Meet the speakers: Aaron Ray
An interview with Aaron Ray: an animation director and designer with an inclination towards illustrative design and character based work.
Q&A hosted by Mack Garrison & Meryn Hayes.
Read time: 15min
Mack :
Hey Aaron, for folks who don't know who you are, a little bit about you and your background and what brought you into motion design as an industry.
Aaron:
So currently I split my time between doing freelance with studios, whether that's art direction, creative direction, or just doing style frames and stuff like that. But I also have a rep for commercial and music video direction, so I'm kind of bouncing back and forth between those things. How I started was early on when I was into skateboarding growing up, just seeing all the graphics and stuff. And this was late '80s and '90s, but specifically the late '80s stuff when I was a little kid, when I first started skateboarding, the graphics were so bold, colorful, gruesome, funny, detailed and illustrative. I had never really seen anything like that.
So I was like, "This is really interesting and I think this might mean I could draw for a living," that kind of thing. I just drew all the time. And then also going back to skateboarding more when I got a little older in high school and college, we were just filming everywhere we went when we were skateboarding. So I got kind of used to using cameras and the idea of editing a video and then probably somewhere out of there, I started to see title design and stuff like that.
I went to college here in Denver and I went to the Art Institute, which is now defunct, and I initially thought I wanted to make live-action movies. But all I had were drawings and my bad skateboard graphics and things like that at the time. I met with an admission person and she said, “maybe you should go into our new computer animation program.” And I said, "Oh, that's cool. That sounds kind of cool." And this was like '98, so this was early, Toy Story had just come out, Pixar stuff was just getting a name and becoming kind of popular, and so the program was really rooted in visual effects for film and 3D character animation.
And so I went into that program and I was pretty unhappy with it because it was very computer based and I kind of learned throughout my time there that I really like more hands-on tactile feeling work. And I liked more design focused work.
It’s Aaron!
Mack:
Well, it's interesting to me. It's like, all right, so you're a kid, you're growing up in the '90s, late '80s, you're loving skateboarding, so it brings you in from the design side of it. And then I'm just presuming here that you started making little random fun skating videos that ultimately brought you into film. Is that right?
Aaron:
Yeah, I bought a camera, a mini DV camera or eight millimeter, and we would just go around filming and editing. I didn't have Final Cut or anything like that at the time. So it was like in-camera editing or eventually we got two tape decks, and I don't know if you've ever done that, but you can run the camera into one tape deck and you're sort of transferring it to another tape deck and a VHS. So you're doing the editing to a tape from tape deck to tape deck.
Frame from the music video Aaron directred for ’Hands/Heart’ by The Raven And The Writing Desk.
Mack:
That's so funny. Are you putting on the classic dad fade where you fade in and fade out at the end in-camera?
Aaron:
Always. Every time.
Mack:
So I imagine the skating stuff, I mean, it's funny how many people I feel like I've talked to that have gotten into this space through skating because really it was kind of pioneers for recording yourself and recording your tricks. And so it got you into that. That always feels very tactile to me. I mean, skating is just rough in and of itself. And the designs on the boards and the decks themselves are really graphic. And so when you get into, it was the Art Institute that you were in Denver, right. And so you get to the VFX, the 3D character animation spawned after Toy Story coming out, which makes a lot of sense because there's this new push and admiration for 3D. But it sounds like you weren't digging it, you weren't really wild about it, but you just kind of pushed through it and felt like, "Well, I just got to get a degree and get out of here."
Aaron:
Yeah, I mean, I got a lot from school though. I learned the tools, I learned After Effects. At the time we were using 3D Studio Max, so I got a good sense of using the tools and understanding 3D. I kind of forgot to mention, growing up, I was really into music, punk music and just independent music in general. And so even before college I was skateboarding and music was a huge part of my life. And when I was in college, it was kind of pre-motion design too. So there wasn't a lot of that. And I think what I was missing is I really loved record covers. I really loved skateboard graphics, I liked filming stuff, but I hadn't really been introduced to motion design yet. And so, I don't know, I think I burnt out and just couldn’t get excited about what I was seeing in school.
