The basic rule of labeling all your materials with contact info is often forgotten on reels and resumes, says Patrick Kenney of Electronic Arts.

Thinking of moving from traditional or CG animation into gaming animation? Think the skills you use everyday can apply easily to games? Is there a difference in terms of talent, skills and mindset between TV/film animation and gaming? We posed these questions to four top gaming recruitment professionals. Here is their very in-depth and thoughtful advice on how to put together resumes and reels and what skills gaming companies are looking for.

Patrick Kenney, Senior Staffing Manager of Artist Recruiting for Electronic Arts Patrick Kenney began his career in recruiting ten years ago at Walt Disney Feature Animation where he worked on numerous features including Dinosaurs, Hunchback of Notre Dame and Hercules. His career continued at PDI as the senior recruiter for ANTZ and Shrek and he followed that up by working as the director of staffing at Will Vinton Studios. He joined Electronic Arts (EA) almost 2 years ago and is currently responsible for hiring artists for its worldwide studios.

I have found that a lot of traditional animators are qualified to cross over into gaming. However, they are animators that already have CG experience. Interactive entertainment doesn't have the luxury of long ramp ups so a traditional animator without some hardcore computer animation skills is really difficult for us to place. It also goes the other way. We love to find CG animators that have a background in traditional animation as well — the fundamentals of traditional animation are still key building blocks.

Believe it or not, a large amount of folks forget to put their complete contact information on their materials. We often get reels and portfolios without names or phone numbers on them and if those materials get separated from the resume, we're in trouble. As far as content, we do look for very similar things as TV/film. We list those guidelines on our Website (jobs.ea.com) as do most high-end animation studios. If you are trying to let someone know what kind of an animator you are, show your best skills at animation and probably some figure drawings, etc. If you are looking for a role as a 3D modeler, include whatever it is that would let the reviewer know that you can build models. Wire frames on turntables and some simple textures would work very well. The one thing that most folks may not know, is that you should be trying to do low poly models. For the time being, we are still using low poly models, however, we'd also like to see your skill at high poly modeling. Very often people ask me what to put on their reel and I usually turn it around on them. I ask them what they think they would need to see if they were assessing someone's skills in a particular area. Usually, they are right on the mark with their answers. Another very, very key element that most people don't include, is the shot list or what we call a reel breakdown. I can't assess your skills if I'm not 100% clear as to what you specifically did on the reel or even in the portfolio — and modelers should include their poly counts.

We often hire people from TV/film — in fact given the more cinematic approach to our games now, especially with the new technology and consoles available, it happens quite often. We can usually find a home for very talented folks from our "sister" industries. I'd say just about any role from producer to production coordinator, art directors and animators to lighters. And if you looked at a sampling of our recent production, artistic and even engineering hires from the last 12 months, you would see a very good representation from TV/film. I think a lot of people have made that transition due to the fact that the artistic integrity of the games has improved tremendously and now artists see it as a viable career choice. Also, our production environments tend to be a bit more stable, in that we don't hire on a project by project basis unless we have a very specific need for that game. Typically, we try to hire full time staff with all the benefits that go along with that. You don't find a lot of turnover in our industry and specifically at Electronic Arts — once people get in they usually find themselves challenged, rewarded and having fun on a daily basis.