WeAnimate 2025-08-01 | wam#0064

Since 2013, Copenhagen’s MOOD Visuals has been creating captivating designs for games, movies, and more. The visual development studio has designed art and assets for legendary titles like God of War, Elder Scrolls Online, The Last of Us II, and more. From its humble beginnings, MOOD has developed into an industry powerhouse, with increasing staff, expanding portfolio, and an impressive client base.

As the studio has grown, MOOD has stayed true to its roots, with a dedicated team and remarkably low turnover. We spoke with some of MOOD’s veteran artists to find out the secrets of keeping artists and designers inspired and dedicated, year after year.

Simon Fetscher is a Lead Concept Artist who has been at MOOD since 2015, working on projects like God of War, The Last of Us II, Hitman, The Division 2, Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier, and more.  His work has been featured in Kotaku and 2dartist, and he’s happy to talk about his career, his process, and his inspiration. 

Simon: I don’t really have any professional training. I have been drawing since I was small, starting out with Disney characters, and then getting into the usual suspects like Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. After high school, when I asked myself what I really wanted to do, the answer was always concept art. So I took a part-time job and spent the rest of the time every day for a couple of years working on my portfolio, creating concept art, and hanging out on online forums, giving and getting feedback.

There are a lot of great schools today, and we have hired a lot of new graduates from different schools. They have already had the experience of working on assignments that are like real-world projects, so they come into the studio well-equipped for the job. In that way, they are more prepared and have better qualifications than I did; I had only worked on my own art. Of course, they get all of their assignments from a teacher, while my cousin and I made up our own assignments.

In a way, that was good, because we had to learn to be very disciplined on our own, without anyone checking on us. I learned to be disciplined and not need to be supervised by someone else.

 

– Simon Fetscher

So I was living in Malmö and working on my portfolio every day, making cool concept art and trying to match the professional work I could see online. And my cousin Oliver, who was living in Gothenburg, was doing the same thing. Ten years ago EA Ghosts, in Gothenburg, was making Need for Speed, and they were a big deal. So I got in contact with an art director there, and he wanted to have a meeting. At the same time, my cousin got contacted by MOOD, in Copenhagen, and they wanted to have a meeting with him. I didn’t even know MOOD existed, which is so weird; they were just a short train ride away. So my cousin and I thought how convenient it would be if we could do a switcheroo, if instead he went to Ghost and I went to MOOD. So I recommended him and he recommended me, and I went to meet with MOOD and he went to meet with Ghost. And we both got jobs within the same week! It was amazing. It was such a lucky coincidence that I got a job here.

MOOD was only about a year old at that time, and we were mostly working on Hitman and LEGO. It was very intimate; there were only maybe 7 of us in total. The partners did the business stuff but also worked on the art, and they and Jesper really took me in and helped me along. It was a great start-up period to learn and be mentored by those guys. We didn’t even have job titles back in the beginning: everyone was just a concept artist. Now we have leads and seniors and different levels and structures that help make the projects work.

But the soul of the company is still the same: taking care of the artists, avoiding “crunch culture”, and everyone still trying to know each other personally and build relationships.

 

– Simon Fetscher

Video games are a really young industry. I mean, the first video games were only developed at the end of the 20th century, just within my lifetime. So it’s all very fresh and new. The technical aspect of the job has changed completely since I started. The tools are so much more sophisticated. When I started, photobashing was still a new thing. Now you can use 3D and make big scenes for several concepts at once, and use the Unreal engine even within the concept art process. Keeping up with all these changes while you are also actively working can be hard; being in production while also staying current with technology and implementing all these new programs and workflows is a challenge. Of course you have to do it in order to stay relevant, but it’s been a big change.

I worked in the MOOD studio for the first 4 years or so, but since then I’ve been working remotely while living in Sweden. Working in-house with the team gave me an opportunity to get to know my coworkers very well, so that even though I am working remotely I still feel like part of the team. I visit the studio about once a month, and every time I’m there it’s an opportunity to talk to everyone, see what everyone is working on, and reconnect with people who I don’t necessarily work with on a day-to-day basis. It’s very important to me to have a good strong connection with my team, and we are constantly keeping communication channels open and chatting, so that working remotely isn’t too isolating and you’re not just hunkered down by yourself. Then when I’m in the studio we sit down together and keep that going. Since I’m now a lead artist and mentoring others, it’s especially important that I build relationships and keep communication happening. I try to get to know my team members as well as I can, because everyone needs different things in order to be creative and productive.

A good lead needs to be able to listen to all the artists, being open to feedback and suggestions. I want them to be able to critique and give feedback on my work as much as I do theirs. A lead also needs to be able to be decisive and make final decisions, but my artists need to trust that I have considered their ideas and opinions, and that there are good reasons behind my decisions. I want them to understand why I’m thinking a certain way, so they can hopefully reach the same conclusion. We also want the clients to feel like team members, and be included. We don’t want to just get feedback from them and then deliver something. We want them to feel like they are part of the process.

