Takeover Tuesday with Elizabeth Gu
An interview with Elizabeth Gu: is an illustrator and designer based in Houston, TX. With an interest in creating worlds suspended between fantasy and reality, she likes to relate these unseen, surreal worlds to the psyche and internal states of mind that are often difficult to express through words.
Interviewer: Bella Alfonsi
Read time: 5min
Bella:
Hi Elizabeth! Thanks for taking over this Tuesday with us. Can you please introduce yourself?
Elizabeth:
First of all, thank you so much for having me! I'm so excited to contribute to this series.
My name is Elizabeth and I’m a designer and illustrator based in Houston, TX. I initially studied civil engineering before taking what feels like a tremendous leap into the design world. At the time, I was working as Art Director at my school’s daily news publication and pretty much decided to take my interests in illustration and design more seriously. After shifting gears, I got my first design internship with Pixel Park. Interning there was super formative to my artistic growth, but also more profoundly - my sense of community in the motion design industry. Shout out to the Pixel Park family, love you guys! <3
Since then I’ve found myself freelancing on projects in graphic design, editorial illustration, and motion design. I feel very fortunate to have landed these opportunities and I’m just excited to continue learning more.
Bella:
What sparked your interest in illustration/design?
Elizabeth:
I spent a lot of time drawing, painting, and dabbling in arts and crafts as a child. So I think the interest has always inherently been there in some way. When I got a bit older I started messing around with digital art and using an Intuos tablet for the first time. Making the switch from traditional to digital was absolutely mind boggling while opening up this whole new world.
As a Chinese-American, I grew up with certain expectations about what my job should look like and the reality of adulthood made anything artistic feel like a non-option. However, when I was studying at the University of Southern California, I came across their animation program and ended up completing an animation minor. So as an adult, I was able to rediscover what illustration and design meant to me while also seeing how art could be applied in the real world.
Illustration titles “Dreamless Slumber.”
Bella:
What inspires you and your work?
Elizabeth:
I love themes of magical realism and surrealism. Both visually and conceptually - things like seeing the ordinary as opportunities for magical moments. As a child, I was enchanted by the kodamas in Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke. Or the soot sprites hidden away in the old countryside house in My Neighbor Totoro. Ideas that were saying if you looked closely enough, you would find something sacred and magical. Perspectives of reality can bend.
Also as a general rule of thumb, I try to stay open minded to new experiences. This keeps the flow of inspiration in motion for myself. Seeing new places, people, or perhaps indulging in new food from different cultures. Anything to expand and change your brain is so invaluable for creatives.
Bella:
What advice do you have for artists trying to find clients?
Elizabeth:
I would say to value every interaction you have within the community. Don’t expect anything to be a one-off, and put in energy to stay connected with the people it comes naturally with. Not only do you end up learning a lot from them, but it’s also an immense mood booster when you’re feeling lonely on your freelancer island.
Speaking more strategically, Motion Hatch is a wonderful resource that goes more deeply into the freelance game. Hayley Akins talks about how to build your online presence, warm up to clients, but also how to use your pre-existing network (work smarter not harder). I know for me specifically, I learned a lot about how to phrase cold emails but she has since put out a ton of useful content specific to the motion design industry. Definitely worth checking out!
Frame from one of Elizabeth’s Social Media Explorations for Pixel Park.
Bella:
A lot of your work has a deeper meaning and seems to be expressive of something you've been through. How has illustration helped you through tough times?
Elizabeth:
I’ve always been drawn to illustration that operates like visual essay. Subconsciously, I want my own work to have layers of story that might be interpreted in different nuanced ways. I think it's helped me in the sense that it doesn't require verbal explanation and the healing is in the process. It's like a meditation through the act of creation.
Granted, sometimes my pieces can feel so obviously diaristic I want to take them back because it’s too embarrassing! But then you realize everyone is the same way, stumbling in their vulnerability. So better to have shared than to hide away. It's kind of what art is for - to share and discover that we're all the same in a lot of ways.
Bella:
I love the colors and textures you use. What's your process of finding a color palette for a project like?
