Bev Bush, Senior Lecturer in Games Design, University of Central Lancashire

My Thoughts

A run through of a career path and decisions made during it, a short presentation so went by rather quick – a lot more notes would be on the lecture slides.

Notes

Bev didn’t know about computers when in education in the late 70’s – computers were on Star Trek and that’s about it. Nowadays it is a lot more directly accessible.

More intentional now then incidental, and a lot more planned and purposeful.

Went from Thames TV to Traveller’s Tales Ltd. – only an “apparent” change. Gender and age difference was never a difference. Making somewhere a great place to work for boys and girls means spreading the word about it to get them involved.

Path didn’t exist early on, but now the landscape of games is more colonised by todays game developers. More opportunities available today. A much more definitive list of skils required for students to succeed are available.

She went via. art college, painting drawing and story telling, into Cosgrove Hall Films Ltd. Thames TV backdrop painting for Wind in the Willows, Duckula, Danger Mouse and others. The additional amount of communication skills and so forth were also very important.

Went into freelance work as a background artist. Went into Travellers Tales – luckily got a contract for Mickey Mania right away! Stayed until working on Lego Star Wars 2. Went from background artist to texturing, then onto 3d modelling. 4 women on the Lego team, out of around 17 or so.

Went onto UCLAN – University of Central Lancashire teaching modelling.

Considers that the games are becoming more friendly to girls in any case for the future. Females will join, it’d be good to encourage it even though it’ll happen naturally anyway. She’s setting a good example too!