Biwald
@JosephBiwald • 7,528 subscribers
Marketing Art Director & Artist @PlayStation, supporting @bungie. Artist & Photographer.
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One of the workflows I helped advance and lead for Destiny 2 was our static compositing pipeline for marketing visuals. When we were creating marketing content for #Destiny2, we always needed strong key visuals for weapons, characters, abilities, and other in-game elements. Unlike a traditional gameplay screenshot, where everything is baked into one static image, composited shots let us isolate individual elements and light them more precisely. That gave us a lot more flexibility to build scenes with better legibility, clearer focus, stronger lighting, improved contrast, and a more intentional overall look. One of the biggest strengths of compositing is having access to individual layers in Photoshop. That layered approach not only makes the editing process easier, but also makes the final artwork much more flexible. Images can be adapted for trailer motion graphics, reworked for print, or pushed further as creative needs evolve. Destiny 2 composites are built using Adobe Photoshop alongside in-game captures. Using advanced development tools, we light, capture, and isolate characters, weapons, and props directly from the game environment, all of which were originally created by the talented Bungie 3D art teams. Those assets are then brought into Photoshop, where they’re cut out and assembled into custom scenes using layered compositions and visual effects. The composites highlighted below are a few of the Destiny 2 pieces I’ve worked on that are meaningful to me. Let me know what your favorite is!
Biwald67,518 views • 1 month ago
Art directing marketing visuals for Destiny 2 has been especially rewarding because it has given me the opportunity to work with so many talented artists whose work l've admired for years. It has also allowed me to hire and develop both internal and external creative talent to support the breadth of visual content required for a live service game like Destiny 2. One of the ongoing challenges of art direction is finding the right balance in how much visual direction to provide. How broad or specific my feedback needs to be often depends on an artist's strengths, our working relationship, and their familiarity with the brand. Over the past couple of years, I've focused more deeply on art direction for Bungie, and it has been a continual process of building on what has worked well while learning where I can improve. Below are a few #Destiny2 illustrations and composites I helped shape through creative and art direction that are meaningful to me. I'm grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with so many talented artists and agencies, and for the time, craft, and care they brought to these pieces. Special thanks to Sung Choi, Yohann Schepacz, Kai Zhou, Jacob Joyce, Drexis Animations, Miki Bishop, Christine Lim, Nat King, Stephen Boe, Gabriel Flauzino | FLZ 🇧🇷🎨 , Jacob Gonzalez, Derek Heisler, and BOND for their contributions. You can find full-resolution versions, artist credits, and additional art here:
Biwald68,654 views • 1 month ago
Destiny 2 left a permanent mark on my life. The memories I’ve made with this game, both as a player and as someone lucky enough to work on it, will forever stay with me. Not just because of late nights running King’s Fall with friends, or grinding out the Crucible Glorious Seal in solo queue like a complete maniac, but because Destiny 2 challenged me, shaped me, and pushed me toward becoming the creative I am today. My journey into digital art and photography started back in 2007, when I began taking screenshots in Halo 3 and entering Bungie community art contests. The relationships I built during that time eventually opened the door to an opportunity with Bungie’s Gameplay Capture team in 2014, helping the team capture footage for a new game called Destiny. I had no idea then that a commendably short two-week contract would turn into an incredible 12-year journey with this franchise. I originally came to Bungie hoping to pursue environmental concept art, but along the way I had the opportunity to work on marketing art and quickly fell in love with it. Creating marketing art for a franchise like Destiny challenged me in so many different ways. It forced me to expand my technical, creative, and communication skill sets, constantly adapt, and keep learning new tools and workflows just to keep pace with the live-service beast that was Destiny 2. It means a lot to be able to look back and say with confidence that I had a visual impact on Destiny 2; but the most meaningful part of it all was getting to work alongside and learn from so many incredible artists at Bungie, and seeing firsthand just how much care, effort, and humanity it takes to make work like this possible. It’s hard to fully capture how much energy, skill, and collaboration goes into every visual part of a game like Destiny 2. That work is shaped by artists from different backgrounds, experiences, disciplines, and perspectives. Each of them, including me, left a small part of themselves in what they created. To me, that’s what makes a game like Destiny 2 feel truly meaningful and memorable. Especially now, in a world increasingly saturated with content and driven by instant output and gratification through AI, I keep coming back to the value of process. For me, and for so many of my peers, it was never only about arriving at the final image. It was about the journey it took to get there. The late nights. The iteration. The problem-solving. The trust. The shared pursuit of trying to make something special. To my peers, I’m deeply proud of what we built together, but even more grateful for how we built it. We challenged each other, inspired each other, and kept showing up for one another through every high and low, as Destiny 2 has had many. That kind of shared effort leaves a lasting mark. What we made mattered. What we gave mattered. And the impact of what we built together will stay with us, and this community, for a long time. Shoutout to the current and former members of Creative Studios, the VizD team, and the many Bungie developers and marketers who helped shape this chapter of my life. I’m especially grateful to the teammates who believed in me, encouraged me to embrace failure and new beginnings as essential parts of artistic growth, and pushed me to take on challenges even when they felt beyond my reach. You showed me that the strength of a team will always surpass that of any individual hero. As my work on #Destiny2 comes to a close and I look toward the future, I plan to spend the next few weeks sharing some of the pieces I had the chance to create or art direct that mean the most to me. For now, I’ll leave you all with a collage of some of my personal favorite pieces to work on across Destiny 2’s lifetime. These projects mean so much to me because many of them started as personal passion projects or late-night concept sketches, inspired by playing early builds of Destiny 2 and by the incredible work of our development team.
Biwald72,999 views • 1 month ago
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