In retrospect, I can look back at it now. And the 3D character stuff we see now, I'm like, "Wow, that's so cool." I wish we'd been kind of pushed in that direction versus just the movie VFX and CG stuff.
But music and playing in bands was really a big thing at that point for me. So I wanted to be a designer in the music industry. I wanted to do album covers and stuff like that. So I got this position as a designer for a small record label, for literally no money. I worked there for about three years. But it was a great experience and worth it in the long run, it actually had a big impact on me.
But streaming music started to slowly take over, and you kind of see the writing on the wall that I wasn't going to be able to continue just doing album covers. And I think it was probably around this time that I first saw, you guys remember a studio called Shilo?
Mack:
Out in San Diego or something, right?
Aaron:
They were California and New York City. But they were amazing. I think that's the first time I saw work that I would've considered motion design. There was one piece they did in particular, It was this kind of white cityscape thing. No materials, just white and what do you call it, Ambient Occlusion And the camera's just moving through and it's got this really experimental edit. And there was just this cool hiphop kind of beat that everything was cut to, and there was typography integrated and there were hand drawn doodles popping out everywhere. I was like, "Wow, this is cool." And it was 3D and 2D kind of mixed.
Mack:
That's so neat. I do remember Shilo. In fact, they were an inspiration for me when I was in school. I was like, "Oh man, this place looks amazing. I want to go work here." It does feel like it's a good segway though, from album art into it, right? Because album art seems equally as weird, off the walls, could be a mixed media of a lot of different things.
I'm curious about your take on this, because you worked at that job where you said three years, the first one that they weren't paying you initially and then they're paying you a little bit. And there's a big conversation around the industry even today, right? It's like, "Don't take unpaid internships, don't do work for less than what it costs."
And then at the same time, I hear you say about how much of a big impact that made on you. I mean, I think about some of the work that Dash has done over the years that has opened the doors to other projects. And some of those projects weren't the highest paying gigs, but we said yes to it because they seemed cool. I don't know, just any thoughts on that idea in the space on balancing stuff that you're into versus saying yes to some things?
Frame of Aaron’s work with New Belgium.
Aaron:
I think if there's a benefit to doing something for no money or low money, then I think it's worth it. But I think each person has to weigh those options. For me, I just knew working in music design is what I want to do and this is my foot in the door, so I'm going to do it and I'm going to work hard to do it.
I guess the point is I will do stuff for lower cost if there's a creative benefit or if it will help me learn something new etc.
I’ve had projects before where I’ve thought "I can't believe I'm doing this for this much for the budget, but I think I'm just going to, I'm trying to ignore that and just keep pushing through it because I think the end product's going to be cool." But again I think you have to weigh the pros and cons of each situation because just because you have a cool end product, that doesn't always mean more work or anything though right?
Mack:
I think you made a really good point, Aaron, that you have to judge it against what you're interested in, what you want to do. And something for someone might be too low, but for others it might be the right fit, because I've heard a little adage as well, it's like don't ever undercharge. But we get projects sometimes that look really cool. We want to say yes to it, but they have a third of the budget that we would normally take on. But if it looks cool, it's like, let's do it and let's make it happen. I think it's also a big difference though, in what you're out there to try to do. And I think one of the reasons I love the motion design industry so much is it's really full of passionate creatives.
I think at the end of the day, there is still this desire to make cool badass work. And not all the time some of these groups out there need a helping hand. And if you can do it creatively, I think that's great. So I think ultimately it just kind of depends on everybody kind of where they are in their life, what they want to do.
So, sorry, I didn't mean to hijack the story there for a bit, but it was really interesting. So you leave the record design stuff, you kind of see the writing on the wall, that might not be a long term endeavor, and you had just discovered (Shilo) and this amazing work they were doing the kind of mixed media stuff. And so at that point, you really didn't know too much about motion graphics or motion design itself as a field, correct?
Aaron:
Yeah, not a lot. I mean, maybe motion graphics was a term at that point, but I don't think I was too familiar with it. I guess around that time I was approached by somebody who knew this company that was looking for an art director. And so I interviewed there and I moved from the record label and I got a job at this other place and they were a parent company for a bunch of skateboard and youth lifestyle kind of brands within it. And so I was an art director there where I did snowboard graphics and apparel graphics. I did packaging for footwear and box design and stuff.
