As Managing Art Director on Messenger’s AR team I’ve led a wide range of initiatives across the various AR surfaces within the product and managed teams of designers, art directors, and technical artists.
AR Filters
My first project at Messenger was revamping our AR effect offering. Messenger had a piecemeal strategy to effect production, and I developed a creative strategy to improve quality, consistency, and creative point of view, leading a team of five designers and numerous vendors to produce XX filters over the course of a year on the project.
AR Games
I led a team which produced simple multi-participant AR games in video chat. The team consisted of three designers, a game designer, two technical artists, and a gameplay programmer. This was one of the first large scale multiplayer AR video chat game experiences, so it presented us with numerous technical and creative challenges. We were limited to only using available AR facial gestures as gameplay inputs, and I led the team to develop a systematic approach to testing gameplay styles and input methods to create an enjoyable experience for users. Under my leadership we produced X games.
360 Backgrounds
Due to the changes we all experienced due to COVID-19, inn March of 2020 increased focus was turned to video chat features in Messenger. One of these was adding a background replacement feature to our video chat service. On a very compressed schedule I led the creative strategy and production of our backgrounds product. Harnessing features available in our AR engine we built the first gyroscope enabled 360 background replacement feature in a major video chat client. To date we have launched over 100 backgrounds, continuously working with multiple product teams to push the technology–enabling streaming 4k 360 video backgrounds, advanced user integration, custom user uploaded backgrounds, and GIF integration.
AR Partnerships
I currently lead the initiative to identify, produce, and art direct partnership content across Messenger’s AR offerings. Working with partners like Disney, MTV, Universal Pictures, and musical artists like BTS and Post Malone, we’ve launched over 20 AR filters and backgrounds. I worked cross functionally with product, comms, marketing, and BD teams to identify potential partners who would resonate with our target demographic, led the pitch process, and worked with the partners and both in-house teams and external design studios to produce the content. Additionally I conceived of and led a collaboration with Facebooks internal art curation team, Facebook Open Arts, to launch a program to bring attention to visual artists from under-represented communities by commissioning six artists from around the world to produce 360 backgrounds. Many of these artists had no experience creating for AR, so my team partnered with them to capture and translate their creations into the digital world. Additionally, I worked closely with our comms team on our promotion of the project, capturing behind the scenes footage and representing Facebook in press interviews.
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