Today I attended two more lectures, the last ones. I feel quite relieved that they have finally come to an end. Although some of them conveyed interesting points, I've already heard most of their content at Mataró's university or read or heard about them. And some other facts could be simply deduced from those classes and by observing the world around us. Anyway, I admit that they allowed me to take a look at other people's work and experience.

Today Neil Thompson came to talk about his career in games design. He's a studio art director in London, for SCEE (Sony Computer Entertainment Europe) and he's been involved in the creation of Play Station 3 games. He actually showed us some examples of their products in the lecture theatre.
He talked about the different existing roles in a studio and insisted that the only prerequisits to work there are being able to turn one's hand on anything and being enthusiastic about computer graphics. I find this a bit simplistic, because studios will undoubtedly take on the most technically experienced candidate, but maybe luck and self-assurance might help some find their way up.
He also talked about the artistic aspect of games and how art offers a broad source of inspiration for graphics creation. He mentioned several films that had inspired him because of their photography and shots composition: Stanley Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon", Yimou Zhang's "Hero", Ron Fricke's "Baraka", Luc Besson's "Le Grand Bleu", Murnau's "Nosferatu", etc.
Inspiration can also be found in painters or even in the NASA photographic archive.

Finally, I went to Shane Chebsey's lecture, from Scar Comics. He works as a publisher, distributor, creator, editor and events organiser. He started by explaining why we may choose to start self-publishing: to showcase our work to larger publishers, to get feedback and to develop our own skills, to make money and develop our own brand, just for the fun of it or to produce material for TV or film.
When starting business, we may ask ourselves about the demand, about who's going to buy our comics and how and where we're going to sell them; who else does the same and whether he's successful or not...
In terms of finance, we need to consider the printing cost, professional fees, marketing and advertising, web hosting, postage, distribution, the number of copies we need to break even, etc.
In terms of creative options, we need to sort out some things like the format we're going to use: print, web, both? Do we want a graphic novel with long shelf life or a series of books that we'll need to sell quickly and in large amounts? Are we going to publish in black and white or with full colour? Do we need collaborative artists?
When considering production and printing, we should take into account that some decisions will affect the price we'll charge for the comic. We must decide if we're able to produce it all by ourselves, if we'd rather use digital short runs or large litho runs, if we need an ISBN number and a bar code...
We'll also have to get people to know our product, so we must think about advertising, networking, viral web marketing, attending conventions, sending out review copies to critics or artists that may give us their opinion, posting out flyers and posters to retailers, etc.
And the final stage of the business, distribution and sales. Shane explained to us that Diamond Comic has the monopoly on comics distribution in the Western hemisphere, but that other options for distribution could be online POD (Print On Demand), Turnaround Publisher Services, Amazon and Ebay, Haven Distributions in the USA, selling directly to retailers and from our own website or selling at conventions, at concerts, even at coffee shops.