Motion Design Career Advice: A Q&A with Hyper Island Students

what's up everybody you know actually I feel like I can't say what's up that has already been taken by someone else so I'll just say hello Joey here for school emotion and this video is gonna be a little bit different I recently had the opportunity to speak to a class of motion design students at hyper island which is an incredible College out in Sweden the students did an amazing job of asking me great questions everything from how do I get an internship how do I ask for money as an artist what do I need to be on the lookout for as I look towards the future of motion design and I did my best to answer their questions this video is dense so grab a coffee grab a pen take some notes get comfy let's get to it so basically it was like I thought it would be great to start with how you started now all right cool um so I'll try to give you the Cliff Notes version so just for context so I'm 37 right now and I turned 38 in April so I've been doing motion design in some form professionally for God it's really kind of scary to like through the math I probably like 14 or 15 years now just to give you awesome context so like when I talk about my career it's a really long time to get from where I started to where where I am now with a lot of twists and turns so I just want you to sort of know that going in because that's actually really really normal in motion design it this is not a career where you generally get a job and you stay there for 30 years and you get a 401k and you retire when you're 65 like it it just doesn't really work that way you kind of there's the ebbs and flows and all this kind of stuff so I basically I went to college in Boston I studied film and television and I graduated in 2002 and then I immediately got a job as an assistant editor I should tell you prior to that I actually interned at I think four different places so I started when I was 19 doing interns chips all the way up until I actually graduated college and then got a job that was a huge huge advantage for me and I know they're all gonna be looking for internships and there's really no better way to get your first full-time job than to be able to work for very very little most studios will actually pay you something as an intern it's very good to be able to do that if you can swing it and then your foots in the door and that's really what it's all about so I was an assistant editor at a production company I did that for about two years and by the time I left I was the editor that I was working under had gotten fired so I took over his position and that's when I really started doing a lot of After Effects so this was like 2004-2005 back in those days there was no the term was not motion design it was mograph or motion graphics and it was a lot more commoditized than it is now so as an editor clients would come in and we'd be editing say like a Subway sandwich commercial and they would say like oh yeah by the way we need the name of the sandwich up on screen do something cool and so I would sort of figure something out and do it and I just kind of got fascinated by that the fact that like as an editor you're given ingredients and then you're told to cook something but as a motion designer you're given nothing you're given like a blank page and it's like imagine something and then figure out technically how to actually do it so I quit and I went freelance so I was only full-time for two years I went freelance I freelanced for like six or seven years had a great time doing that that was like a super positive experience for me and then I kind of got sucked up into the thing a lot of young motion designers get sucked into which is I wanted my own studio and I had this vision of like how I'm gonna be I'm gonna build a studio and I'm gonna have the artists and it's gonna be cool like polished concrete floors and a nice coffeemaker so so I partnered up I partnered up with with two local people in Boston and we founded a company called toil and I was the creative director lead animator kind of technical director of that studio for for years we built it up we were doing a lot of work with ad agencies Boston is an ad agency town so you've got big ad agencies like Arnold and Hill holiday you know big accounts like subway and Hummer used to be there and JetBlue so we were doing a lot of work for them and after four years I had sort of peaked I thought I am you know running a studio is not what I thought it would be we can talk about that a little bit if you don't want to I'll be super honest about all of it and I realized that really my favorite thing to do was to teach so we had like junior artists working on stuff we had interns coming and going and I got the most pleasure my day out of like sitting down and teaching someone like an After Effects trick and then once we hired a full-time art director I realized oh my gosh now I've got this like amazing designer sitting next to me I could suck all of their knowledge out and then I can sort of like reverse engineer it and teach that to our interns so I kind of got really obsessed with that and that's what led me to kind of shift careers I left the studio about six years ago now and started school of motion and moved to Florida I taught at the Ringling College of Art and Design for one year decided that wasn't for me focus on school motion and now school emotions just grown really really fast in the last few years and so yeah now my full-time job is basically making sure school emotion doesn't explode and and I have a really amazing team so I just try to stay out of their way I get to do fun stuff like this and go to meetups and conferences and stuff like that so yeah it's been quite a journey and if you'd told me like seven or eight years ago that I wouldn't actually be like doing client work anymore I would just be teaching and I would you know I'd be like a Nick Campbell knockoff with no hair I would have I would have never believed you so but but here we are yeah so that's kind of like my story in a nutshell and I will answer any questions you asked me I am an open book so you started off with 30 days of after things first thing why any part before you started charging so this is a great question actually so I started off 30 days of After Effects I think came in about a year and a half into school of motion so I actually had some other videos that I'd made and basically the reason it was free was because I was afraid to ask for money it was that simple like you have to you have to remember that you know we've only been running our classes for a little over four years it's not very long and so four years ago there was no such thing as a $900 After Effects class you know and so I just thought this is crazy no one's gonna pay for this because YouTube was free everything on greyscale gorilla was free lynda.com was 12 bucks a month or whatever and I thought no one is gonna value this enough to actually pay what it will take to turn this into a real business so part of it was just fear to be honest the other part of it though is that when you're building any kind of web presence like this you kind of have a chicken and an egg problem so you want the goal is to eventually find and grow an audience or a tribe really I read a lot of Seth Godin so if any of you have read this is marketing or purple cow or any of that I'll use a lot of the same language so you want to build a tribe you want to find a group of people that think like you that better have a similar worldview or into the same things and then to turn that into a business where now you can just focus on that and really just put everything into adding value to your audience you have to charge and you have to make money and getting that tribe in getting that group you can do that by just paying for it you can buy a bunch of Facebook ads and and and that's what a lot of startups do you know you raise capital and then you you go and you buy an audience I didn't know that that was even an option and even if I had I probably wouldn't have done it so I thought what I really need is a I need to find the tribe I need to find people that like the type of teaching that I'm doing and find value in it and I thought the best way to do that would be to just do some crazy sort of you know sort of marketing shenanigans like doing 30 days of tutorials in a row I actually stole that idea there's a there's a podcast I used to listen to a lot of my best ideas I stolen like hey I'll tell you who I stole them from so this one I stole from there's a podcast I used to listen to it's called entrepreneur on fire the host John Lee Dumas started the podcast several years ago now and it immediately took off and became hugely popular and the oh and it's he's a pretty good interviewer he had pretty good guests but what made it take off was that it was daily seven days a week he had a podcast out and that was literally it that was the only difference and I and I saw that and I said well that's really interesting because like at the time I had no idea if I was actually good at teaching like I'd taught at Ringling so I thought okay at least I've been paid to teach before so that was like some kind of signal but I didn't know if anyone actually liked these tutorials or if they were just being nice because we're in a very nice kind of industry you know and and so I just decided to like basically take that idea and say well if I I'm not sure I can compete on quality I can at least compete on quantity and so I just did so that that's why I did the 30 days thing I was like let me I figured it would get a lot of attention people would think I was crazy for committing to something like that it almost killed me it's really hard to do and to keep up with it but it worked because after that I had thousands of people on an email list and and that were emailed me daily every single time a new video would come out they would email me and tell me how great it was it really helped them I just used this trick and so finally I was in a position where I could then say okay how about this how about I make a class and I have like did homework and like will critique it and I pitched this idea and since I had an audience and I had a tribe and had already given so much value away at that point they were willing to give it a shot and say all right we'll give you a few hundred bucks and try this out so that that's the reason I started with free and then into paid and I actually recommend that when I talk to you know I'll talk to a lot of a lot of sort of entrepreneurs now that see what we've done and they want to sort of replicate it or they're in our industry and I always tell them try to build the audience first because if you try to monetize first and there there's actually some interesting correlations between this and freelancing if you try to monetize first your incentives are in the wrong place and so like at school motion everything we do is we look at it through this lens of like how can we add value how can we like make our students lives better by reading the article we just put out or a class that's gonna really help people if we looked at it through the lens of I have bills to pay I need to make money right now then we would do some things that wouldn't line up with like our values and stuff like that so that was a long answer hope that kind of answered somewhere in there yeah like you