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Five years ago, a small ragtag group of young artists banded together as a virtual company. They had met in school, online, and while working at various jobs in the film and games industry. They had $6,000, a passion for art, talent, experience and a lofty goal: Deliver the top quality artwork to the top quality companies in the entertainment world.
Today, Massive Black’s 55 artists provide concept design, storyboards, graphic design, illustration, 2D concept art, 3D modeling, texture painting,
3D animation, and marketing materials to more than 80 entertainment clients worldwide. Currently, about 80 percent of the studio’s work centers on the videogame industry, with the rest spread among film, advertising and marketing, television, and toy manufacturing. With branches in Shanghai and Bangkok, the San Francisco-based company has positioned itself to be competitive in cost as well as quality. Now, the company’s success has fostered a second goal: create and license its own original content.
But, despite the commercial accomplishments – the company has been profitable since its founding – and the business acumen that implies,
Massive Black still looks and feels more like a collective artists’ atelier than a corporation. “We keep the corporate side invisible,” says Jason Manley, co-founder and president. “It has to be absolutely invisible for artistic culture to thrive.”
Adds Justin (Coro) Kaufman, co-founder and art director, “There’s not too much corporate culture around here.” |
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Community Planning
The coming together of the founders reads like a six degree of separation story. Manley and Kaufman met when Manley interviewed for a job at Shaba Games, now part of Activision. “We got along really well,” says Manley. “We were on the same path; we were straight with each other from the beginning.”
Together they and Andrew Jones, a third co-founder and now creative director and head of R&D, started the internet-based artists’ community conceptart.org. Manley had met Jones in school and introduced him to Kaufman.
“There was no place where artists could get to know each other,” says Manley. “Someone once said to me, ‘Successful artists are like Kung Fu masters.
They wander the world and sometimes they come across people who say they are masters or want to be, but they aren’t really dedicated to it. And sometimes they find another Kung Fu master and teach each other a few secret moves.
They go on in life, and never forget the great ones they came across during their journey.’ Our group came from having a strong attraction to people with high talent and that led to building conceptart.org and that solidified our relationships.”
Kaufman had met Chris Hatala, another founder and now director of animation, at school. Hatala started his career at Tippett Studio in the animation department where Petey Konig, Massive Black founder and 3D director, also worked. Hatala showed Kaufman’s portfolio to Konig.
“He hung onto it for a few years,” says Kaufman, “and then, out of the blue, he dropped me an email and asked if I wanted to trade artwork with him.”
When they met, Kaufman told Konig about an idea that he, Manley, and Jones had for starting a company. Konig hopped onboard. Noxizmad, Massive Black’s senior concept artist and producer Melissa Lee joined not long after.
While each of these artists continued working for other companies, they solidified their relationship through conceptart.org and by coming together to teach workshops. Now that they’re running a company of their own, that hasn’t changed. The non-profit group continues to run workshops, with Massive Black’s sponsorship: The company provides most of the instructors, the work force, and the client relationships. And, conceptart.org has grown: The website, which gets around 700,000 unique visitors per month, has doubled its traffic each year.
“It’s our way to give back to the world,” Manley says. “We’re training our competitors every day, but we believe in art education and furthering the art.
We guide it and protect it from corporate goons.”
Conceptart.org also serves Massive Black – as it always has. “The workshops are a great way for our guys to see the world and promote what we do,” says Kaufman. “And it’s useful for finding talent. We found our entire concept art department through conceptart.org.” |
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We asked three of the Massive Black founders when they first starting thinking about art as a career choice.
Jason Manley
I was 20 before I centered in on art. I decided then that someday I would own and be part of an animation studio that made amazing works. Back then, I wanted to be an animator. I studied traditional animation for about two and a half years before figuring out that my passion was really in representational art and illustration. The latter led to my concept design career. And, that career led to Massive Black, conceptart.org, and the workshops, which cemented it all together.
Coro Kaufman
I think I began to take art seriously back in 1991 when I began writing graffiti in my late teens. It became apparent to me that I wanted to paint stuff for a living. As a child of the Star Wars generation, I was always interested in science fiction, giant robots and monsters, so when I made the decision to become an artist, I decided I wanted to deal in that genre. My original goal was to become a maquette sculptor or get into special effects. Somehow, I ended up where I am today.
Andrew Jones
Drawing was the only thing I ever did well. Reading gives me a headache and I’m mathematically challenged. I can’t spell to save my life, never picked up a musical instrument, and I’m still healing emotional scars from little league baseball. Art basically won by default. I painted a caterpillar in pre-school and the art teacher singled me out and told my parents I had a special talent. Somehow that made my teacher happy and made my parents happy and that made me feel good. It was a simple equation for a five-year-old to understand. My parents were always encouraging. I think they knew I would be an artist before I knew what an artist was. As soon as I realized that the system of reality we have in place requires you to do something in exchange for money, I decided I would rather draw pictures with my time than wash dishes. Some people choose to do a certain thing either because they have deep passion for it or they can’t do much else. I guess I am a mixture of the two. |
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