Interview with Braid's David Hellman [Part 1 of 3]

Posted by Gary Hodges at 8:12 PM Sep 10, 2008

Though the year isn't even over yet, most would agree that Braid already has more than a few "Best of 2008" awards in the bag. Part of that is due to the game's ingeniously designed gameplay, courtesy of Jonathan Blow. Another part is the groundbreaking way the game tells a story through what the player does just as much as what he's reading off the screen (Jonathan again). And yet another part is the enigmatic, layer-heavy story that had (and still has) players comparing notes trying to decide What It All Means (yes, that was Jonathan too).

But what would the original Star Wars have been without Ralph McQuarrie's designs? Or in our pastime: would we have cared as much about Okami if not for its sumi-e-inspired visuals? A critical part of Braid's effect comes from the music and, in particular, the game's stunning visual design - for that, we can credit David Hellman.

David was good enough to agree to a rather long interview with me covering a range of topics, from his own background to his work on Braid to the state of art in games in general. Because the final transcript was so massive, I've broken it up into three broad sections. Tonight's covers David's biography and background. Part 2 tomorrow is the chunk on Braid, and then Friday's Part 3 will be our chat about games, art in games, and what's next for him.

I talked to David as he wandered the streets of San Francisco near his apartment, so that seemed a good enough place to start...

David Hellman

So you’re in San Francisco, you’re not just “Bay Area”, you’re right there.
Yeah. I’m from Baltimore and moved here a year ago, this is my home now.

Does it feel like home? Have you lived there long enough?
Yeah, it does. But I traveled a lot recently and that’s confused me. I went back home a year to the day from when I left to see family and friends and when I came back, my first impression of my apartment was that it felt like a hotel room. I realized I didn’t have a lot of art on the walls or anything like that, it didn’t seem like a home. And as soon as I got used to it again I left for Seattle, for PAX. It was a little confusing. But yeah, it is like home. I don’t think I’ll be moving back to Baltimore.

So how was PAX?
PAX was really cool, I had a really good time. I’d never been before.

Were you there as an attendee or did you have a booth…?
I was just there to say hello, hang out.

Oh, I forgot I’m supposed to inform you this conversation’s being recorded.
Oh, okay.

I’m obligated by law or whatever, so…
I wouldn’t want you to get into any trouble.

And I will turn this over to Homeland Security if I have to.
I understand.

So start at the beginning, tell me about your beginnings with art.
I drew on paper plates.

Fabulous.
I don’t know why but that’s what my parents provided for me to draw on, paper plates. With my Crayola markers, I guess.

Do you still have any of these things?
I think my parents have one. I liked Superman. When you’re drawing him on a paper plate there’s a temptation to draw a big round head, and make it perfectly round.

I can see how you might be lured in that direction. What do your parents do?
My dad’s a psychiatrist and my mother works at her synagogue, involved in education.

So how well did it go over when you decided you were going to be an artist and move out to San Francisco?
Well, it didn’t all happen at once. I wish it had, I wish my dad were an electrician or something and was like, “Son, you’ve got to come into the family business!” and then one day I woke up and said “You know, folks, I’ve got to go to San Francisco and be an artist…and I’m gay!” That would have been even better, but it didn’t happen like that. They always encouraged me to do art and when I went to art school they actually paid for it, so there wasn’t a lot of controversy.

I think they were a lot less enthusiastic about video games, you can certainly say that. I played too many video games as a teenager, and they were probably right to be concerned. But I think they didn’t have an appreciation for what made games interesting, and now that I’ve done Braid they’re happy. My dad actually bought an Xbox and played through Braid, which was amazing because he’s not a gamer at all.

What was your first professional art gig?
I think it was at an e-commerce startup in Owings Mills, Maryland, near home. I got a job doing graphics for them. It was a really small company and I was THE art guy, so I did all their website graphics and illustrations and stuff. That actually helped me consider doing art professionally, because I saw that it was useful to someone. I hadn’t really been thinking about it clearly until that point, so after that I went to art school.

Now that was the Maryland Institute College of Art?
Yeah – so you’ve really researched! This is the most interest anyone has ever shown in my biography.

Why is or isn’t formalized education important for an artist?
Well… I think what I got the most from was just being around artists who’ve been doing it for awhile who had interesting things to say about the practice of art and could help me focus my attention on particular things or in a particular way. When I got to art school I was impressed with how some teachers talked about painting as a struggle. It was this terrific struggle to get a painting done. I didn’t necessarily expect that, but I guess that makes a lot of sense, artists get pretty involved in their work. There’s a lot riding on it, it becomes a stage for playing out whatever demons they have. So that was one aspect of it I guess, talking about art as a struggle.