mentioned running a studio and stuff so I had one thing about like being afraid of getting paid how do you even know what charts where did you even begin you don't know the hours that you're going to need and the kind of money that you could make sure so um all right so I'll start with like when I was freelance before starting the studio I knew how much to charge only because someone else told me that's literally the only way I knew I asked another freelancer and he told me this is what you charge and that is a huge problem right if that's the only way is that like you happen to know someone that you can ask and who will tell you because some people are really squirrely about that so you know I've written a book on freelancing and I literally put the rates right in there because I think like everyone just needs to know that this is this is what you charge there's obviously a range so depending on your skill level and how how niche you are like if you're the only you know fluid simulation houdini expert in your city you can charge a lot of money but if you're you know right out of school junior After Effects artists you can't charge as much so I had I had an idea of during freelancing from talking to other freelancers and then just getting a sense through experience like you know I raised my rates twice while I was freelance and the first time no one even blinked which told me that I'd been under charging the whole time the second time a couple of people pushed back a little bit and so that told me okay so this is where the line is right now as far as wearing a studio it's kind of a different beast because when you're running a studio you're not just charging for your time you're not just saying okay well it costs a thousand bucks a day to work for our studio typically you're doing bids so I don't know how familiar you all are with with like a professional-looking motion design studio bid but the ones we used to use that toil would be five or six pages long they were these kind of industry standard things we're literally every conceivable thing that you could throw at a post-production job buying tape stock hiring voice-over talent FedExing hard drives around anything was itemized and available and so we would literally have to go through and create this very detailed bid and the the first time I actually grasped how to do it was again I kind of got lucky I don't know if I should say this like well I guess it was been long ago statute of limitations has run out um one of our producer friends who worked for an ad agency gave us a bid from a very well-known post house in New York very well-known motions I studio and so we got to see how they were bidding and we got to see their rates and so from there it was like okay well there they were in New York and in New York you can charge more money and they were one of the top studios and so we were we weren't gonna charge as much as them so we kind of knocked it down like 25% and that's where we started that was how literally how we set our rates at first I don't think it's really the the smartest way to do it you know I just had a I actually just had on our podcast I had guy named joel Pilger on and he's a consultant who consults for studios it's really kind of a niche cool thing he does he might be a good person actually cash to have do one of these cuz he's he's so he's literally built a studio run it for 20 years and then sold it which is super rare and now he consults but anyway but but the way that you know I've heard him talk about pricing and the way Chris doe talks about pricing is that you don't charge like it's hard to it's hard to do this in practice as a motion design studio but it is possible to charge based on value as opposed to based on time so if you get a thirty second commercial project and you look at it and you're like okay this is gonna take us one week to do this is really really easy but you happen to be the only place in town that has the chops to pull that off that elevates your rate if the client is a pain in the ass and you know this you've worked with them before and they're gonna be really pixel effie then you're you're probably going to want to like you know pad that bit a little bit we used to pad our bids around thirty percent so we would figure out this is how much time we think it's gonna take we had rates that we sort of used just to do the math okay so animation cost this much design cost this much are we gonna have to use a freelancer if we are let's pad that a little bit so that we can still make money on it and then at the end you get a number and then we would pad that thirty percent and we would Pat it in different ways we would add things like a render fee a file posting fee sometimes a creative fee so there's kind of a black art to doing these bids and and it's funny because at first it actually seemed like almost unethical the way we were doing it and I was told over and over again this is how you do it and the reason I felt that way is because you are essentially in some cases pulling numbers out of your ass like you really are and and and not many people will admit that but the truth of it is that you have to maximize the amount of money you're getting out of your client like that's the name of the game because if you if you shortchange yourself once it hurts you forever you will forever be the budget option or you will forever be the the studio that the client goes to when they can't afford buck you know when they can't afford Stardust or something like that so we ended up getting pretty good actually towards the end like trying to like suss out like we would get a proposal from a client like this is what we're thinking of doing can you give us a bid and you can almost like can almost smell it smells like about about 40k and we were usually pretty close and so we would bid like 50k and then they bring it down to 40 and we get the job so there's like there's some math to it there's some science there's a little bit of hand waving and art to it and in the end like as a studio you really do need to focus on like bringing in as much money as possible cuz it's very expensive to run a studio especially the kind that that Toya was speaking of rates and I'm also having fear of charging we recently had a freelance module where we all had to find someone who would hire us for a job and they were like get pay and that was when the fear stricken for a lot of us in our class and that was a very common pattern no one asked how do you get over this the fear of charging and just find yourself comfortable in that position when you're you can put out a number and it's fine you can step by it that is a really great question you know it's really funny that there there's there's always this tension with artists like any kind of artist like an illustrator photographer when you get started you almost feel like you're tainting it by asking for money and there's also this feeling of like you know I'm sure you all know people who have jobs that they really really hate right that's a lot of people as motion designers you will for the most part really enjoy what you're doing there will be like bad days and good days but you'll but like it's a pretty sweet way to make a living so it feels weird to try and charge a lot for it so really it's all like mental hacks so that the short answer is with anything like that right there's basically this wall and in your mind it's like I can't get over that wall I have to tell someone I want five hundred dollars per day to do after-effects for you that seems insane right and here's the thing it's not going to feel normal unless you like destroy that wall and the only way to do that is to just close your eyes take a deep breath take take a shot of vodka whatever and just say the words out loud like just disassociate right just go to your happy place and say like yep my rate is $500 a day um the first time I ever got a freelance job I experienced exactly what you're talking about so I was on the phone with this producer I was for converse shoes and my friend had recommended me and I'm on the phone I've never been on the phone with a producer before and and she's talking to me as though I'm a professional and I know what I'm doing like little did she know and you know like impostor syndrome it's just it's everywhere and so then um she said awesome yep everything sounds good how much what's your rate and I and I had this moment where it like it's the words started to come up and then they got caught right there and I had to literally like like I had to like swallow and gulp and just like just force the words out I said like 500 a day and I remember once they were out I was like oh my god I said it and there was like one second and then she goes perfect all right we'll see you Monday so and then and literally and that and that is what will happen to you if you're not if you're charging the right amount the client will just say yes right that's kind of how it works and then I never felt weird about asking for money again so that you could get the first one out of the way now there are some kind of mental hacks that you can kind of do I mean first of all I find this helpful it's a little bit strange but I'm used to talking to myself alone in empty rooms is is just practice saying the words like it's funny I do this with my daughter now I have three kids my oldest is 8 and she's at that age where like you know she's experiencing like KITT like someone at her you know school or whatever like be kind of mean to her or be mean to one of her friends and that she'll come home and she'll tell me and she's like I don't know what to say like when they do that and I'm like all right well let's practice let's rehearse it and we'll literally like write a script for her and she'll read it and then she'll say it and then she'll say it again and then it starts to sound natural and then she's internalized it and now it's not hard for her to say it and so then next time that happens she feels comfortable like confronting somebody or something like that so it's just like when you have to give a speech you practice you practice practice you're at some point you're going to have to say the words I at my rate is $500 a day or you know if you're going for a job and they're like you know what what kind of salary range would you like you're gonna have to say I'd like sixty thousand plus benefits right it's gonna be hard to say that but you can it's just words you're just like it just sounds you're making with your mouth right it shouldn't be hard so just know that every single person in this industry has to go through that wall at some point and as soon as you do that fear generally goes away now it kind of comes back as you progress and get more expensive because if you are if you're freelancing you want to raise your rates all those same fears are gonna come back oh my gosh they're gonna think I'm greedy they're gonna say no then they're gonna tell everybody that I'm greedy and I'm never gonna get work again and none of those things are true now that's assuming you're not actually greedy and you're not doing it just to make more money like there should be some reason that you cost what you do but generally when you're starting out especially you're gonna cost what the market says you cost right and until you prove that you are actually you know ash Thorpe or something like that right you know or