Elizabeth:
Thank you! I think working with colors might be my favorite part of the whole process. I usually gravitate towards purpley blues and love pairing that base with yellow or pink accents. Anything that gives off a moonlit nocturnal scene I’m pretty much always partial to. With specific projects where this isn’t the case, I usually first identify the tone and mood. Then I play around with colors that match and I take time to assess my reaction. I try to find ways to use my favorite ones into projects, but I also like the challenge of an unfamiliar color that isn’t in my typical wheelhouse. I’m not a color expert, but the process is often an intuitive back and forth more than anything else.
Bella:
What advice would you give to someone who is "trying to find their style"?
Elizabeth:
I would say a big part of it is honoring your interests and being willing to explore them in your work. I still find this difficult myself when certain visual styles are in vogue and seem to dominate the “look” of the industry. But personal style is ever-changing and takes a bit of time to develop, so it's important to keep creating and investigating what you like. It helps me to see it as creative playtime rather than the pressure of finding your style as soon as possible.
Frame from “Water Memory.”
Bella:
Do you have a dream project or client you'd like to work with?
Elizabeth:
I always have a hard time answering this! I think there are so many cool projects going on, both big and small. I would say story-based concepts that are emotionally explorative in nature would be such a treat to contribute to!
I’ve recently been enjoying sci-fi content like Scavengers Reign which has such immersive alien world visuals. Bladerunner 2049 is another recent watch of mine and I can’t get the striking dystopian set design out of my head. Paired with concepts about the human condition, our relationship with technology, environmentalism, etc. I find any project that touches on these themes so compelling.
Studio-wise, I have also adored Chromosphere’s work. In particular, the short film “My Moon” which explores romantic versus practical love. This is represented in a love triangle with the Earth, Moon, and Sun. The Sun provides light, energy, and color to the Earth while the Moon is less practical. I’m such a sucker for symbolism in the form of celestial bodies!
Bella:
Is there anything you've learned as an artist thus far that you wish you knew when you first started?
Elizabeth:
I wish I understood sooner that the only person I was competing with was myself. As someone who came from engineering where a lot of processes can be more linear with exact steps - I started creating this unnatural checklist fueled by anxiety and comparison. I remember telling myself I needed to work with certain clients by a certain age which was absolutely ridiculous and unfair to myself when I needed the time to switch industries and gain footing. Obviously there are crucial beats to hit such as developing your portfolio, but in large it’s much healthier to be patient with yourself and let your circumstances naturally guide you.
“The Big Role Nostalgia Plays in My Life”
Bella:
Anything exciting coming up that you're excited to share?
Elizabeth:
Client-wise, I designed a piece for Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina that’s out now! Many thanks to Kyle Griffin who animated and also played a major role with design concepts.
And for personal work, I would be remiss to not mention My Shadow which was designed under my mentorship with Dash. Shout out to Meryn Hayes and Meg Snyder for supporting my ideas and offering their sage advice along the way! It deals with themes of the inner child and rekindling a sense of wonder and curiosity.
“My Shadow” Based on a personal dream where a young girl is gifted her shadow.
Meet the speakers: Kevin Dart
An interview with Kevin Dart: CEO and Founder of Chromosphere, a boutique animation studio in Los Angeles that specializes in design and creative storytelling with technology.
Q&A hosted by Mack Garrison.
Read time: 15min
Mack:
Hey Kevin. Nice to meet you.
Kevin:
Nice to meet you too!
Mack:
I'd love to know a little bit of backstory. How'd you get into motion design? What was the draw to the animation field, and then maybe a little bit of that path that led you ultimately to starting Chromosphere?
Kevin:
I switched careers after graduating from college, because I originally wanted to work in video games. I went to a school called DigiPen up in Redmond, Washington, originally in the engineering program, because I wanted to program games. I think by the third semester, I was in calculus three or something and I was just like, this just isn't what I wanted. It was too heavy on physics and stuff for me, but I always had a real passion for art and design too. I actually was more interested in graphic design, especially in high school. I always drew, but I also spent a lot of time designing websites. I was really into just the worldwide web of the nineties when I was growing up. I taught myself HTML and Perl and various types of web coding languages, so I could build my own websites.
That was my real intro into art, was through web design and graphic design. When I was having that third semester crisis, there were only two programs at DigiPen; engineering and animation. I was like, "Well." I always loved animation too. Maybe I could get into it. I threw together a portfolio and they let me switch over to the other program, and then I did that. It was mainly focused on 3D art, learning how to model and animate in 3D.