Working in a company that has so many artists under one roof, seeing new faces come in, working on different teams with different people on different projects, gives me an opportunity to meet new people and be inspired by them. I like learning how other people work and think, and it’s probably my biggest source of inspiration. And when it comes to who we’re working with, it’s just been more and more interesting and cool clients, big games, fun projects. That’s also made it really interesting for me to stay and develop within the company.

The industry in general has been growing so much, even though we’ve also seen a lot of layoffs in recent years. The indie scene has also grown and changed a lot, and some indie games now have really big budgets. I love that they are getting more of a spotlight than they got 7 or 8 years ago, and we’re seeing a lot of really cool creativity in those games. A lot of the big AAA games can suffer from the demand to make more and more money and please shareholders instead of gamers; perhaps that will show in their sales numbers in the end and force them to rethink what they are doing, but I don’t know. I’m so happy that I work at an established company that lets me feel so safe. But of course you also have to think about everyone else in the industry, and work on ways of supporting them.

At MOOD we obviously want to do the highest quality all the time, but we are also always thinking about the team. Everything we do is a team effort: nobody just starts doing something and works on it by themselves with no communication.

We want to make sure that we care for each other, while pushing each other forward all the time. We are always trying to improve each others’ work, and all our best stuff, even if it was technically the work of one person, has been done with input from other people with cool ideas who are trying to push it forward.

 

– Simon Fetscher

Simon’s work can be seen here: https://www.artstation.com/simonfetscher

Creative Director Jesper Andersen has been at MOOD Visuals for over a decade, working his way up, from one of the first concept artists at the company, to a leadership role as creative director. His current role challenges him as a leader and strategist as well as as an artist and designer. We discussed his history and creative inspiration, as well as the evolution of MOOD over time.

Jesper: I had always liked art, but I had pursued other things, and was working as an IT consultant. In my free time, I was drawing and looking for a community where people were drawing together. It was the early days of online art forums, and I found a group who were basically doing game mods. I joined this group and got along so well with these guys from all over the world, and one guy in particular, Hanno Hagedorn, was also working in the industry, developing games at Crytek. One day we were chatting online and he mentioned that he had gotten a job as a concept artist. I had been doing that type of illustration, so I knew what it was, but I wasn’t very familiar with the company; Far Cry had just come out at the time. He suggested that I contact them, so I sent in an application, and they asked me to do an art test. I did the art test and I was hired over the phone. That was unheard of back in the day: people almost always required an onsite interview. I think they may have been a bit desperate. Not to talk myself down or anything, but it was a lucky break for me. So that was my first actual industry job, back in January 2005.

While I was at Crytek, I was still trying to figure out where I was going. I had a job offer from Guerilla, in the Netherlands, which was interesting, but not exactly what I was looking for. I really wanted to get back to Denmark after living in Germany for almost 5 years. I felt like I had skills, but I felt like I needed to back up my skills with paper, because that’s how it works in Denmark. You have the education, you have the paper, and so you can prove that you have the skills. I also really wanted to get some theory attached to my gut feelings. I felt like certain things were right when I did them, but I wanted to be able to back that up with an education.

So I went to university and studied design and finished as a bachelor, and then took a specialized game development program. While I was doing that I was working in my free time for another game company. I had worked for them on a Warhammer game, but it was just a part-time job. The game they released didn’t do very well, and the place was kind of closing down, so I knew that I was going to be leaving that job soon anyway.

Just at that time I got an email from a guy called Jan Ditlev. We had just connected on LinkedIn, and we kind of knew each other from online forums and things, and he was one of the co-owners of MOOD. He sent me an email out of the blue and invited me to MOOD’s moving-in party. I knew nothing about MOOD. I didn’t even look up their website or anything. It’s a very small world, and another friend of mine was invited to the party as well, and it was like 2 minutes away, so I decided to go. I got to meet the owners and we were all talking, and it was basically like an impromptu job interview at the party. Then they called me and said how much they liked talking, and suggested that I come by to continue the conversation. So the party was on a Friday, and I stopped by on the Monday, and I had a job by that Tuesday afternoon.

I can look back at my career and say that yes, of course, the choices I have made have had an influence on where I am today. But I can also honestly see the role of chance; these freak coincidences that just happened and it’s kind of remarkable, really.

 

– Jesper Andersen

One of the things that hooked me on MOOD in the beginning was that we were doing movie work, we were doing game work, we worked on toys, consumer products… I came from game development, where you stay on the same project for X amount of years, and you’re on it so long that you get tired of it. You see other people hyped about it, but you can’t feel that way any more. MOOD actually gave me a job where one week I was on Hitman, and the next month it was God of War, and the next month I was doing LEGO posters. I can’t say that it played into my ego, but it was great to see these day-to-day changes, and be involved in such a variety of work. It hooked me.