Karen Fung then like you will get paid what the market says you're worth but in two to three years you'll be able to kind of set your own rate based on what you could do so I have like a question on that well how do you handle clients that don't know what emotional graphic person is worth like because I think that's what we have experienced as well like people haven't worked with a write great great great question um so first for the most part if you're trying to freelance and you're going out and searching and trying to get work I wouldn't recommend going after clients that don't know anything about motion design Yukie it's totally possible but there's so much work out there there's like infinity jobs out there so why not just focus on the easier ones you know the ones that are like easier to deal with so if you go to like on you know if there's a local arcade or something or a pool hall or a restaurant in your town and you're thinking man you know they have a digital sign and and there's no animation on it I could make some animation for it it's gonna be a really hard sell for them but if there's a local marketing agency or if there's a you know a local software development firm that makes iOS apps you guarantee that they are doing animation prototyping um they it's gonna be a lot easier to explain to them what it is you do and then the main thing this is this is actually there's actually something I just talked about there's I I don't know when it's coming out there's an episode coming out of our podcast in a few weeks where I get into this with Ysera Whillans comer and it's this idea of animation in some cases is actually increasing the value of a product so when you think of motion design you probably think of like the stuff Oddfellows does the stuff you see em oceanographer it's almost like short form narrative films right or explainer videos things like that where it's advertising now advertising are is actually a pretty easy thing to sell because it's instantly valuable you advertise something people see that they buy the product you make money that's the way it works but there's other areas like if you find a software development firm this is like one of the fastest growing areas of motion design by the way you know Facebook Apple Netflix Google Airbnb they all hire motion designers like by the truckload because using motion inside of an app for example or on a website it increases retention and increases time on it decreases customer support because you can communicate things better so if you find clients like that it's not hard to explain a what motion design is but be more importantly the value of motion design you're not just saying I can make you something pretty you're saying I can make you something pretty and it's going to get you these results so so I guess there's kind of two parts to the answer there it's like one over the long term don't go after those clients like go after clients that know what you are and what you're capable of and know how to use what your product is and and then on the other hand you know just with practice like you'll learn how to position your skillset in a way that it's clearly adding value to clients and it's not just putting you know nice a new coat of paint on something because if that's all you're doing frankly you know you're kind of wasting everyone's time like there should always be some points to sitting down and and you know crafting something beautiful one question that I had was how do you stay up-to-date and relevant one of the things that I'm experiencing is there's I'll be animated and then just just they we were talking about boom it was kind of like four cell animation it's worth looking into and there is cinema 4d so there's so many programs to look into that it seems like impossible to stay up to date yep so here's my thought on that so the the industry of motion design like the worldwide industry is humongous it's hard to see that until you get into it and you start networking and all the sudden opportunities come out of nowhere that you never would have imagined would need a motion designer so there's enough room for everybody and you don't have to know everything so for example for the first five years of my career four or five I only animated I almost never designed and I only knew after-effects i did not know sent him before to eat and this was you know ten years ago fifteen years ago when there was a much smaller actual use case for motion design it now motion design is everywhere I mean this was pre iPhone and I'm talking about like there was no it's like full-color screen on your phone so even back then I was able to get away with only knowing After Effects so now there's you know a hundred times as much work if you're going into the studio thing and your goal is to like work for the top Studios to go you know work for gunner work for golden wolf people like that just being a good After Effects person isn't enough you're gonna eventually you're gonna have to be able to design you're gonna know how to animate pregnenolone 3d but you can also just totally specialize so at gunner there's an artist she's acting she was actually on our podcast - her name's Rachel Reed and her specialty is cel animation and she's just awesome at that and that's her thing and so that's what gunner has her do enric a bar owner who just left giant ant to go freelance same deal like he can animate in after-effects but he's mostly traditional animation guy probably doesn't know 3d at all it's not affecting his career like he's still you know probably booked as much as he wants and doing fine so part of that and I always see this with students too it's like you know shiny thing syndrome like I think part a part of a part of part of the mentality that I and I had this too by the way I was like super guilty of this is that when you're new to this it's sometimes hard to tell when you see something amazing what makes it amazing and then you'll find out oh well that artist used octane okay so that's the secret I need to learn octane now okay that and that's just the completely wrong way to look at anything you know some of the most amazing work that's ever been produced and animation was done with like a pencil and paper right there wasn't even a computer involved so focusing on the tools I think is just the completely wrong way to do it now I will say you have to know Photoshop you have to know illustrator you have to know After Effects everything after that is gravy right it's really helpful and you are worth more money if you also know some cinema 4d but it's hard to do all of those things really really really well so if you want to be like you know a crazy rich nas worthy you know twisted poly 3d monster you're probably gonna have to let your Adobe Illustrator skills slip a little bit or your After Effects chops will get rusty because you're really focused on 3d and I guarantee you neither of those guys that I mentioned are missing After Effects very much I mean that you know Chad Ashley uses fusion right it's like it does not matter what tool you're learning as long as you know design you understand composition and you know how things move like you know the animation principles in terms of staying relevant as a motion designer because you took that question in the direction I didn't think it was gonna go I mean I think that staying relevant is far more about keeping up on what the design trends are and what are new ways that motion design is being used and what are some new techniques that could come in handy so just as an example when I was coming up in the industry one of the biggest studios that always did the best work was SIOP they're still around but there it should they're kind of they've morphed into a different thing they don't do the same kind of work but SIOP was known for producing work where it was always one seamless crazy camera move with weird transitions and there was no cuts and it just looked super cool so I was obsessed with that that is extremely hard to do it's expensive you know it's actually really a terrible way to of working because then any change your client makes unravels the entire thing you've built and then at some point I forget what studio was it might have been Shiloh they started doing a lot of motion design stuff with just quick cuts to it so it was more editorial and I saw that I'm like oh that's allowed oh my gosh I can just cut misses edit and my life got easier my work got better because I started as an editor so I actually knew how to edit and that became a trend for a while and then you know I was like well I'm not that great of a designer but all of a sudden you know Jorge Jarek honest ends up at buck he produces this piece that is sort of like the precursor to all explainer videos that you've ever seen and it's all simple shapes and just easy like just good animation with like triangles and circles and stuff and I'm like oh wow that's a thing okay I'm allowed to do that now and all of a sudden I could do that all day and I built half my career on that stuff so I think it's far more useful frankly lucrative and smart to not focus on software as much and to focus on like visual trends and storytelling trends what are the trends right now it's interesting because I was thinking about this like at the end of last year I was trying to like sum it up in my head like what are the visual trends so there's a few and what's interesting to me is that all of the things that were really cool when I got into the field and then they kind of went away and now they're coming back so that like collage photo bash kind of you know grungy look that's coming back the I've actually seen a couple of amazing kinetic type pieces been Raddatz who's one of the founders of mk12 put out this amazing opener to like a conference and it's a kinetic type piece which I don't even know if you all know what a kinetic type pieces that used to be like the thing you did in motion graphics you'd have a voiceover and you'd have the words popping up in time with the voiceover but they'd be doing something interesting and you know like they would say the word gun and the word gun would pop up but it would be in the shape of a gun and then there'd be a muzzle flash like stuff like that so Ben Raddatz did something like that and it was the first one I'd seen in probably eight years and it was brilliant and I know people are gonna start copying it Oddfellows has even started doing stuff that does not look hand-drawn Illustrated flat shapes simple visual metaphors you know it almost looks like something out of like a skateboard magazine from the 80s so I think that there's you know I think that there's like this trend towards this throwback analog look which I personally love and and I think it's actually a great place to start as a motion designer because it's so graphic design ish it's like when you when you get into like explainer videos and the Illustrated thing and giant Anton and their aesthetic that's very specific and and very hard to pull off if you don't have those skills but to do something like one of our instructors Knoll Hoenig just you you can find this on his website it's the drawing room NYC if you google that you'll find it and he put up this case study he did an opener to a show about UFOs so I guess there was a bunch of documents Declassified in the US about UFOs and stuff like that and he did this title