Jean-Paul Jarreau - Photographer/Level Designer

I will only give feedback about the Level Design since I really don't know very much about photography.

The first thing I though about was that there was no information on what YOU specifically have done on the parts of level design. Right now, I think it looks more like a portfolio for a Level Artist. Put some texts in there about the screenshots, what you did and your ideas behind them.

Also, include a top-down if you made any, either of the level or the paper-planning.

The links are really slow to show anything up. I quit after 10 seconds of waiting for something to open.

I'd love to leave feedback back but I can't see any of it.

The problem of loading seems to be that there is no steaming : it waits to load everything to show any pics. Maybe because of an iframe, not a pro dev

I have a 20mb connection and I gave up waiting on the tf2 and photograph sections. I waited around and the BMS one popped up eventually.

ditto what dux said, broken pix. fix it punk

Quote from JeanPaul

what the fuck am I supposed to fix?

the seriously long loading times.

I think the problem is that it downloads all of the images before showing any of them. For example I just went to the 'The Void' section and I was literally staring at a blank screen for 15 seconds before anything appeared.

I'd remove whatever script causes that delay and have the images show up as they download. Also, if you save JPEGs out of Photoshop with the 'Progressive' option ticked it not only usually makes the images a bit smaller, but it shows a blurry preview of images as they load which generally works better on the web.

Other than that the portfolio does look great, and lots of great photography.

Quote from JeanPaul

All the black mesa stuff is remakes of the original, so I didnt really plan the level out in a traditional sense? What would top down views of single player levels help accomplish? I mean I guess im confused on what I should say here on my work.

Oh alright my bad, didn't see all of it was from Black Mesa. In that case maybe you should state somewhere what 3D-assets you made or if you built the level with someone else's assets.

works good d00d

Quote from JeanPaul

All the black mesa stuff is remakes of the original, so I didnt really plan the level out in a traditional sense? What would top down views of single player levels help accomplish? I mean I guess im confused on what I should say here on my work.

I would also read this as an environment artist portfolio. Sure Black Mesa a remake, but I know you didn't remake it exactly as it was. Did you change the environment significantly? Why? Did you change the gameplay or pacing? Why? Did you have difficulties with players understanding what to do or where to go? How did you solve that? Level design is very much about constantly identifying and solving problems. Simply showing a bunch of screenshots is not communicating any of that.

Some pages still take a while to load (like The Void). A simple bit of text like "Please wait for the images to load" would do the trick.

Loaded fine for me. Only thing that I didn't like was the sideways scrolling. At least the mousewheel works though. So it's not a huge deal.

Ideally you would have one of those left/right arrows that slides to the next photo.

You are a great photographer, i'm sure i've seen something already when you had the interview up on mapcore, but really, congrats.

Is this a portfolio just to share your stuff or is aimed at finding a job? Because i'd expected more ephasis on the level design (in the second case).

That said, load time would be quite good if all sections took the time of "Cerion" (~11sec), "The Void" took much longer. I have a shitty connection btw.

Improvements? Well, I trust your friend has done a hell of a job (really like the site), but I'm pretty sure i've seen scripts to show images as soon as they were downloaded. At least you should really have something spinning in the middle of the frame, if not even a progress-bar, to make clear something is loading (not everybody will notice the stock spinning icon in the browser's url-bar).

I also appreciate A LOT the horizontal scrolling, is something i like a lot and find very natural when done this way, usually is done poorly (read: laggy) but yours is fluid that said, it wouldn't hurt to have a minimalistic arrow to click... people are dumb.

Quote from blackdog

that said, it wouldn't hurt to have a minimalistic arrow to click... people are dumb.

HEY

Anyways some javascript/jquery/jsexy to dynamically load the elements as well as add visual queues for navigation would truly help. Horizontal alignment is also against the norm and while fashionable it overall hurts the end user unless they are given the visual tools to understand the layout.

Quote from JeanPaul

Its definitely aimed at getting some work but I guess I didnt know what to show, so I just edited all my screenshots like I would my photography. Should I just flat out show more work or something?

Depends what kind of job you are interested into.

I think your website is perfect to get hired for photoshoots. As a freelance. Throw in a few renders, and I guess lots of marketing agencies would be happy to work with you.

If you are interested in getting into the Game Industry –which I'd assume, since you are posting here– this portfolio doesn't do justice to your work.

I'm not an expert that has made a ton of portfolios and applications and i'm not employed... but first: you are giving more relevance to the photography, second: as Algor said, you have to give much more informations about the project. More shots, even renders, wouldn't communicate much about your skills. Yes you can map, but how do you work? I mean, it's not like that you are posting stuff you made while working for a recognised company (i'm thinking to RickD's website, which just posts screens, but i mean: it's Battlefield 3 ).

PS: in the interview article, shots look more flashy.

Also, the menu-text is small, i don't think that an HR guy/lady would notice at first sight you can map, and maybe they would just close the browser on you

Quote from AlexM

HEY

ghghgh

"Non-taken" I hope!