And that was also a really cool stepping stone I think for me, because again, I'm learning more about the print design stuff still, but it started to get bigger than just doing record packaging. I went to China to do press checks on snowboard graphics, I art directed national Ad campaigns. So I just learned I think my whole experience from college up through this job was just learning different things and they're all really interesting and fun. And maybe, I don't think I was thinking too much about the future really at this point. I was just kind of going along for the ride and everything was interesting. I was learning new stuff every day. But during this job we started creating more video content and stuff. And then I started getting back into using AfterEffects and then motion design. This is actually the period when I first noticed Shilo, but then a bunch of other motion design studios were kind of popping up.
So yeah, I started doing more After Effects stuff and kind of got back into it. And then during that time is when I, actually taking a step back, at the record label is where met one of the partners of my future company Legwork. Actually two of my partners. But I went to this other job and they went their own way and we kind of parted careers for a bit, but it was during this new job when we started talking again, and then we started talking about maybe starting a company.
Mack:
Oh, nice. Were you guys doing moonlighting on side projects together or was it always like, "We'd like to do that," and maybe this company Legwork, what it ended up becoming is how you could do that?
Aaron:
We probably spent six months to a year just planning it out, designing our logos and crafting our “brand”. We all kept our jobs while we planned it. We designed the initial Legwork logo and then we built our first website. We quit our jobs before we launched the website, And I don't know if we were doing any big projects at the time, I think we went cold turkey and quit our jobs and went right into Legwork. And for me it wasn't that big of a deal because I still wasn't making that much money, But my two partners left better paying jobs to start Legwork, so they had more at stake.
Mack:
You're like, "I'm already broke. Why not just keep doing this?"
Aaron:
I wasn't worried at all. So yeah, I kind of feel bad about that for them!
Frame for Aaron’s “Kiss my airs” campaign for Nike Toronto’s Air Max Day to celebrate 30 Years of Air Max .
Meryn:
Do you feel like y'all had a certain dynamic? To start a business with someone that takes a lot on both sides. Do you feel there was, I mean obviously y'all thought about it because there was six months leading up to it. Was there a lot of thought in terms of what Legwork would become in those early days? Or was it just like, "Let's jump and we'll see where we land?"
Aaron:
Yeah, that's a good question. I think I was idealistic about what it would become or what we wanted it to be. And I learned later, maybe nine years later, that if I was to start a business again, there are definitely things that maybe should have been different. But yeah I think the three of us had a good dynamic. One of the partners I was pretty good friends with because I worked with him probably for a year or so at the record label, and we all kind of ran in the same circles and had a lot of the same friends. The other one I also met at the record label, but he was just a freelance website designer that would do stuff for the record label so I didn't know him as well. But all of us came from the local music scene. And so we weren't the best of friends, but I think we were good enough friends and trusted each other enough to be comfortable with it.
But again, I think we were not thinking that far ahead. I didn't think, "Oh, what happens if you get in a fight with one of your business partners or something bad happens?" In my mind I was just thinking It was going to be a small studio where we had cool screen printed posters on the wall. I was just thinking more about what it was, where I was going to be sitting during the day. Being inspired by all my design books around me and stuff. I didn't really think about the business that much. I just thought we were going to create cool work all the time.
Mack:
Oh my gosh, that's so funny. I did the exact same thing, Aaron, when Cory and I started Dash, it was like, "Oh man, it'll be so rad. We can just hang out all day. We can make cool stuff."
We didn't talk about the fact that we'd be nitpicking each other's emails on how we write to clients. I mean, it’s just dumb shit like that the first year of any studio as you're working through the business stuff has got to be honestly some of the toughest.
Aaron:
Yeah. Was it just you two at first for a while?
Mack:
It was, we just had the two of us, so there was no third party to make a decision, although I guess Meryn kind of came in and is kind of making some decisions for us now, which has helped. Thank you, Meryn :)
Aaron:
Yeah. Well, so the three partners' situation was what it was and it was pretty good. And I think the three of us actually made sense because I was kind of coming from video and animation and illustration and also print design. But then the other partner was a website designer, and so he knew the website design and development world. And then the other partner had a business degree and he was like at the record label, he kind of managed the books and planned tours that kind of stuff. So he just kind of had more of the business mind. So we're like "Oh, this makes sense." But the crazy thing is one year into that structure, I think it was 2009, we brought on three additional partners.