I graduated with a degree in 3D animation and then went to work in video games as a character modeler. I did that for almost three years. And then I had another existential crisis... I think I had some awakening or something, when I saw Samurai Jack. I think that actually came out when I was in school, but it sparked something inside of me where I was like, "I think maybe I actually do want to work in animation." Something about it was just so ... it was an epiphany for me. That bug never left me and it kept growing.
At some point, I made a trip down to LA and showed my portfolio around at an event I was at, and met this amazing recruiter from Disney named Dawn Rivera, who's still working at a lot of different studios today. She was like, "I think you really might have something here." She set up this whirlwind bunch of meetings for me at some studios around LA, and none of them went anywhere, but being as naive as I was, my first time in LA and going to these big studios, I was like, "Well, I guess I'm in."
Meet Kevin Dart!
Mack:
Ha - Nice.
Kevin:
I pretty much quit my job a few weeks after that, thinking I was just going to go start working in animation and that wasn't what happened. I think I ended up being unemployed for two or more years or something, trying to figure out how to get into animation and realizing that having a meeting at a studio didn't mean that I was actually going to have a job there.
Mack:
How old were you at this time? I'm assuming this is Samurai Jack, so I'm thinking early 2000s, something like that.
Kevin:
Yeah. I was in my twenties, early twenties. I was probably more naive than I should have been at that age. I think at the time also, there was a really huge geographical disconnect between animation and being centralized in LA. It felt to me, being in the Seattle area, it was basically impossible. There were just no options to work in animation. At some point, I finally made the move down to LA, I think it was 2007 or so, which was actually spurred because my at the time, girlfriend and eventually wife, were long distance dating. She was living in LA and I was up in Seattle. It provided the impetus I needed to finally move down to LA. Then once I got down here, things finally started connecting because I was in the area and I was able to actually go to studios I was talking to and meet with them.
One of the first things that happened was, I got an internship at Pixar in the visual development program in 2007, which was really cool and surreal, because that was a place I'd wanted to work at for such a long time. Then I got to just spend a summer there, learning from all these guys that I only knew from captions and art of books and stuff. Then weirdly from there, I started working a lot for European studios like Cartoon Network Europe.
Mack:
Interesting. Just committing to being there, you were able to meet with some of these studios, you got in at Pixar. The internship itself for the digital development stuff, was that a one-year gig or just a few months?
Kevin:
Yeah. It was just a summer internship. It was weird because I was a lot older than everyone else in the program. Everyone else was still, they were coming out of school or were still in school. I had been out for a few years at that point, but everyone accepted me. It was really nice, nice little camaraderie, but I did feel strange about it. They had us do our own individual projects, where we would get mentored by people. I was mentored by Harley Jessup, who was already one of my idols from just seeing his work on Monsters Inc and stuff like that.
Also just, he's got an incredible eye for graphic design, so we really matched up perfectly. I think he really recognized that I had that interest and was able to guide me on that, and just one of the kindest, most open people ever. It was just a really cool experience to be able to work with him and have that role model, someone who's so open and so interested in art in general, and particularly graphic design, to just be really encouraging and inspiring.
Frame from “Forms in Nature.”
Mack:
Especially given his ... I'm just looking at his IMDB here Ratatouille, Cars 2, Presto, the Good Dinosaur, Coco, and then the upcoming feature Elio. Monsters Inc, of course. What an immense source of talent, and you're just a sponge absorbing all of it. What an amazing opportunity.
Kevin:
I'm pretty sure it was Harley who encouraged me to do this, was to start gathering photo references and just putting it up all around me. That was something that just really stuck with me. I don't always do it actually physically printing stuff out and hanging it up anymore, but I make a big point of always starting every project with a lot of research and gathering a reference and creating boards that we can look at and just be like, "Oh yeah, this is where we're going," and just relying a lot on that research process that he talked about. He was also really big on... I don't feel like I needed a lot of prodding to also be into this, but I think he encouraged me to really focus on presentation.
That's something that's really stuck with me too. The way that you present your work a lot of times, is just as important as the work itself. If you put something out there and you're like, "Whatever," you just throw it out and it's got some messy type or it's printed badly or whatever, it really betrays the quality of what you were trying to do. That's really bled into everything that we do. I spend so much time curating our website, for instance, for Chromosphere, really getting everything just right. I want our work to be presented in a way that I feel is fitting of what we've done.
