough. Before starting the classes in October at UNArte and Cinetic, Matt trained our trainers in gaining popularity in all schools. Thank you, Matt!
Art Challenges
Thank God the museums were open!
We went to the National Museum of Contemporary Art!
Then in the artist’s den:
And then this came out, our Challenge to the 3D artists of the world to make a 3D model of an art piece and, eventually, win.
In November we opened our gallery shaped and programmed by Dragoș Casian and Andrei Dănescu, lead artists at AMC.
This is how we’ve met young artists and further mentored 10 of them in walking that extra mile in 3D modeling. Some of them told us their stories.
And yet another gallery was shaped by Mădălina Pomparău and Daniel Vijoi and came out on the web, our virtual 3D booth at XDS:
Before saying our goodbye and “see you soon” to Wargaming over a project that lasted for 6 years, our Lead Artist, Dragoș Casian and Yakov Yaskevich, Senior Art Supervisor at Wargaming shared their experience of creating trusting relationships in game dev projects at the External Development Summit.
Following the Christmas 2019 tradition, we held an online concert, from J. R. R. Tolkien‘s “Namárië” to Fleet Foxes and Romanian carols, we’ve got them covered:
Let’s not forget why we’re all here
Posing in cool merch from your clients can be one good reason.
Here’s how a proud mobster looks after seeing his in-game art.
We’re counting the days until the arrival of the spring-summer collection for Scavengers and Call of Duty Black Ops. Hope it’s organic cotton!
This year we’ll give out a single award, for wanting to only approach the big issues of humanity, climate change for starters, recycling as a method to make it a little better.
The Greta Thunberg Prize of the Year goes to Alexandru Almășan, Environment Artist at AMC.
His technique never gets old, it’s 100% reusable, and his children will thank him when they’ll discover the PC blanket heritage.
See you next year!
Georgiana Toea, Community Builder @AMC
Read also the best times in AMC in 2019.