sequence that feels like almost out of the 60s or something but it's really I mean it's like modern with the techniques and everything but the design is very classic and really cool and I see a lot of that aerial coast is another one who you know he's got this trend of like chopping up stock photos and these weird interesting things and making collages out of them so that I think is one trend and then on the other side you've got 3d where the trend is abstract photo realism and I think that that is being driven by third party renderers like redshift and octane and v-ray which i think is now gpu-accelerated and and so it's it's allowing people to create neat looking stuff without really having to know too much which is good and bad and so that's actually a trend that I'm watching kind of carefully because you know where we want to teach people 3d we have a cinema 4d class we're about to start building a photorealism class and these trends are interesting because I don't know is that a flash in the pan is that actually going anywhere or at some point are people gonna realize like oh just because it's photo real doesn't mean it's good you know because there's still a lot of there's still a lot of that too yeah so those are two that I've noticed and I'm trying to think if there's any other if there's anything else I mean you know traditional animation is still slowly picking up speed I mean it's all been part of our industry just the hand-drawn cell look I suspect here's a prediction actually making prediction right now we'll see if I'm right the the new spider-man movie the spider verse that the way they animated that you know a mix of everything on twos and some things on ones and then drawing stuff over it by hand and getting this crazy look that you've never seen before I've seen in the motion design community like everybody's just exploded about that movie and I suspect we're gonna start to see people playing with that idea of using 3d animation but making it look like mixed-media collage and really playing with timing doing things on twos and ones and mixing that up I mean frankly I was thinking you'd be really fun to experiment just in after-effects like only using hold keyframes doing everything by hand as if you were a character animator at Pixar or Sony or something like that doing things on twos but every once in a while it goes to ones for like quick moves and things like that you get this totally unique look that you can't get any other way it's actually very old-school it's sort of Disney ish but I would I would love to see it make a comeback and I predict that we're gonna start to see something some of that stuff how did the reason why I little bit around this because the future trends in motion design it's like we do have to look into what the future of what motion trends are but not just in visual trance but also the tech side of it mm-hmm so I was like curious what your take as a bird's eye view on the whole scene yeah I mean I can say specifically about tech it's just it just always gets better After Effects is not going anywhere photoshop's not going anywhere illustrator is not going anywhere cinema 4d is not going anywhere so those are the big four and in order I would say probably for me Photoshop Illustrator After Effects cinema 4d so learn them in that order you could flip flop Photoshop and illustrator if you want to if you know the first three you have a job waiting for you if you know the first four and you're decent at them then you have plenty of jobs and you're gonna get paid more but again if you possess all of those skills and you can't animate a ball bounce so that it looks right or you don't know how to layout type so that it like looks good has good hierarchy it's clear visually where you want people to look what's important what's less important none of that matters so like Oh answer your question but I still want to harp on the fact that like that is the probably the least important thing that that you're gonna learn and and hopefully at hyper island I mean that's a big focus right like you know the the tools you have to learn them and they're tricky and and and they're fun and you've got you you know you can go watch the tutorial learn how to do something really really cool is it actually gonna be something a client asks you to do a client's gonna give you their logo and they're gonna give you eight lines of type and a buncha legal and they're gonna say make this look good and make it readable so like most and to be honest most After Effects artists I meet can't do that they like they can write expressions for days right but lay out an end card in a readable way they can't do that so that that's really the main focus I think a lot of times we started realizing how the fundamental basics of design principles and animation principles are actually what we need to focus on and also a concept that drives the entire motion piece so it's like I was listening to one of the podcasts where it's about before animating a single keyframe it's important to have a solid concept what we're doing most of the time at hyper it's like we're talking about what it is that we want to present and how we're going to do it and also how that he was going to work with each other so it's like it's postive notes it's paper and pencil and and then the After Effects part comes pretty much last that's good to hear because that to me cash that's the hardest part you know if a client comes to you and I mean this is typical thing like if you um you know you could go to New York or LA and you could get a gig at you know one of the big studios and your first project will be for some company you've never heard of and they've got some IT product that uses you know blockchain encryption to like you know distribute blah blah blah and it's the most boring product ever and they need a one-minute video for a trade show and it's got a budget of $60,000 or $100,000 and you have to vit you have to come up with like a concept that explains that visually you have to like wrap your head around what it is and then you have to say how can I make a visual metaphor for blockchain right and that is a really tough skill to develop and the only way it develops is by doing exactly what you said ideally being in a group and bouncing ideas off and and getting used to the idea of like I'm just gonna open my brains you like open it up and I'm gonna let all the ideas out and 98% of them will be terrible embarrassing useless ideas but the 2% is gonna be something in there I can kind of polish and turn it to a good idea and you know when you when you look at like all of the work that really sticks with you good design good animation those are helpers right like my um my favorite motion design piece ever I think still I haven't seen one I like more is something G monk did it's called box have you guys seen it it's the two robots holding these screens right I just think it's brilliant like on a technical level on a design level but conceptually it is so amazing and it's like this magic show and there's different like tenets of magic and the music plays with that and then you've got the performer sort of doing things like a magician would and it's all to create this sense of wonder and it's like everything is in service of this one key concept that's kind of rare you don't often find projects that have that much clarity and direction to them and so there are lots of projects that have cooler three D or cooler lighting or neater music but that one sticks with me it's the same with them the original buck good books piece the hunter s Thompson one metamorphosis that one you know the animation is amazing right but it ties in with the script and the story it's such a deep level that it really like hits you hard and so you know like there's really honestly there's not that many pieces like that you know that come out of I think forms in nature that chromosphere did a few years ago was like almost there you know there's some things like that so again like you can be the best designer but if you can't think at that level you know you can still go really far and have a great career make a ton of money and you can work with the Patrick Claire's and the people who are good at that but if you can be the person that can come up with that idea and even just kind of get it started and then hand it off to a really good designer that's invaluable that's actually what a creative director it does have a question about the future companies like generates videos like that I see coming I was just wondering on you take on that maybe ten years from now or where do you think this whole industry will go and like the job so you know yeah are you so you asking about this funny when you said too about the future I was thinking of Christos channel the future and I was like wait you want to tell you about Christo so so are you asking about companies that are when you say generate their own videos do you mean like they're making content like that like youtubers and things like that or like companies doing branded content it's a pretty much like generate you know what I know you know yeah almost like like ordering a mograph piece at McDonald's like a little menu and you okay I know you don't and I was just thinking like okay you know how new that is or if it's developing or if that's something that people use more will it be cheaper than maybe hiring a studio and like how will the future develop and change I've talked to a lot of people about this because you know there's a lot of stuff in the news right now about AI and how self-driving trucks are gonna like take 25% of the jobs away and stuff like that and so right now there is absolutely nothing out there that can automatically do anything approaching what a motion designer does it's just doesn't exist there are some really cool technologies like you know data clay is a company that makes a script for After Effects I have a video about using it on YouTube where you can design something and animate it but then you can have this like computer program spit out 5 million versions of it on demand the client can login type in their name whatever and it spits out a render for them now you still have to design it you still have to concept it and animate it right so the computer can't do that part but it can version it and it's actually been pretty disruptive I mean a lot of legacy studios kept the lights on by doing a commercial and then making a hundred versions of it doing a car commercial and then doing one version for all of the 50 markets that that car is sold in and literally just changing the phone number on the commercial stuff like that now you can literally just have like an iMac sitting in the corner doing that all day long and that and the client can order their own commercials so some examples of that are there's a great studio in London called cub studio and they spun off a side business called mow share where that's what they do and it's really amazing if you if you go to their website it's mow share code at UK you can see these great case studies where their clients are like I'm gonna use the right word football teams I almost said soccer like football teams rugby teams they think they do stuff for the NFL now so for like American football and they will set up these beautiful templates for like Instagram posts like social media where you know the the Dallas Cowboys want