Mack:
After the internship you said you went to Cartoon Network?
Kevin:
Yeah. I just went back to LA after the internship and then started getting work from Europe, from Cartoon Network Europe first, from a director named Pete Candeland, who was there. And Pete Candeland directed all the early Gorillaz music videos, and those Rock Band promos, the Beatles Rock Band promo and that stuff. He was very iconic in that. Pete, at the time, was working at Cartoon Network Europe, developing a pilot for a show, and they asked me to do some background designs for it.
Then weirdly, they also had hired at Cartoon Network Europe, this French compositor named Stéphane Coëdel, who ended up being pretty much my most long-term conspirator and collaborator in animation. When I started on the project, they told me, "There's this French guy here. He really likes your work and he's wondering if you would be interested in collaborating on these title cards," because they were making title cards for the show and they wanted to do this old monster movie type look to the cards. They asked me to paint up a card like that. I was like, "Okay." I did something where it was a dock scene with these squid tentacles coming out or something and some horror movie type font on it. I sent it off, and then a few days later they sent me back a movie that Stéphane had done, where he had ... I was completely unfamiliar at the time with After Effects as an animation tool, and what you could really do with it. They sent me back this movie and he had taken all the layers from my Photoshop file and animated all these tentacles moving around and appeared in smoke and all this stuff. There was a little parallaxing. The whole thing just came to life and my mind just exploded. I was like, "What?" It felt like he had taken this little painting I had done and just brought it to life, created a whole world out of it. That just planted this whole seed of, "I want to do more of this." I love this process of painting and then working with someone to bring it all to life in a way that I'd never really considered.
I still thought of animation as just drawing in frames. I didn't think there was a whole other level to what could be done with 2D animation and compositing. It just really opened my mind to that. Then the next job I did was also with Pete, but he had gone back to Passion Pictures and he was directing a promo for the 2008 Beijing Olympics on BBC. For that one, they asked me to come over to London and just work on it for a month or so, doing a color script and background paintings for it.
One of the funniest experiences was they just threw me in the room. At the time, Passion was in this ... I don't want to say dilapidated, but it was a very old building with lots of breezes coming through. It was freezing in there, and the floors were all creaky and there was just this room and they're like, "All right, here's the guys. This is so-and-so and this person, and here's a computer for you to work at," and I was like, "Okay." I just started working and there was this guy that they had all introduced to me as Bob, sitting over here. I was like, "Okay, hey Bob." He was a friendly Canadian guy, and it wasn't until a week later where I think I was about to go home for the night and I was going over to look at what he was doing, and he was animating on paper, flipping these pages, and I was looking at it and I was like, "Wow."
First of all, I'd never been around people animating traditionally. All of my training had been completely digital and all of my experiences were totally digital. I was looking at it and I was like, "Wow man, that's really good. It reminds me of Robert Valley's stuff," and he was like, "I am Robert Valley." I was like, "What? They've just been calling you Bob this whole time." I didn't know.
Then you start finding out who everyone else in the room is, and it's like, "Okay, this is the whole team of people who've done all these Gorillaz videos and all this stuff, and why am I here?" I didn't feel like I deserved to be there, but I still tried to soak it all up as much as possible. I remember one time, Pete invited me to sit in on a review session where he was going through all the latest animation and seeing how it was all coming together.
That was such a momentous thing for me, that this person would just bring me into that process and let me observe how it was being done. I was like, "Wow, I want to do this. I want to do this exact same thing. I want to make animation this way." I just wasn't aware of other people who were doing it at that time. I haven't really traced the history, but I feel like Pete and those guys on the Gorillaz videos were one of the main originators of the whole After Effects and motion graphic style that exploded in the years after that.
I just loved the process, just getting in there and just working with all of the elements. It was also raw and immediate. The person who's animating it is just in this room over here. Then the guys, they scan it, this guy's compositing it. I would see at Cartoon Network in LA years later, the way they did animation was: you have a pre-production team in LA who does a lot of designs and storyboards, and then it gets sent off to Korea or somewhere else, and then a few weeks later you get back a cartoon.