Mack:
What was the impetus for that? Just cool people that you wanted to bring on?
Aaron:
We needed to fill out what we were doing with additional skill sets. One of our friends was a really good developer, so we brought him on and then we didn't really have a sales person, so we brought on this other guy to run sales. And then we needed another developer at the time that did a different type of development. So we had a front end developer and a back end developer.
“If This Then Domino’s” is a website that uses IFTTT technology that allows customers to automatically order Domino’s pizza every time a particular situation occurs.
Mack Garrison: Interesting. So the early days, you guys, what's really interesting to me is that even though it was kind of like you didn't have a long term plan, you did have a lot of really talented people and even as a small entity, you kind of had these different divisions of the company where kind of people were responsible for. And so how would it go? Did you guys develop processes to work together? Would each person go do their thing and bring information back to the table? Sales guy's like, "All right, I got us a project. Who wants to handle it?"
Aaron: When I think back on it, I was the only one who wasn't really from the website world. And so I think in a lot of ways I was just sitting there kind of doing my own thing and if something came up where we needed to do an animation or an illustration, that would be what I would do. I also was handling a lot of the company branding stuff, so I was just working on the visual side of the company and logos and that kind of stuff. But yes that’s essentially how it worked, but really the 6 of us each made up one part of what a full team on a project would be - so in those days we all kind of worked together on each project rather than one person doing a project and another person on a different project.
Mack:
Interesting. So the early days, everyone has their job, their niche, they bring their experience they have to the table. Were a lot of your clients in the books initially? Was it more kind of in the music space or that same kind of stuff that you had talked about? You were in the kind of album artwork, there was skate stuff, the sort of punk side of things. Was that still a lot of the work y'all were doing in the early days?
Aaron:
Yeah, kind of. So I left my job, the place was called Collective, but I left that job on really good terms. So I gave them two months' notice. I said, "I'm quitting, I'm going to start my own company." And they were super cool and supportive and they gave us work. They had stuff to do that they couldn't really do internally anyway, so they just gave that to us.
One of the brands was this old, I’m sure you've heard of Airwalk. They used to be a legit skateboard brand in the '80s and early ‘90s, but then they turned into kind of an “affordable” mainstream brand, So they brought us on for the brand relaunch website which was a really progressive website at the time. That was one thing about Legwork and Matt Wiggins, who was our developer/partner, he's like this genius developer. Okay, sorry, side note: I'm jumping back again here because this is right when the first iPhone came out…
And the iPhone killed Flash. So Matt, and all these guys came from the Flash development world and the iPhone basically didn't allow Flash, so it kind of killed, developers had to switch gears and start using HTML 5.
And so Matt was such a genius developer that he started figuring out how to do HTML 5 websites that felt like Flash. So we did the first Airwalk projects. And it was just really cool and experimental, we were winning awards for it, and then we also won an award for our own website.
I don't think awards really matter so much anymore, but maybe they do more so in the web world. I'm not even sure these days, but back then, winning those awards, we won at SXSW for our website and then the Airwalk site won maybe a Webby or FWA I think. And that actually got us quick name recognition in that world. So we're definitely known as a web company initially and I struggled a bit because I was from the animation and design side. And it took us a long time, I think to even be known as doing animation. That was kind of an interesting journey for me personally.
Mack:
Well, I can imagine, because as anyone knows who's run the studio, there's ebbs and flows on different types of work. So you know, you may find that you're a particular type of designer, you're getting a lot of type of work coming in, but then there's a pivot and then you're kind of like, "All right, how can I help?" And you're in this kind of space to give me more work, why everyone else is overloaded. And that's going to be a hard thing to kind of navigate. So when you guys, you won, so really the growth came from winning some of these awards, getting the recognition with them, landing some other jobs and then landing those bigger jobs got you more recognition and it kind of became more of a snowball effect on how stuff came in. Is that more or less how the growth happened?