to put up on Instagram the score at the end of each quarter during a game and they want to see the Cowboys helmet and then the helmet of the team they're playing and the score and some stats to roll up and they want it to be designed well and animated well and they don't want to have to hire Cubs studio to make those every single time because they make thousands of them so Fraser and his team they make a template and they they use some expressions and a little bit of code and they basically build a computer program for that client but now they're done and they charge the client I don't know how they charge it's probably like a recurring monthly subscription or they build them for whatever they use or something like that it's an entirely new business model I mean I think it's brilliant frankly I mean if the goal is to grow a business and scale it and make money which you can then use for other things that is way better than selling your hours right and doing like a service so I think that's incredible now you were asking about like can a client go to a website and pick female character wearing blue pants walking over holding a cell phone what's on the cell phone well it's just like yes someone could make that and there are versions of that out there but they're terrible right now there's two there's two things about that one is sometimes terrible is enough so you know if you're if you're going after the local you know laundromat and trying to convince them that they need to do some YouTube advertising and you can make a cool video for them they don't really need a 20 thousand dollar slick piece of animation they just don't their business doesn't need it they would be fine with the 500 dollar kind of semi-automated you know whiteboard video right or they'll just get on fiverr.com or upwork and hire like a cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap freelancer but there is always always always going to be room for quality and high-end Google is never going to use something like that I promise you like like good companies have taste good companies care about their brand and everything they put out is a reflection of their brand right so if if school motions started running YouTube ads with like crappy whiteboard videos and like a bad vo I'd like a really bad vo talent that would reflect pretty poorly on us right so you know if we launch a course you know when we launch courses we always have these animations that open and close the the course videos and we've had buck Dhoom and Anna made and and gunner and companies like that so if all of a sudden I let my little brother who you know he's like he's like a manager at a company and you know but like maybe he dabbles in After Effects or something and I let him do it it's gonna reflect really badly on us so companies care about quality and they're they will always go to the artisan you know the person that can craft something for them bespoke as opposed to using the AI bots that will you know like Google deep learning and and face swapping and put Nicolas Cage on a video for them or something like that yeah so I I'm honestly not worried about it at all I will say I'll say what there there are some areas where it could affect people like in visual effects it could be a it could actually cause problems because there's a lot of jobs doing rotoscoping it's hard to imagine that that's someone's full-time job but it is there are technologies now where they're using deep learning and things like that machine learning to rotoscope now it's not there yet right it's still imperfect sometimes it's perfect but most time it's not but in ten years it will be perfect like I can almost guarantee like you'll there will be shots like maybe 80% of shots you can just feed to a computer and it will just it'll be done in like ten minutes you don't have a human to do it that is going to kill some jobs but it's also going to open up other jobs that we don't yet know about that's the other side so I quit doing client work about five years ago and this is right when that really started to take off so I've never worked on a project where what I was doing was actually going to be implemented in code in an app somewhere I did do a lot of sort of product prototype videos where I would get a design of an app that didn't exist and I would have to sort of make the video like stick it on an iPad with element 3d and sort of show how it would work and stuff like that but it was really just to sort of sell the idea through and then they would go to a UX designer and then figure it all out so I haven't I did just talk to someone who that's literally like his specialty he actually teaches people the concepts of animation in the UX world is pretty interesting and what is cool about that kind of stuff is that it's a very new it's like a frontier it's like the Wild West right now like no one's really nailed it and figured out how to like conceive of the way things should move people have come close and people have got really good at it but there's not like a standard way of doing it and then there's not a standard way of prototyping it like some people use After Effects some people use framer or haiku or things like that then there's not a standard way of taking that and turning it into code some people use Lottie some people just rebuild it from scratch some people use Inspector Spacetime so people who are looking for what's gonna be big I mean it's kind of already big if you moved to San Francisco or Silicon Valley you know you can go to Google and you can freelance for them for six months and make $200,000 yeah you gotta be really good but you like they'll pay you that so there's a couple other things I want to say about this too so so one I think that if you're interested in that you need to learn about UX user experience which is really about psychology it's kind of fascinating it's it's separate from UI user interface UI is kind of like the it's kind of just like the way things look UX is literally like getting inside the mind of the person using the app and being like okay so they open the app what do I want them to feel when they open the app I want them to feel like ants how do I do that okay cool that now the apps loaded how am I going to tell them what they're supposed to do now I need to somehow direct their eye to this button cuz this is the button I want them to push how do I do that when they push that button I want them to know that by pushing that button they've now created a new project how do I tell them that that action caused this and it's really about psychology it's really fascinating and if I was getting in to this into this industry now I would probably go pretty hard at it but the big thing to know from a career standpoint is that every single app is going to need animation and you know the big companies are our way ahead and the smaller companies are kind of catching up and what's cool about this from a career perspective is and it's also like a problem for studios when you're a motion design studio and coca-cola comes to you and says we need a 60 second spot or we need a bunch of Instagram animations or we need something on a billboard in Times Square the money to pay for that is coming from their advertising budget their marketing budget when Google comes to you and says we are building a device that's gonna sit on your counter and it's got these four colored lights on top of it and they can spin they can close and open they can they can you know sort of brighten and dim they can turn on and off that's what they can do and we need to develop a visual language to tell the user when it's loading something when there's a message waiting for them when you know the volume is rising when the volumes falling and that the money that they're paying someone to do that is not from the marketing budget it's from the budget like the operating budget the product budget which is an order of magnitude greater and so that's why companies like Amazon and Google and Facebook can pay these outrageous salaries because they're not looking at the work you're doing as an ad it's not it's actually part of the product that they're selling and they're gonna make so much money off of it they're willing to invest more so that's something to keep in mind from a financial standpoint this is kind of a new thing it cannot it's also causing problems because now studios have to compete with those salaries and they can't because the budgets are not gonna go that high so there's kind of its kind of this interesting dynamic going on I've been talking about it a lot with guests on our podcast but yeah all right so okay so here's the thing so if when you're going for an internship there's a different bar that you have to clear if you're trying to get booked as a cell animator at buck there's a different bar if you're trying to get an internship at buck there's a different bar right so the bar you're trying to clear is to show them that you're super passionate about this that you're willing to work hard and that you have some talent so you don't need to show them that you're a total pro at this okay you have plenty of time to do that so instead you know having a real is is useful but I think what they really want to see is that you know what you're doing so one of the best tips I can give anybody and this this goes for like anything freelancing getting a full time job at especially for internships is do a short little case study okay because if I see something that you animated by hand even just a ball bounce right if it's a good ball bounce I'll look at it I'll be like cool good for you or if you what would be really impressive if you could pull this off is like a really cool like 20 to 24 frames cycle of flames or something interesting right so me looking at that I'm gonna be like whoa he knows what he's doing but then if underneath that there's just a short little breakdown of like you know first you know like little thumbnail sketches of like what's the style of this flame right is it gonna be like really pointy and detailed or is it gonna be kind of blobby and stylized and you know how big is it gonna be how little is it gonna be is there gonna be logs underneath it and then write it like two sentences about like so the first thing I did was just try to find the style of this flame then underneath it show like some failed tests you know which I'm sure if you try to do this for the first time you'll have many show some of those and write a little blurb about what you learned so in this first one I had too much difference between each frame so it looked too flickery in this one I didn't have enough so it looked too slow and it looked like the flame was in slow motion and then this in this one the thymic good but I didn't have enough little pieces flying off the top you know little embers and then finally I arrived here so now what you're showing them is a you care enough to like go through this very painful exercise and more importantly seeing the end result means what it means you were good enough once to get that resulted maybe you got lucky you know like I bet if I just sat here for two days I I do not do traditional animation but I bet if I looked at a youtube tutorial and I sat her for two days I could probably come up with a 22 frame flame sequence that would look okay and could fool somebody and show them that like yeah I Wow he's a great selling