This process was just so opposite of that. It was a team of ... it felt like maybe it couldn't have been more than 12 or 15 people coming together and using their resources to, from start to finish, create this incredible piece of animation. I think I modeled everything I've done with Chromosphere and everything off of that experience, small teams, everyone knows, everyone's really good at what they're doing and really good at improvising and coming up with quick solutions and just working together to make stuff in a very quick and almost improvisational way.
That whole period from 2007 to 2009 was really characterized by these very life-shaping experiences like that. Then when I came back to LA, I did end up getting a job doing background painting at Cartoon Network, on a show that Genndy Tartakovsky was making. Genndy's the guy that did Samurai Jack.
“June” is the story of a woman reconnected by ridesharing
Mack:
Yeah, phenomenal.
Kevin:
It was like jumping from one person I idolized to the next. If I could organize all of my inspirations in some way, Genndy and Samurai Jack, and all that stuff would just be so far at the top of what I wanted to do. Then Scott Wills, who was the art director for Samurai Jack was also on this show.
It was basically me, Scott, and one other background painter, who was Kristen Lester, who's actually now a director at Pixar. It was just another crazy experience where it's like this guy who's an industry veteran, has these two complete noobs that he's taken under his wing, to teach how to background paint. Scott is a traditional painter by trade. That's how he learned. He started on Ren and Stimpy. His story's pretty crazy because one of his first gigs was blowing up album covers for Tower Records stores in LA during the eighties, because they didn't have the technology to just scan stuff and blow it up, so they would hire him to just paint a bigger version of an album cover.
He learned a lot of painting through that, and then got hired on Ren and Stimpy and did background painting for that, and eventually found his way to working with Genndy on Samurai Jack.
What I was really astonished by, was that it seemed like he hadn't skipped a beat from being a very accomplished traditional painter to just taking all of his knowledge and translating it effortlessly into digital painting. We were painting digitally on this show. He was doing it just how he would do his regular painting, no problem. It wasn't like he was like, "Ah, I'm not going to work on computers, these newfangled machines," or whatever. He just did it. Then he showed us exactly how he did it. He broke down the process into this very understandable thing, where even Kristen and I, just being complete novices at this, could understand how he was approaching each of these paintings.
It was just a very ordered, understandable and reproducible way of working, that I still paint that way now. It was just such a great way of starting with blocking in simple shapes and then you add light and then shadow. He would group all of his layers in a very organized way, like someone who'd been painting digitally all their life. He just had complete mastery over how to work in Photoshop in a way that was just very, very thorough and very organized. I think for me, it was especially cool because at the time I had no real process to speak of.
I felt like every time I would paint something, it was a totally new approach, that I was just fumbling through to get to some result, hopefully. Then this was the most incredible tool set because it was like, "Well, now I can always make something because I have this process I can rely on. I don't have to make a bunch of mistakes and then end up here. Hopefully I can follow these steps so I'll always end up having a painting at the end." It was ideal. It was an ideal process, especially for that job where you do have to crank through a certain number of paintings every week.
It was a whirlwind at that point, because I sort of started two different careers, where I was working at studios in LA doing either vis dev or art directing stuff, but I was also trying to keep alive the dream of what I had seen Pete doing in London in 2008, making short films and doing it in this way that I was really inspired by. Stéphane and I, at that point, we'd been making films together. We were doing some of the early Yuki 7 stuff at the time, and then eventually started getting gigs co-directing these things. We did this little film for Persol sunglasses, but all of this was happening simultaneously. I was always working two or three jobs at the same time for several years.
Frame from Yuki 7.
It went on that way til 2014 or something. I think my wife and I were having dinner one night and I was just like, "I only want to be doing this one part. I want to be doing all the fun films and stuff, and I want a studio where I can" It just felt like I was in this place where I had this amazing fortune of learning all these different things. I learned how TV animation worked. I'd learned how feature animation worked. I learned how commercial animation worked. I'd even learned how video games worked, how they were made.
I was like, "I want to take all of this," Take all my friends I've met, these incredible people like Stéph or the various artists I was working with at Cartoon Network, like Jasmin Lai or Tiffany Ford, all these people, and form some place where we could do projects that just didn't follow any way that any of the studios in LA were doing things. I loved all the shows that I worked on, like Steven Universe, or Power Puff Girls, or Peabody and Sherman or whatever, but I didn't want to do that process. I wanted to be in that situation, what I had seen Pete doing, where it's a small team of people just creating something really cool together.
