Requirements for Certain Job Positions (2/2)

[Continued]

Job: Concept Artist, Bioware
Responsibilities: Work with art director and production artists to create cast of believable and immersive characters and backgrounds, wide variety of additional concepts including character design, hard surface props and vehicles. Design original concepts to fit in with style guide, translate high level ideas into production-ready art packets, maintain a high level quality of art, with variety of ideas, in depth research, reference material and develop conceptual ideas. Create lighting schemes and colour palettes to capture the tone of the world, create storyboards and dynamic keyframes that illustrate the sory and/or gameplay, ability to create photorealistic work. Qualifications: 5 years of concept experience, shipped video game titles is a plus, ability to create concepts from scratch and create colour studies, environment and component ideation and design, very strong traditional illustration skills in a variety of media as well as excellent drawing skills, matte painting experience is a plus, ability to think in 3D, strong fundamental skills including good use of line, light, shadow and colour, storytelling and concept development, ability to work within specific styles, including style set by other artists etc.

I didn't actually expect to these to ask for so little experience, compared to some other job opportunities I have soon. I assume this means that they rely a lot more on portfolios then, especially since a lot of what they are looking for is specifically drawing skills.
I feel as though I should definitely concentrate on showing my skills when it comes to drawing and designing in different styles, practice a lot more drawings in different perspective and experiment a lot more with colour. Experience collaborating sounds like it would be extremely useful when looking at other requirements, which I hope to do more of in Extended this year, although it would be good to look for possible collaborators if I do decide to enter any competitions.  I think that designing many different characters and different worlds will help me to get my confidence up and give me more experience for these kinds of jobs; if I'm not confident in my skills, no employer would be, and I need to do everything in my power to be prepared. This may mean building my portfolio a little bit more when I finish college as well and/or undertake projects that could count towards my experience in this area. I'm going to keep an eye on any other job opportunities that may come up as well, as these are only some open positions that I have found at the moment.