Over the years, MOOD has changed tremendously, but also not that much. We are lucky that most of the original team is still around. Most of the big things: the way we work with clients, the way that we project what we’re going to work on, all that is pretty much the same. But the communication in the house has changed a lot. Now we need to include everyone in much larger communication channels. It’s so important to give everyone a voice. You can’t just sit and say “well, I’m the senior, so what I say is law.” Of course not – you need to open up the conversation. We’ve always had the belief that no matter where you are coming from, even if you are starting as a junior, you always have a say in things. We’re nothing without the artists, so of course it’s the artists that drive a lot of decisions. If you have feedback, we want to hear it. One of the best examples is that we had a project where we were just about to deliver, and a junior artist came up to me and asked if we could make a couple changes before we delivered. And it was actually a really good idea, so we stopped the whole delivery until we made the change he suggested, because it was such a good idea.

Other companies have just a core team of art directors working with freelancers, and that’s fine, but that’s not how we want to run things. We want to have people together, we want people coming up with ideas together, because that’s the most important thing.

We earn our money on our ideas. Anybody can create an incredible image, but if it isn’t a good idea, it’s not going to work.

 

– Jesper Andersen

We believe that when we say to an artist “you’re now actually responsible for this client. You’re responsible for doing the work and promoting the company,” it creates a sense of shared responsibility, that we’re all in it together, and a sense of belonging. That responsibility and being part of something is what makes us different.

We have clients that keep coming back, and most of them are from the US, and one of the reasons they say they like working with us is that we don’t waste time. Our mentality of always pushing means that if we have extra time in the schedule, we don’t just sit on our hands: we do more. Like other companies in the Nordics, we really feel the need to use time to the best of our ability.

We don’t want to just sit and wait for things to happen. We want to MAKE things happen.

 

– Jesper Andersen

But it’s also one of the things that artists learn in the company: we don’t want to just tackle the work. We want to be attentive that there’s a real person on the client side, and make sure that they are also having a great experience. So there’s a lot of different hands on client communication, and we try to help new freelancers who are just out of school to adjust their expectations and learn how to communicate effectively, not just to make art.

Personally, transitioning from being an artist to being a creative leader means that I came with one set of skills, but now I have to develop a whole new set of skills. Being an artist is more about working with the task that I’m given, and taking that responsibility, but as creative director I’m looking at the bigger picture of things, trying to influence where we go as a company, while taking care of the creatives. What has changed most for me is the aspect of mentoring. Now I’m mentoring the art directors more than I mentor the artists, but I’m trying to help make sure people don’t make the same mistakes I’ve made.

One of the things I promised myself when I transitioned into this role was to be in a position to help people. That’s the most important thing to me. If an artist  starts at MOOD, and learns so much that they go on to an even bigger place and have an even bigger career trajectory, and we were, or maybe I was, instrumental in helping them on that path, it gives me the kind of satisfaction that I may have gotten in the past from finishing artwork and having a happy client.

I see my role as making MOOD a great place for artists, but also pushing them, because I know that people can always be better. Of course, you can’t push people all the time, but it’s important that we don’t plateau, and we don’t want artists to feel that they have plateaued. If I can help change someone’s trajectory, or at least give them some food for thought about how they are continuing with skill-building or with their career, then hopefully I’ve done my job well.

Every year since I started, way back in 2014,  has been different. You could almost put a theme on every year. What keeps me excited is that I feel like we haven’t peaked as a company. I want to see how much I can contribute to push the company in directions where we didn’t even imagine ourselves.

I want to know what’s over the next horizon, what new areas can we delve into, what we can try that’s exciting and different. Operating a successful concept art studio is a huge achievement in itself, and we’re proud of it. But I’m excited to see how we continue to move forward. I see a studio that wants to keep evolving, wants to keep doing new things, and is hungry for more.

 

– Jesper Andersen

Whether you are a person or a company or whatever, being hungry for more, being ballsy enough to seek more, is super important. I mean, you could perceive that in a negative way, thinking that we’re never satisfied. But I would rather turn it around and say that we have the opportunity to become so much more, and that’s not egotistical. It’s just a desire to see how far we can take the ship called MOOD.

More of Jesper’s work can be seen here: https://www.artstation.com/scribblehead/profile

By matching ambition and exploration along with a great culture and support for their artists, MOOD Visuals continues to achieve both creative and business success. While the company grows, evolves, and undertakes new challenges, their creative staff embraces these new opportunities and grows right along with them. We wish the company continued success, and celebrate their approach to teamwork.

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