2003 ©NEW LINE/ELECTRONIC ARTS

In the summer of 2003, I relocated from Hawaii to San Francisco to be Art Director on EA's Lord of The Rings: The Return of the King video game.

I took on the task of art directing the game. Aside from MINAS TIRITH WALL and SOUTHERN GATE, which were under Margaret Fauly-Mauvais's command, I directed all the levels of the game, including the FRONT END.

During my time, the team grew from about forty artists to a group of one hundred sixty. Working with all these talented artists was a truly exhilarating and extremely rewarding experience. People in the game industry put in an insane amount of time and effort into their projects.

We had access to huge amount of footage and image material from Weta Digital, which was, on one hand, a great blessing and on the other quite a challenge, considering that we had over 15,000 images of THE RETURN OF THE KING to choose from. Many people think that games are becoming more and more cinematic; I personally believe that the production pipeline is actually closer to a digital animation studio than a movie production.

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HRISTIAN SCHEURER