Mack:
What was the next step of, "I want to do this, so I'm just going to start a studio."
Kevin:
Luckily, my wife Elizabeth Ito (Creator of City of Ghosts) was just really supportive. We talked to our therapist about it too. It was a big topic. It was a huge decision. It felt like I'm talking about basically just leaving this industry that I worked so hard for so many years to get into, to just strike out on my own now. I think something I was struggling with a lot of the time was, all I ever wanted, if I rewound 10 years ago or so, was to work with all of these people that I've now worked with. Now that I've done it, I feel like maybe that's not all I want. Maybe I want to go a whole step further and build something on my own that was just different from everything else, in some way that was hard to define at the time.
I just started taking the steps really slowly, first just registering a business name. At first, it was just a small freelance business, where I felt like a snake oil salesman type guy for the first two years. Basically, what happened is anytime someone would write to me saying, "Oh, are you available for work on this thing?," I'd be like, "Yeah, maybe, but the thing is I'm actually running a studio now," and I had no studio. I was like, "I have a studio, so maybe." If they were looking for an art director for a movie, I'd be like, "Well, would you be interested in talking about hiring my studio to do all of the vis dev for your movie?," or whatever. Most people were like, "Is this a real thing? Can you actually do that?"
Air BnB - The Good Guest
Mack:
Like… "Can you deliver on this? Who are you?" haha.
Kevin:
Yeah. Most people just wouldn't respond because it felt like a crazy proposition to them. One of them actually bit, and it was actually for a movie that just came out recently, but this was back in 2014. There's a movie that came out recently called Paws of Fury. I pitched the directors of the movie the idea of hiring my fledgling studio to do the visual development for the movie, and they agreed. We worked on it for maybe nine months to a year or so. I just built a little team, just all freelance, of my friends, to create all the designs for this movie.
I just did that on the side as I was also still working full-time as an art director at Dreamworks. Basically, that created enough of a seed fund for me to take the next step with Chromosphere, with renting an office space. I built up enough where I could rent an office space for a year, so if we just go under and I make no money whatsoever, I've got enough in the bank to pay for the office for at least a year.
We also got a job designing a little short segment (at the time) for the new Cosmos series. It was a three to four minute little short film about ancient Mesopotamia and how they basically went away because of drought.
Frame from the Ancient Mesopotamia shot on the Cosmos.
Mack:
What's really funny to me about this is even just how cavalier you were about how it came up, right? You're pitching your studio and you're not getting responses or anything, and then Paws of Fury is like, "Yeah, sure." Did it catch you off-guard too, since that was the first one where you just like, "Oh, shit. Okay, cool. I guess this is happening."?
Kevin:
Yeah. I was just completely just winging it. I didn't know. I don't think I ever even put together a full budget for it or anything. They wanted to know how much it would cost per week, and I just asked everyone what their rates were and added it up, and then added 10% to that or something, and was like, "I guess this is our rate," and they're like, "Okay." Then that 10% over the course of a year, added up to enough for me to rent a studio, so I was pretty proud of that.
Mack:
Amazing!
Kevin:
We don't do stuff that way anymore. It's been a process like that. There was no one around to show me how to do any of that part of it, any of the business management. That was one aspect where I never had a role model, for better or for worse, who could bring me in and show me, "This is how you run a studio."That was just completely trial and error. It feels like to this day, it's still trial and error sometimes. You still keep finding these situations where it's like, "Wow, we've never done that before." These things just come up. It just gets more and more complicated as you get into it, from running just a small design production, to working on a Netflix series or whatever it is. Things just get a lot more complicated. We try to ask questions and we make a lot of mistakes. I don't know. We're still going somehow.
Mack:
You got Chromosphere. It launches. Was there much of a plan with it initially? Had you given that much thought? Or was it still just seeing what developed ultimately?
Kevin:
That period was really tough. There were a bunch of people I called up for advice around that time. I remember one of them was Ken Duncan, who's a veteran Disney animator, who has his own studio in Pasadena called Duncan Studios. I guess I shouldn't have said there were no role models, because just not where I was actually working with them and day-to-day seeing what was happening, but Ken was very open. We went to lunch and he told me about his experiences and was very clear. I just had lunch with them a few weeks back and caught up again, because we've kept in touch over the years. And I was like, "Man, some of the stuff you told me at that first lunch we had, I still think about it all the time."
