Another really interesting speaker at ADAPT conference was Christian Lorenz Scheurer, matte painter/conceptual designer/art director, a brilliant artist and teacher who has worked on incredible productions such as Titanic, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, The Matrix, The Animatrix, and the recent Superman Returns -- among others.

He had this very inspiring and motivating conference about the creation of original and groundbreaking intellectual property (IP) for feature films and next-generation video games. Intellectual property is everything that one mind can create, and that becomes a known universe to the general public. For example, everything pertaining to the Star Wars universe is proper to George Lucas's IP, even though other people are working on new content creation for it. He presented us with his approach on the conception and production of digital art for movies and games, and the importance for an artist to create his own IP for better self-development, and breaking into the movie and video-game business.

I liked his views on art direction, mainly as he was saying that it was "...not a democracy, but a soft tyranny" - funny, but true. While the process behind conception and production requires teamwork, there must be someone with a definite view on how things will end. When an art director decides something will be white with blue dots, he might listen and see if anybody comes up with better ideas, but then if he doesn't like them it's going to stay white with blue dots, and that's that.

Check out Christian's Web Site at http://www.christianlorenzscheurer.com/ . You can also buy his Gnomon Workshop DVDs (I also got myself one of these), on which he presents step-by-step tutorials on different matte painting and drawing techniques.

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