animator but I like savvy people know that that could just be you got lucky there's a great expression the Sun shines on every dog's ass for 15 minutes all right so like maybe that was just the sun shining on your ass for 15 minutes but if you have a case study even for like one second looping flame that shows me way more it tells me way more about you so if you only have five little you know two or three second things you've done don't try to stretch that into a show real it will be ridiculous don't do that I would do do the easy stuff right like put them on Instagram you know put them on a website but do case studies case studies will get you an internship faster than just about anything else and then when you when you approach people for an internship if you approach giant an if you approach buck if you approach you know digital kitchen I know they're looking for a lot of selling animators lately when you approach them approach them as a traditional animator and link to one of your case studies don't like to like your front page or something say like you know I I you know I'm a student at hyper Island I'm looking for internships I'm very interested in traditional animation and I've done a lot of I've done a lot of experiments and I've blogged about them and here's a one I'm particularly proud of you can check it out if you want to and they'll check it out and they'll read and they'll be like wow this person actually cares they actually want to get good at this and as an intern that's really what you care about because you're gonna go to that studio and they're gonna probably make you like get muffins for their clients and stuff but then they're also gonna throw you into the fire and they want some sense that like they can count on you that you have a work ethic and so the case study is the way to go so that's my advice I would not try to do a real I would just I would just blog about it if you can put I'm telling you that it's like that's like that's like the crucible for animators or like a good like water splash or something like that you know doing the ball bounce is is useful to learn but you're not ever going to do a ball bounce in real life you're going to you know and and really what's in-demand now is character animation which is incredibly difficult like there's a real steep learning curve to do hand-drawn character animation but so if you don't have that skill yet you can sneak up on it like learn to do some effects animation even do just like some experimenting you know like this the lines and little elements and the facts and things like that you know try drawing a face and morphing it into another face in some interesting way these abstract things but but right your process out you get a lot of tension that way where it's like okay you've sent out a couple of emails and you're waiting for responses sometimes people don't get it back to you so how do you follow up on that because we had this question a couple of times in the past where it's like I don't want to be pestering someone but at the same time I do want to find out if emails came in or what's happening sure let's start with why do people not write back to you okay so the most common reason they don't write back is because they are SuperDuper busy so if you're writing to a creative director if you're writing to a producer even if you're just writing to another animator they are probably going to be very very busy like we did a survey this was the three or four years ago now of producers who are typically at studios the people hiring freelancers making the call and booking people and we said how many emails do you get a day and most of them said they get more than 50 a day so they have a job to do a very labor-intensive job producers work their butts off and on top of that they're supposed to get back to 50 people it's just not going to happen right especially if it's someone looking for an internship and they're like and it's not because they don't want you to have an internship or that they're being mean it's that they just they don't have the bandwidth they don't have the time so there's a couple strategies so one is you want to go install this plugin for Gmail it's called write inbox there's another one called boomerang and I think they both have free versions okay what you want to do is write the email to that person and you want it to hit their inbox first thing in the morning you want to be the first email they get because right when they get to work they're probably gonna check their email and they have like 30 minutes of peace before the crazy starts and you know if you're the 50th email in there you're not getting answer but if you're the first one way more likely so right the email the day before you can use this plug-in to schedule it it will go out and I would just like figure out what time zone they're in and set it to go at like you know 8:00 in the morning 8:30 in the morning 9:00 in the morning something like that so that's one thing then I would install another extension called mailtraq mailtraq tayo what this will do is it will tell you if they opened the email okay this is important because if they opened it and didn't get back to you okay at least now they know you exist but maybe there was a reason maybe they actually looked at your work by the way mailtraq will tell you if they clicked any links in your email - so you'll know if they went to your website right right yeah so so knowing that changes everything right because if they open the email clicked on the link obviously they then looked at your stuff if they didn't write back to you maybe they're not interested maybe you're not a good fit right so move on the the world's a big place plenty of fish in the sea right but then if you sent that email and two days go by and they haven't even opened it they're probably not good at email inbox management and they probably have they're probably one of those people that have the red dot on their phone and like ten thousand seven hundred and thirty unread emails right raise your hand if you're like that hit right so yeah so so did and like do you feel guilty about not replying to those people like no you kid there's no way a human being can do that so they didn't open the email send the same email change the subject line try sending it at a different time and so so that's part one hit them at the right time and see it and just try and track when the thing was opened or if it was opened right and that by the way if any of you are curious there's a there's a book called the freelance manifesto that goes deep into this kind of stuff this is like this is my wheelhouse like like hacking email it's like that yeah and so then the next thing is follow up so if someone opens the email they click the link they don't respond what I want you to do is use that same plugin right in box and you can snooze that email and have it come back in two months or three months and then one day you'll wake up and boom that email reappears in your inbox and it'll remind you oh three months ago I wrote to them and they open the email and looked at my work but they didn't they didn't reply so that's okay so then you just write them a new email right and they probably won't even remember you but you write a new email saying like hey just following up I wrote to you a few months ago and in the meantime I've been doing this and this and this I'd still love to work with you guys if you ever have you no need for an intern or something like that boom and that's it and so and then the other thing is don't just write to one place or two places or three places write to 30 places it's not hard to like find places to intern you know I guess it depends like where how far you're willing to travel and stuff like that but there's a million opportunities out there and so it's really a numbers game if you have decent work and you hit them at the right time and you follow up every three months and you reach out to 30 or 50 people you will get a bite it's just almost inevitable that you will so don't don't be don't take it personally when people don't write you back I cannot write back to everybody who writes to me like it's just physically impossible I actually have a tag in Gmail called guilt ignores you know and I throw them there and I'm like one day I'll have free time again and I'll be able to like answer all of these you know and it's not a and I'm not trying to be mean or like disrespect people I just literally I would just answer emails all day long if I answered everybody so just keep that in mind be respectful that these people are super busy that you're writing to but use technology to like hack it a little bit and it's all it also goes way deeper than that - this is a rabbit hole I love going down I mean when you write to them what's the subject line you're using are you saying like looking for internship well gosh my eyes just bounce right over that I don't even see that right or are you doing a little bit of search and are you finding out that that producer that you're writing to looking at their LinkedIn profile went to the same school as your sister or something and now you know like your subject line is my sister also went to hyper island you know and that's going to get opened right so there's other things like that to where you can use psychology to ensure that you will rise to the top of the email pile yeah so there you go that was it that was like a little teaser hopefully that's enough to get you started like try that like 20 years younger Joey a year so I'd be 17 Wow um you know it's hard it's like it's a tough question because there are things that I did wrong that were really painful to go through that I like at the time I'm like I really wish I didn't have to go through this but they taught me something and they turned me into this Joey but so but but I will say this okay so what I wish I'd learned sooner was that your career is is like it's made up of all these components like your success will be dictated by how good you are at doing this like the quality of your work how good you are at building relationships with people and how reliable and professional you are and these two are far more important than how good you are at the work that is the least important in my experience and as an artist that's kind of crushing because you you what you want is you just want this perfect meritocracy where whoever works the hardest and and really like devotes themselves and and practices and stays up all night perfecting that thing that's the person that's gonna get the gig that's the person that's gonna end up you know running a successful studio it does not work that way at all it really doesn't if okay so Claudio is one of the most talented animators I've ever worked with he is absurdly good at it like stupid scary good at it but if he but also when we worked with him we hired him to animate something for class everything showed up the day he said it would I will have something for you on Tuesday it shows up on Tuesday ok he gave us a bid and then he stuck to it even though we had some extra revisions he didn't charge us for those he like was nice he was gay I'll just do it he's super nice to work with right he's just a pleasure to work with so the quality of the thing he made for us that like I know is there but what would I remember and what sticks with me is how nice he was and how professional he was and