Aaron:
Yeah, I think winning the SXSW award for our own website, I think within a year we had a rep for the studio, like an LA based rep. And so they immediately introduced us to bigger agencies. And then we started doing a lot of work just with bigger agencies, almost right off the bat.
Mack:
That's really fun. Well, especially, I know there's a lot of folks out there who talk about whether they want to be repped or is that a good thing or a bad thing. It sounds like for you all, that was a real big key in moving forward and taking on some bigger projects was the award and then getting representation. Do you think that's accurate?
Aaron:
Yeah, for sure. I think times are, I know it wasn't that long ago, but I think times were different in the industry then too though.
I think the industry was less saturated with small and mid-size companies back then too. So I think we were a bit of an anomaly because we did interactive and animation. So that was definitely unique for the time. I even think now it's a little unique and I feel like if I do ever start another studio, I would probably do that again.
Mack:
I think being, at least from my perspective, is a little bit shifted cause we are a general studio. And so I like the idea, I mean, we're still in the lens of just animation or live action, but we still, we're not just 2D, we do 3D, we do a bunch of things.
I think variety is important, honestly, I think what keeps animators on their toes, you talk about your partners having to learn like HTML 5, kind of pivoting completely and then it discovers a new way of doing things. I think that's how studios evolve and last is you have to mix it up a little bit
Aaron:
Yeah, I think you're totally right. Having those two different disciplines when we were slow and on one side we could make up for it on the other side of the company. But in terms of the motion stuff, it was a gradual growth. And we got bigger and bigger projects on that side. And then I think by the end, it's interesting, I talked to a lot of people, some people knew us only as an animation studio then.
Mack:
Huh. Interesting. So, I don't want to spoil anything from your talk that could be coming up.
Aaron:
I think I've already spoiled half of it.
Mack:
Well good. Well, this will just be an accent then to what's coming up. So Legwork continues to grow. You guys talked about the beginning that you really didn't have any kind of a long term plan. It was just like, "Oh, we'll do this. This is good. Oh we'll do six partners, this seems good," right? And you grow a little bit. Did people kind of come in and out for a bit at Legwork? Did some of those partners stay? Was it kind of fluid where folks were coming in and out of the studio for a bit?
Aaron:
In terms of partners, we were pretty much all there until 2016. Having six partners sounds insane to me now, but we did a really good job of working together for that amount of time, which is a pretty long time for six people to stay friends and business partners.
In the beginning we didn't really have any employees. We had a couple interns, maybe a year or two years in, they came on And our first intern became an employee and was with us for 8 or 9 years!
And it's funny, I think one of our selling points early on, and this is no offense to producers because I fully changed how I think about this over the years, but my partners were like, "We don't need producers, we're a small tight-knit team. We're all pretty senior level at this point and we can just do the work. We can talk directly to clients." And I actually think a lot of our clients liked that. And I think that was a bit of a selling point for us for a while. But as we got bigger and bigger, we brought on bigger and bigger projects we brought on producers. And I would never do that again, I value producers so much now. It's insane.
Mack:
Well as soon as you spend 75% of your day writing emails instead of working, you're like, "Wait a minute. What happened here?
Meryn:
And a level of objectiveness that's just like, it's really hard to separate yourself from the art or what you're making and that layer from the client to you, a little bit of protection from yourself.
Aaron:
Definitely. Even now, just working as an independent, I have the producer at my rep company and he does most of the corresponding work. We'll do meetings, creative meetings and stuff like that. But when I do a check-in, I'm like "Here's my deck, here's my stuff for the day" and he’ll send it over. Often when a producer is the middle-person, they're just passing an email over and then getting the feedback. And sometimes that can get muddy if the producer doesn't communicate it correctly. But it's been great Rob the EP. And I actually really like that process because I can stay kind of focused on just doing my work.
Mack:
Well, there's a lot more to talk about here, Aaron, but I think it leaves a lot for what's to come, the presentation. And I know Meryn and I both really enjoyed chatting with you today and getting to know a little bit of background. I'm super excited to be hanging at the Bash this year.
Aaron:
Awesome. Cool. Well, thank you both very much. Looking forward to meeting in person and I’ll talk to you soon.
Meryn:
Awesome. Thanks, Aaron.