Takayoshi Sato Article

[nureintier]

(working on doing a bunch of these for my site)
reposted from
alchemillahospital.net/takayoshi-sato/


Takayoshi Sato studied fine art at Tokyo’s Tama Art University in Japan, receiving a BFA in Oil Painting. He was hired by Konami in 1996, after taking three art tests and 5 interviews. His earliest work with Konami in 1996 was working on numerous animations for Sexy Parodius for the Playstation and Sega Saturn. He then began work on the first Silent Hill game for the Playstation. He worked on characters, environments and the mood of the games as well as helping with the creation of the story. “I tried to depict a town that is desolated, filled with sorrow yet you cannot stop loving it.” It took him 2.5 years to single handedly create all the CGI scenes in the game. He created the higher-res character himself, the environments, all aspects of modeling and texturing, as well as lighting. He said one of his major challenges, besides technical limitations, was creating Caucasian characters. “I really had no Caucasians around me as a reference.”

For Silent Hill 2, he worked on the story line, the game system, and led all the preproduction activities. After working on Silent Hill 2, because of divergences with Konami Japan, he decided to relocate to the US to work on the development of other games. He worked for a few years for Konami of America, working with the staff there to help them to focus on important gameplay features in their games. “I still think that SILENT HILL 1 and 2 represent the best of my work. They have my largest influence. I can do much better now, though.”

“Silent Hill 1 became very successful and I got three awards for it. That allowed me to pursue my own creative vision.”

For GoldenEye: Rogue Agent, he spent 19 months leading the six creative producers in creating the artwork. He hired a team of 70 people and collaborated with many renowned artists. In 2006, he worked as producer on a canceled project for Xbox and PS3, Tiberium.

Since 2006, he has been working with Virtual Heroes Serious Game division in North Carolina as a research associate and art director. He has helped to schedule, plan, and finish more than 20 games in the space of 3 years. He has also designed the characters for Tale of Tales’ independent game, Fatale.

I made the choice of going out into the world instead of staying in a privileged position in Japan for many reasons. But I believe that there will be a moment and a place for ambitious artistic vision in game production. That’s what I want, whether it’s in the USA or Japan or Europe.

He works in Maya, Lightwave, SoftImage, Photoshop and Zbrush, as well as 3DS Max, Illustrator, and After Effects. He has won many awards over the years for his work in Silent Hill as well as his work on Serious Games. “After all, I came here to serious games in search of new creations. ”


sources:
www.satoworks.com/
tale-of-tales.com/blog/interviews/interview-with-takayoshi-sato/
coregamer.web.simplesnet.pt/sato.html
alchemillahospital.net/another-game-takayoshi-sato-worked-on-fatale/
www.satoworks.com/Fatale.html
alchemillahospital.net/interview-with-tale-of-tales/

[mr. worncoat]

“I tried to depict a town that is desolated, filled with sorrow yet you cannot stop loving it.” It took him 2.5 years to single handedly create all the CGI scenes in the game. He created the higher-res character himself, the environments, all aspects of modeling and texturing, as well as lighting. He said one of his major challenges, besides technical limitations, was creating Caucasian characters. “I really had no Caucasians around me as a reference.”

Two-and-a-half years, egads. He got it right, though. If anything, I'm surprised they couldn't just grab a bunch of tourists and bring them by for "referencing".

[nureintier]

Indeed, he got it right. Probably no tourists wanted to go up to the top of the building there.

Also, because elsewhere people have been whining about why certain people left Konami, here is another quote from him:

"I got enough of budget for SH2 before it started but there were no contract papers. I was approached by executives when SH2 work was being created; they were saying “this is the money as promised”. But the amount was the half of it was promised. So even though the project went very profitable, it was written in red ink. It is rather popular not having contract paper within the same company in Japan and I was aware of its risk. But because SATOWORKS directly reported to Japanese headquarters, we needed to follow the Japanese rule. I found it very difficult following this rule when I was still working in the US office. So I left Konami."

But yeah, he's another one who has moved on to do his own thing. I enjoyed Fatale, though, which he designed the characters for. I didn't even realize that until I had interviewed the folks at Tale of Tales, somehow, but I did think the characters had a familiar look to them. ^_^