Sophia Coney 'Time to Direct'

Hello and welcome back to the confetti website for another Industry week blog.

Here we welcome to the stage Sophia Coney, who is currently the Studio director for Lockhart Studios. Sophia has risen up the ladder from leaving University to get this role of Studio director. She graduated from DMU whilst having an internship with a company during her final year there. Since then, she has risen from being an Artist to being a Manager and then on to being a director.

Lockwood studios specialise in virtual content for PlayStation home, producing normally small items although on occasions producing entire environment for the paying customer. Lockwood do turn around many small items such as Skinny Jeans and Light up shoes to an amazing quality and generates a large amount of income doing so. Sophia quoted “Making a product for the virtual world isn’t all about the end product” which is true, because you still have to market this product and get it into people’s hands.

Lockwood have had the pleasure of working under contract from some big games, such games include, War Hawk, Red bull, Uncharted 3, Guitar Hero and Killzone.

Before the end, Sophia spoke passionately about how she would like to see more females in the industry as it is widely male dominated, although the male to female game ratio is split 50:50. She would encourage more women to join the industry because the percentage needs upping! Lockwood currently have a percentage of 20% Females which is 10% above the industry standard!

We were approaching the end of the session, and she again spoke with passion, on how your job should combine what you love and what your good at, and also recommended that students like us should approach companies and apply for an internship to gain experience, as In reality, it will help you in the long run and may even get you a job in said company. Lockwood Studios also offer Internships, so it’s great for local talent to get the opportunity to showcase their ability on an industry wide scale.

Sophia has had a reasonably quick rise up the ladder than some of our other guests this week which in itself speaks words.

This session was reasonably short, but got straight to the point and obviously rather quickly, we thank Sophia for taking time out of her day to visit us.

Thank you once again for reading this blog. 

By Nick Mason, Level 3 Gaming student