Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/929567
20 P E R S P E C T I V E | M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 8 education SKILL BUILDING FOR THE NEW ART DEPARTMENT by Marty Kline, Member of the Art Directors Guild Illustration of THE FLINTSTONES lunch truck by Senior Illustrator Marty Kline. I have worked as an Illustrator in motion pictures for forty years. My favorite projects have included: The Flintstones, Back to the Future II and III, Contact and Jurassic Park, just to name a few. When I began in this business, we all worked in Art Departments, rooms large and small, with others of greater and differing experience, each one coming to the current assignment with a unique set of skills learned on the previous job. Working side by side with others in the same profession with the same goals exposed us to new ideas, techniques and tricks of the trade. We talked, we shared, we looked over each other's shoulders at each other's projects. That's how most of us learned the skills that advanced our abilities and increased our utility to the directors and Production Designers we served, adding value to our presence in the Art Department. The Art Department I joined was part of a visual effects company that was filled with a marvelously talented and eclectic group of people with an all- encompassing range of skills, interests and experiences. And I discovered that it had been like that in the movie business since the beginning, when film looked to theatrical design for its talent. The "movie business" was full of artists exercising traditional skills with fantastic imagination, and all for new purposes. If it wasn't new, it wouldn't amaze, and amazement was our stock-in-trade. And we all had to learn all these new skills, altering the training we had received in school, modifying the practices we had developed in other fields, and sometimes creating new skills, tools and techniques. Constant interaction kept us strong, skilled and well trained.