CREATOR ITW TRANSCRIPTION – JOHN FRYE

Since the launch of The Crew 2 Season 8 Episode 2: USST Next on May 10th, players are able to get behind the wheel of a brand-new Creators Concept, the amazing Spruemeister SM71. We sat down with its creator, John Frye, to learn more about this new exclusive addition in The Crew 2 line-up.

Hello John can you introduce yourself in a few words to our players?

Hello and thank you for your invitation! I'm John Frye and I'm a vehicle designer. I've been working in the design industry as an industrial designer for about 25 years now. My specialty is in cars, but over the years, I've expanded my kind of breadth of knowledge to design other things like spaceships and flying vehicles for video games, movies and TV and that sort of thing. Anything that is manufactured and moves around. That's my area of interest.

Can you tell us more about your background as an automotive designer?

I had a strong passion for sketching cars when I was a little kid. I was mostly drawing army stuff and race cars- and those were kind of my biggest areas of interest. When I was about five, the real inspirational sci-fi movies began to come out, so I shifted focus to drawing spaceships and with race cars and military vehicles, those aesthetics got mixed together in my style. I saw the design process for several movies and the sketchbooks that showed how they developed designs for the movies and figured out that industrial design was a profession that you could make a living designing things for the movies or for the world!

I ended up going to Art Center, College of Design in Pasadena and got my Bachelor of Science in Transportation Design. From there, short stints in aerospace and video game industries, and then working for an automotive OEM. I've been working for the automotive company for decades now and lead a team of 3D modelers. So, I added 3D modeling to my area of skills through the company, and that's kind of a creative  specialty right now as well. I manage a team of about 20 people making cars for production you see on the road and show cars.

What made you decide to become an industrial designer?

I grew up with so many visual influences, you know, the books and TV that I was seeing at that time. And then on top of that, there was a frustration with the poor design of products in the world around me. That dissatisfaction and critical vision of things is an essential attribute of a good industrial designer. I see something and I want to make it better. It needs to work more logically, like button placement on a TV remote or the way an interface works on an application or some sort. What's also critical is making things look better. An industrial designer makes things function easily and also make things visually pleasing. So that's very important in consumer products. Cars, household goods, that sort of thing, it has to look really cool. And if we talk about video game design, of course, you know, we don't have to crash test things, there are less functional hurdles. There's no safety. There's no fuel efficiency, that sort of thing. So we can focus on making things look really, really cool. So that's a fantastic area of design.

Can you tell us more about your creative process?

The first part of the creative process is always to collect the information, understand the project. I look at the restrictions of the project, what are the goals of the project? I start to visualize things mentally, often I see colors in my brain and the general shapes. I'll have a paper next to me and that'll have a list of what I need to accomplish with this project, and if the customer has some specific ideas that they want to include, often they'll send images for inspiration. These images might be previous vehicles, it might be fashion or architecture, anything else that is relevant to what they want to see as ingredients in the final design. I have all of these constraints, inspirations and references in my peripheral vision when I start to sketch, and I try carefully not to use reference too literally, but use it as flavor in the developing design sketches.

I start with 20-to-45-minute thumbnail sketches that are 2 to 3 inches big on paper, usually with light grey marker to rough in, and then linework with ordinary ballpoint pen. Then, I'll tighten things up, make sure the drawings are clear and presentable to the customer. I'll put a letter next to each sketch so that the client can refer to them when we discuss. At this beginning stage, you want to give the customer a lot of different directions and then allow them to pick one of those and start to narrow down into one that they like. Often it's a case of "we like a little bit of sketch A, a little bit of sketch F," and they want to kind of merge two or three sketches together somehow. I will return to sketching, and with each step I'm getting a little bit tighter and slowing down. I'm thinking about things a little bit more carefully based on the information they are feeding me. We work back and forth, tightening up until we get to the final. Listening to what the customer likes and doesn't like is critical to achieving a design that satisfies them.

Can you present your creation you made for The Crew 2?

The constraint for The Crew 2 project was to make an Alpha Grand Prix inspired by the old F1 cars of the 1970s while adding a futuristic touch. I got a package composed with all the hard points, the size of the vehicle. Where the wheels are positioned, where the driver is positioned, that was all given to me by the project team and basically had to work around those parameters.

One of the things that was distinctive about this design was it's a very cab forward car; the driver is sitting at the very front of the car, and behind that there's a lot of space. What to do with that space behind the driver wasn't defined by the project, so that was an interesting opportunity to work on that area and kind of figure out what's going to fill this area between the driver and the rear wheels. I drew upon the influences I was given, and I also started to think about 1983, 1984 Grand Prix cars, since during that area the drivers sat way forward. That era was pretty much the last time that you could see the exposed engine, and I love to see that sort of mechanical detail. I drew upon that and decided that I'm going to show the top of the engine behind the driver, behind the air box area, and then get some more modern surfacing on it. So more planar stuff, kind of stealth, fiery looking things. There are some broad surfaces and then, of course, making it super wedgie and sharp looking combination. The colors that I used- white and the fluorescent with black out sections. I can't remember where that came from exactly, but that seemed like it stuck through the each round of sketches. I was happy with that color scheme from the beginning because, of course, we want to make the color and the car look distinctive from the other cars in the game.

And because we are designing something for a video game, we need to think about the player as one of our clients, it's important. This car is for you, the player, and I think long and hard about the direction that you're seeing the car from when you're driving it. It has to look great from that view. I was very cognizant of making that rear wing look really cool and making the wedge shaped the air box profile really iconic.

Can you tell us more about your collaboration with Ubisoft Ivory Tower?

I was really excited to get an email from Ubisoft because I'm familiar with the Assassin's Creed brand. So I'm like, okay, what's this? Okay, The Crew 2. And then I looked at the designer video series you made and what people have done before me. I know Yasid and saw that he did a formula one tractor and I was like "Okay, wow, this is going to be a really great project!" I read the brief which talked about an Alpha Grand Prix car, and this was like an exciting one to get on because I like open wheel types of vehicles, they're super expressive- spaceships with wheels. I received a bunch of information about the game and how you can kind of build the whole story because it's not just a racing game, but there's a whole story that goes with that with Motorflix. I thought that was really intriguing and I decided to jump in.

The interaction with the team going back and forth, sending the sketches went super, super well. It's always really pleasing to get an email after you send sketches, you know, open your inbox the next day. And they're like, okay, we really like this. It's going great. We also had some video chats and even with the time difference it was fun to be able to work with a team that is on the other side of the world.

How can interested people follow your work?

People can find me on Instagram is probably the place that I upload the work most frequently and I got a lot of stuff on there. So on Instagram at @fryewerk. And also on Behance. www.fryewerk.com as well.

Do you have any message that you want to tell the players that will drive your car?

I just want to say, "Thank you very much!" Of course, my design is going to be the coolest one in the entire game and it will be forever, ha! I'm sure it's designed for speed, but also go ahead and thrash the hell out of it and enjoy. It's a super stylish design that's made to win. Make me proud with your performance in the game!