It was just things like, "What are you going to do if it gets down to it where you just can't pay the bills or something?" I was like, "I don't really know." He was like, "I've been through some hard times." He told me that he started a studio in 2007 right before the big financial crisis. Suddenly, everything was in turmoil and he was like, "It was pretty dark." He was like, "It's a whole different world, having that responsibility on your shoulders."
I also met up with Chris Prynoski and Ben Kalina from Titmouse, and they told me their experiences. I think the main thing I was asking them was, "How do you know when it's real?" From the point where you have an idea to start a studio and even when you rent a place, how do you know it's finally going to just keep going?" They were like, "I don't know." They just had that look in their eyes that now I recognize. Every year I'm so thankful that it's still going. They were making a thing of it that I've been a full-time employee of Chromosphere since 2016. It's my main thing. I don't have to do anything else. I never thought that would be a reality.
Mack:
I think it just shows that maybe we're all in it together, but we're also trying to work it out ourselves.
Kevin:
It was also funny about catching up with Ken Duncan again. We've talked twice I think, during the pandemic. He was like, "Remember when I told you about how stuff gets crazy?," and I was like, "Yeah," because now we're both in it simultaneously. A lot of people I talked to at big studios seem like they've moved past it, but running a small studio through the pandemic was ... it got hairy. I felt like I experienced what Ken had warned me was going to happen at some point. Our entire business model just basically completely changed during the pandemic, because so many TV productions shut down and TV work had become a real backbone of our studio leading up to the pandemic.
We finished up the shows we were working on before the Pandemic in the first six to nine months or whatever, and then never got another TV show after that. I kept thinking it was just going to come back, and it just never did. We had to pivot completely, 180 degrees, to just all this other stuff that we're doing now, which has been really fun and everything, but there were those moments where I was like, "I don't know what we're going to do." I felt like I was flying an airplane where you see the fuel running out and you see the ground approaching and you're just like, "I don't know if we're going to make it."
Mack:
What did you do?
Kevin:
We looked at everything we possibly could. We called up everyone we'd ever worked with. The things that came out of it that were real savior moments for us, were starting to work with Unreal and Epic. We started applying for and getting these mega grants from them to do work in real time. We started creating short films with the Unreal Engine, which started to financially support us for a good while, and then just started picking up any work we could. It was doing some animations for social media, doing some 3D model designs for this game or whatever. There's been no pattern to it, but also it's been all good. It's all been very fun, smaller stuff, documentary animation, just things like that. We still do development work for some people, but it's primarily been the Unreal stuff, and then pairing that with just adding up all these small projects to make up the rest of it, essentially.
Frame from Mall Stories - a documentary style short.
Mack:
Well, it's interesting because I remember following y'all's work when it first started coming out because it looked really good. I will say that it feels like you've got way more range now, and maybe than you ever had before, just through the experience of doing all these different things. It has to make you a bit excited about the future, because I'm sure when you started the company, you had this vision of this little niche that you were going to fill. It's blossomed into becoming more than that. I'd love to hear some of your ideas on where are you guys now, staff wise, what size are you and have you thought, I don't know, what's next for Chromosphere as we look ahead over the next 10 years or so?
Kevin:
We're a lot smaller now. Before the Pandemic, I think we were around 30 or so, and now we're around 10 or 12 most of the time. The studio rebalanced itself, because we got a lot bigger, because we had had a huge design team to work on all the shows that we were doing. Now, it's this very small team, but we have a lead in every area we need, for 3D, or animation, or design or whatever. It's funny. It feels like just back to the start again. In some ways it's a comfortable spot for me to be in, because it is like I've been through this before. I remember when we first started the studio and it was just a couple of us and we were just trying out new stuff.
In a lot of ways, the stuff that we're doing in Unreal feels like that moment when I first saw Stéphane comp that little poster for me a long time ago. It's this whole new way of working that I've gotten so excited about, just creating things in real time and being really experimental with it. It's already led to new stuff. We did the opening titles for the Beavis and Butt-head movie that came out last year. We did that all in Unreal.