how uh you know honest he was about how long things would take if something came up and he needed an extra day all of that stuff goes way further than just having a little bit better piece on your portfolio so when you get to a place in your career where you feel like you're stuck and you'll get there and say it's inevitable at some point you'll be somewhere and you'll be like I'm stuck what do I do the answer is not my work needs to get better that will help the answer is usually I need to level up my business skills or I need to network more I need to get out and meet more people so that more opportunities pop up I really wish I'd known that especially when I was running my studio because our studio was in Boston where at the time there were really very few studios there was only like one or two other ones and our work was very good like for Boston especially it was like some of the best looking motion design coming out of Boston it didn't matter our clients would still go to the crappy post house down the street because they'd worked with that guy for 15 years and I never understood that I was like why you know but like we're better like look at our work and like it's designed better like I'm better at After Effects than that guy you know and it's like and it's like such a silly egotistical way of thinking and I wish I'd broken that mental habit sooner because I would have spent more time just going out and like having lunch with people and just talking about music and stuff not related to motion design because like ironically that's where gigs come from a lot of studios you all have someone who's either executive producer or a biz dev business development person their job is literally to make friends like that that is actually their job now they're supposed to then take that friend and kind of hint hey you know we yeah well you guys got anything cool going on over there cuz we got all these artists that can make cool stuff so just saying but really their main job is to make buddies and to take people to lunch and to throw parties and to fly out to the person's office and bring them a gift and to remember with their birthday and to call them on their birthday that's how you get work you know it's kind of like it's like the dirty little secret of any creative industry that the secret to getting work is not always just doing good work in fact most time it's not I actually it was like you know I didn't have a website at the time then it was like okay so I need to keep the conversation going because we have something good running here so how do I do that and I sent them kind of like our student video that we shot at the beginning without any knowledge and this kills me just basically a rough-cut video with their Roth story and stuff like that and yeah it turns out that she enjoyed it so it was like a conversation they kept on going yeah yeah that's not and and yeah I mean you'd be really surprised like how often even when you're freelancing you know you may have this perception that a producer has this rolodex in in their head of every freelancer that's available all 25 that they work with and a job comes in and it's like a computer all right which one's the most appropriate well this one's good at 3d this one's better at design this one not how it works how it works is the first name they think of is generally the one they email right and a lot of times the first person they think of is the last person they talk to the person who is currently working on a job for them or the person who they just finished a booking two weeks ago and they had they remembered how great they were and they just call them back right so part of part of the game is staying at the top of their mind and so that's why these follow-up emails are so important and using tools to like remind you to do that is super helpful because sometimes you know when you go freelance one of the things that I recommend people do is like automate this like have the plug-in tell you when you need to do this give them an availability check an availability check is like you know you haven't been booked by them for a few months you you have no bookings coming up for the next couple weeks so you write to all your clients and you say hey hope you're having an awesome summer just in case you guys are busy just want to give you a heads up that I have some availability opening up in case that's helpful that's all have a good day that's it it's just a courtesy and you'd be shocked how often that works and turns into work because like if you write to ten producers it's almost guaranteed that one or two of them have something percolating that they're trying to figure out and boom right at that moment and that email shows up 8:30 in the morning right on the dot and you're checking to see if they opened it and they'll be like oh my gosh this is perfect I could totally forgot about this person I even think of you um thank you for writing to me yes let's put you on hold you know that happens all the time and it's in it can be the same with internships too if you write to someone you may you may have this perception that studios and agencies are well-run well-oiled machines some of them are some of them are not some of them are very disorganized so if you write to someone and they're like oh my gosh sure works great yeah we'd love to have you as an intern we're not hiring right now but we'll keep you in mind for the summer it's not on them to remember to write you back right you need to say awesome I'm gonna follow-up in a month and then you need to click write in box remind me in a month and then in a month you need to follow up and say like hey just following up if you guys are looking for interns I'd still love to you know help out and in the meantime check out this cool thing I did and you and it's like you just keep doing that it's like you know it's like you have a rock and you just a drop of water hits it like you know like once a day for a million years and eventually it wears down like that's how you get in at these places and that's how you get clients it doesn't take a million years though it can happen pretty quick most the time yeah there you had like this sending it something new that you yeah and even if it's not something new it's just you took something that you already did and you wrote a case study about it right I mean that that works too I mean it's crazy case studies are like the secret weapon right now you know studios that do them and again it's all about showing your client that you did not get lucky you have a process you you you know it's not like the open Photoshop threw some things together and whoa that actually worked look at that it looks good it's like no no you know how to aim it something and refine and polish and really helps to see those initial things that don't look so great and then to see how your process led you to the end result which is amazing that's super powerful so yeah definitely like and that's a way you can you can leverage old work - you can just like rehash something you've already done you know just write up right out case study about it yes so yes yes okay my um all right so I'll tell you so we've we've just been hiring recently and the it's probably different for everybody but I'll tell you what I love when I'm interviewing someone so two things one I like to get to know you so like what I don't want is someone to tell me their educational background and you know like how much After Effects they know and you know that they won the student award for this and that I'm gonna know that before I ever interview you right like if you've gotten to the interview part they've already looked at your work they've already looked at your resume or you know if you sent that over they've gone to your portfolio and they've looked at the breakdown at that point when you're in an interview situation they're really looking for two things they're looking for can I actually stand this person like if I'm gonna be in a room with them all day for weeks on end are we gonna enjoy each other or am I gonna get sick of this person and then that's probably the most important thing and then if you're going for an internship this doesn't apply as much but it might still but if you are applying for a job this is like gold do your research find out everything you can about that company right I'm trying to think of an example so if you want to go work for tendril let's say in Toronto right a lot of the crazy stuff they've been doing lately is this really cool abstract conceptual 3d okay and so what I would do is I would like go find the artists that worked on those things I would email them let them know you're applying for an internship at tendril do you have any advice I would I would research all the credits on their work and see like what did they use on this do they use a Houdini person do they use octane was this like just one person that like you know does all this who is the designer on this like oh do they you know find out as much as you can about that company and then what you want to do is basically create a story in that person's mind and the interviewers mind where they can picture you in their ecosystem so what's worked amazingly well to get hired at school emotion is people do their research and they find holes where we're not doing as good of a job and they'll offer suggestions hey by the way whether you hire me or not I think really what would be helpful is if you know you had notifications on your site because when I signed up for one of your free classes I found it difficult to keep up with all the emails I was like shocked that someone told that to me when they were trying to get hired I thought that was a brilliant write so if you're if you're applying it tendril or something like that you probably want to criticize what they're doing but you might want to you know if you know that they're doing a lot of things with octane right now maybe bring up the fact that you just read a press release about you know the new version of octane is gonna have this artificial denoiser and its really really cool have you heard of it yet and it's like oh my gosh this person like they know we use octane they know that like yeah I probably am interested in that you know just like do your homework and you'll just be able to almost subtly offer ways where like you know because they'll probably ask you some generic questions like so you know what's your favorite part of the motion design process and so like if they're a very concept heavy place like a elastic or something like that or if they're a very you know design focused place like Gretel then you will kind of know like what they really look for and what's important to them if I was interviewing it Gretel do your homework there's a lot there's interviews with Greg who founded Gretel out there and you can find out who's favorite designers are and you can talk about how you're really inspired by Magritte and like you know all of these like art history names that will impress someone like that it may not matter at all to Jay from giant ant but Jay from giant ant if you listen to interviews with him you'll find out that he's really really he's into running and he's a family man and he really cares about story story is the big thing for giant ant and so I was sort of positioning yourself as someone that I really loved crafting the arc and the narrative you