Brown Center, Maryland Institute College of Art

Now I have to try to tie this into something relevant to Braid, try to make it seem as though it all meant something or was going somewhere: I like art that shows evidence of a struggle or a process, and I feel less of an impulse to make work that’s very clean or very neat and tidy. I like things that show a little bit of process behind them, or almost look like they’ve been revised in the process. I think you see that in Rembrandt, he’s scratching things out, it seems tumultuous the way things came together. I did that with some of the comics that I worked on before Braid. And I think you can see that in Braid, it was something I tried to do with the particle objects, make it look like the picture was being created – and you, Gary, wrote in your review something to that effect, and that felt really good to me because that’s sort of what I was thinking: the idea that it was being created as you were watching, or that its reality was somehow fluid or shifting in a way. I read an essay on Cézanne landscapes… I think it might have been a Merleau-Ponty essay, Eye and Mind. There was a great passage there where it describes his work with landscapes as “seeming to show a world in the first moments of its existence”. You’re looking at this thing that has just come into being… that made sense to me at the time.

Assorted Cézannes; click for larger versions

Just going back to art school, there are other things I picked up about looking at things a certain way. But I really feel like I have loads more to learn. If I didn’t feel an urge to be making things for an audience and getting on with things, part of me would want to go do grad school. But I’m drawn to doing projects with interesting people and that can find an audience.

If you look at your work as if were someone else’s, what do you see?
I’m not sure, I’m hung up on the way you frame the question because although it seems like a good one I don’t know if I can answer it. I don’t know if I can pretend to be someone else. That’s one of the difficult things about making art, you’re stuck in your own perspective. And anything you work on, it’s hard to get outside of that framework to see it fresh. Occasionally you can, maybe; if you haven’t looked at something for a long time and you go back to it, maybe you’re struck by what it is, you don’t necessary see all the steps that lead up to the final work, you’re struck by its manifest reality or nature… but that’s a lucky thing when it happens.

What media do you prefer?
I’ve been working on the computer for a long time using a Wacom tablet and Photoshop. Other than that, I still like drawing with a brush pen in a sketchbook, I’ve been coming back to that recently. I really like oils but I don’t use them as much as I like because… (sighs) they’re messy, and I’ve ruined brushes by not cleaning them off and stuff like that, so I’m just not very good at taking care of my supplies. I actually have a French easel that you can carry around and set up to do landscape painting, but I think I’m lazy, so now I just go for the things that are right there like the sketchbook you can always pick up or the Wacom tablet that’s always sitting there on the table. No mess.

You have work to do and you’re just not feeling it, what do you go back to for inspiration or to get things moving?
(laughs) Well, if I’m having trouble getting to work I’ll either grind through it and have kind of a half-assed day, or I’ll just go do something else and the next morning I’ll get up and get started right away, before I brush my teeth. That’s a good way to make a good day. That’s not inspiration, that’s just practical stuff.

What sort of worker are you? Organized, plodding, procrastinating, lazy…?
I like to see the big picture. I usually ask a lot of questions while working on a project, I like to see where we’re going, I like to see as much as I can up front to get a sense of where I am in context… so I guess that’s “organizing”, right? I’m going to try to get all of them. I can procrastinate sometimes but you know, when you’re a professional you’ve just got to get to work.

What’s your favorite part of the creative process? The initial inspiration, the work, seeing the final result…?
I think there are little moments in the middle, there isn’t any one moment. I think it’s when you discover something new, and that can happen at any point. It can happen when you’re chatting over an idea with friends in its earliest formative stages, or when you’re drawing and you notice something that you can use, or you find a connection you can make, or even when it’s done and sometimes you’re able to see it fresh for just a moment. So I think the artistic process is hard, but its peppered with these fun moments where you suddenly feel a sense of acceleration as you jump forward from the normal course of things for just a moment before it catches up to you again and you’re waiting for the next little insight.

So it’s kind of like a rollercoaster…
Yeah, it’s kind of like a lurching rollercoaster.

Someone once told me that all art is autobiographical. What’s your reaction to that?
Sure.

I can almost hear the shrug. What artists are you a fan of right now?
(long pause)

I feel like the way I consume media, it’s hard to talk about for some reason, it feels personal. But there are a lot of things I enjoy which all kind of feed me in one way or another. I just saw Transsiberian yesterday, I don’t even know who directed it to be honest… this doesn’t answer your question at all, does it? Let’s just move on.

Okay-dokey.

That wraps up Part 1 of my in-depth interview with David Hellman. Check in tomorrow to read our conversation about Braid!

And of course: a special thanks goes to David Hellman for his cooperation. ~gwh