know like the designs fun the animations fun but I like looking at it as a whole and having those climax as those Peaks that's my favorite part that will stick out like you know like crazy but you have to do your homework and you have to know who it is you're talking to what company you're talking to all right so like first of all like take take a note from Claudio and and and be and just be the nicest person you can be put any any negativity that you have just get rid of it go like meditate or something you know drink some cava and write or don't you get a bellyache and and just be very nice be very friendly be interested in what they're doing talk about the thing they just put on their on their Vimeo page right talk about what you liked about it and do your homework so you no problem what they liked about it right because it's gonna be different from Studio to studio where that where the focus is [Applause] injured yeah so in the Netherlands you've got what I'm blinking all of the names one one sighs I think it's called in Berlin you've got a set it's a German word I'm gonna totally butcher it it's a cash you might know right it's issue there's zeitgeist as ex Ponza there's statutes so it's so in Germany there's a bunch in London obviously there there's a bunch in Paris you've got matte trunks studio does amazing stuff matte trunks used to do tutorials by the way he's amazing at it thank goodness he left because he would have taken my lunch money but he does amazing work I'm trying to think where else I mean that there there are studios everywhere actually it's just the ones that you've heard of like the big ones you know there are really just the ones that are good at marketing themselves but if you get on Vimeo and you type in after-effects Portugal I guarantee you're gonna find like so this is what I would do I've get on LinkedIn right and and I would look for you may have to use the this so they have a tool on LinkedIn it's called recruiter you may have to pay for one month of it and it's like 79 bucks or something but it's it's worth it so let's say that you have your heart set on getting an internship in in Italy or something like that right what Ehlo is in Italy so I would just call that I ll out okay but let's say that they're I think they're in Milan or something so if you don't wanna be there then what you do is get on LinkedIn grab that you you like sign up for one month of recruiter and do a search for anyone that has the word after-effects in their LinkedIn profile in Italy within 50 miles of the town you want to be in what you'll find is you might actually get lucky and find Studios pop up well you probably find our After Effects artists or motion designers or Photoshop are you know like like you'll do a few searches and if you find an After Effects artist in Rome find that person's you know on LinkedIn they may actually list the studio's they work for but find their portfolio look at their work look at the credits see who they're working for now you know the studio's you know in those places I mean there's really there's great studios everywhere and then you know great studios are also a place to aspire to so even if your first internship is that a studio doing like pretty good work you know not cream of the crop not motion Agra fur but like pretty darn good you can learn a ton you know it's gonna look great on your resume you're hopefully gonna beef up your portfolio learn a bunch of new skills and then you can you can progress from there then there's the networking and socials are soft skills what else is good if you want to be a good motion design about networking and social social skills working like skills what are good skills to have or what house to grow as so many - meditation - oh okay so like the non obvious things right okay cool um well so I am I am big into all of that stuff so like you know meditation and nootropics and the occasional psychedelic all that stuff I think that so some advice that I got early on and that I've heard repeated throughout my career I think is really really appropriate here which is to be a better creative to be more creative you need more ammo right like you can't live in a one-bedroom apartment and watch Netflix 20 hours a day and be very interesting right like you need to be out you need to see things you know I feel like you're all in a great position because a lot probably most students in my country do not travel to other countries very much it's rare actually it's like we don't travel extensively in America the way Europeans do so just being exposed so like different looking buildings like in hearing different languages and meeting people from completely different cultures and different foods and different color palettes you know all of that stuff it gives you a visual vocabulary that it's not obvious why that's useful like if you spend a bunch of money or or you backpack across Europe you know for six months or whatever it's not obvious how that's gonna make you a better motion designer but I promise you it will because you're going to have just a more expanded like palette really when you have to come up with ideas when you have to design things you're it's gonna be easier for you then for someone like me I grew up in Fort Worth Texas which is like a very it's a pretty it's it's a pretty homogenous place right he's got like if you've got like white people and Mexican people and that's it that's what I grew up with and so like I'm really used to Spanish but the first time I heard Japanese like you know and I saw like Japan I was like I've never seen anything like this it blew my mind and I wish I'd been exposed to that a lot more I wish that frankly my parents had like traveled with us more because now as an adult I get to travel and I find like everything opens up so that's one thing like just exposing yourself to stuff you need you must have an outlet besides motion design to get the poison out right so if I sit and animate for eight hours I am fried and I might have a problem I need to solve like I can't quite figure out how to get from this frame to this frame I'm not going to figure it out by sitting in front of a computer I have to leave it literally I've never solved an After Effects problem in front of after-effects like you know like like simple stuff of course but if if I'm like how do I get from this frame to this frame and how do I rig that so like I can change in stuff and so what works for me is running so I run a lot and running for me it's almost like a form of like moving meditation where my brain turns off and then all of a sudden I'm like thinking about something and then I'll sit out of nowhere boom there's the answer and it almost feels like the answer didn't come for me it just like bubbled up and now I have it but it doesn't come up unless I'm in that flow State I also I do meditate too but that's more for like I guess that's that's more just to boost confidence and become more aware like as you get older you know you're all nice and young so like you know someone happen to you for a while but as you get older you know and you get more and more responsibility if you start a studio if you start a company you know the problems get bigger too and the stakes are higher and so it just takes kind of a little bit of a different strategy to manage that and manage your internal state so for me that's what meditation does in terms of you you know I think you mentioned networking cache so I'll bring that one up too I mean really the value of networking cannot be overstated so even just you know going to blend which is probably astronomically expensive from where you all live are going to NAB are going to move o which is in Prague right or going to you know fitzy if it's an Amsterdam or something like that like going to those you will meet all of these people who are just like you there are creatives there they know what After Effects is they know what a keyframe is at the worst case scenario you're gonna make some friends and be inspired and have a good time but you will probably also likely form relationships that will help your career in one way or another because literally all it takes especially at the beginning of your career all it takes is one little crack in that door that's all you need once you're in everything just starts flowing naturally and things just land and all of a sudden someone looks over and they see you working and they think your stuffs pretty good and then they remember you and they go to a new studio and they remember that person and and all of a sudden now you're over there that you need to just get your foot in the door so going to live events is actually incredibly incredibly valuable you know it's also nice to have a network of people around you even if it's just virtually that understand what it is you do you know my my group of friends in Boston some of them were editors but there weren't really any After Effects artists you know so it was very hard for me to like if I really just wanted to like geek out or decompress about something there wasn't like a good way to do that now you've got MD a slack you've got like our alumni group that's what it is all day long people talking about motion design you know you've got the motion hatch Facebook group you've just got all these places where you can meet virtually but doing it in person is just the values astronomical I highly highly recommend it if you can swing it yes doing this I mean one question I had is McDonald our program manager he's continuing so I hope that this could be something that you guys could do with future students and something that's interesting for you yeah so I want to say first off thank you so much for asking me to do this this is like super fun I love I love nothing more than I could just do this all day this is real this like lights me up and is written you all had such amazing questions and you know like you're on the front lines of motion design right like I'm in a strange position now running school of motion where I'm sort of like floating above the industry and I'm in it and and I'm touching pieces of it but the market forces at play in our industry don't affect school motion the same way they will you and so that's why it's really awesome for me to hear your concerns and the things you're you're worried about and any advice I can offer so so cash yeah at answer your question I would love to do this over and over again and frankly I'd love to come out and do this in person too you know I think I think I think that I think that'd be really fun and you know like maybe maybe in the summer or something when it's warm I'm not good cold not good in the cold weather did you dig this video if so please give it a like and subscribe to our channel then head to school of motion comm to grab a free account to download tons of project files take a free class get our weekly industry newsletter and much more let us know what you thought in the comments tell us anything you'd like to learn and we will see you soon

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 40,988

Keywords: Motion Design, Motion Graphics, After Effects, Tutorial, Tips, Tricks, Technique, Learn, Basics, Design, MoGraph, Questions, Answers, Q&A, Hyperisland, Hyper, Island, Student, Freelance, Job, Internship, Mograph

Id: jtRL7Q-3m5o

Length: 97min 50sec (5870 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 12 2019