Mack:
I had no idea.
Kevin:
We never would've known that if we hadn't gotten into this situation in the pandemic and found our way to Unreal, and then this strange job comes up out of nowhere and we're like, "We could do that. We know Unreal." We're pushing really hard into more of our original projects. We're pushing hard into educational based projects. We've started applying for grants, like federal grants and educational space for projects we're developing. We've learned a lot about that during the pandemic too. We're working with educators and people to figure out how we can use art, just for better purposes.
It's become a huge passion of ours in the studio. Everyone feels very strongly about it. We want to find a way to use what we're doing for education in some way. We've made that a big initiative at the studio. We're just exploring everything. We're looking at creating 3D assets to sell in the Unreal marketplace, so other people can build things with our stuff. It's honestly just super fun. It's so new again, which is just great. We never wanted to get to a place where we're just a factory, just churning things out and anything like that. All these circumstances have forced us into a place where everything is just new again.
Mack:
Kevin, this was fantastic, and super excited about your talk this summer. Have a good weekend, and we'll be in touch soon..
Kevin:
Yeah, you too. See you guys.
Takeover Tuesday with Dylan Casano
An interview with Dylan Casano: a motion designer/illustrator from Oakland, California who has over 8 years experience in animation specializing in 2D After Effects Animation, including motion graphics, character animation, and compositing.
Interviewer: Bella Alfonsi.
Read time: 5min
Bella:
Hi Dylan! I'll never stop saying it, your Earth Day 2020 animation is glorious and one of my favorites of all time. But for those who are unfamiliar with you/your work, please introduce yourself!
Dylan:
Haha, thank you! I'm a human 2D Animator and Designer currently based in LA! My personal work tends to be colorful and graphic, and I'm usually breathing life into something that shouldn't be alive, like a taco, a bra, or the Earth.
I think putting sad faces on random inanimate items is hilarious, and you can't tell me any different.
I'm always trying to think of new ways to use After Effects in funky ways to get new looks! I believe every kind of illustration style can be animated, just comes down to how you do it, and how much sleep you want.
I'm primarily an After Effects Animator, with a propensity for adding character to things. I've been picking up Cel animation in the last 6 years because drawing can just make characters waaaay more expressive. Through a Mograph Mentor course with Henrique Barone, I discovered that Cel is very similar to how you would animate something in After Effects, but you’re just drawing it—a lot.
Bella:
How did you find yourself in the motion design world?
Kyle:
I went to school for Graphic Design for way too long and the most valuable thing I learned was that I’m not very good at Graphic Design. Animation has always come easier for me, and I'm a big nerd about it, but in my school there were no Motion Design classes. “Mograph” was barely a thing in schools at my time.
When I was looking for work with my fresh GD degree (Stands for both Graphic Design and Gol’ Dern), I came across a cool Creative/Branding Studio in Berkeley, California who was looking for a flash animation intern. I knew flash from my “Newgrounds.com” days (if you know what I'm talking about then your back probably hurts rn) so I took it on! After I finished the flash stuff, I was moved onto some After Effects projects which I learned as I went. They liked what I did, and I was hired as a Motion Designer.
After 4 years (to the day!) I broke from that Full Time nest to spread my wings in the Freelance world, a phase that would be pretty short lived because of the ever-present and ever-tempting long-term Tech contracts that would beckon me. After a few stints at some beefy internet companies, I decided to venture to the Mograph wilds of Los Angeles to work with We Are Royale!
Shot from Dylan’s reel.
Bella:
The behind the scenes content you share is super interesting and helpful to see as a fellow artist. Have you ever considered creating a class/being a teacher to share even more of your knowledge?
Dylan:
Thank you! I've always strived to make "Behind the Scenes" content both informational as well as entertaining. Sometimes the BTS is more interesting than the piece itself, and the animation process is very complex and really deserves some extra love.
I absolutely LOVE the BTS breakdowns made by Stéphane Coëdel and Chromosphere (look them up!). Their breakdowns always seemed to go further than a lot of the BTS content I saw out there at the time, they would stop and start the animation, break it down layer by layer, and then use fun sound effects and music to bring the whole thing home. I took a few pages from their books.
In addition to BTS content, I've spent some time teaching a Workshop or two at my alma mater and loved it! I definitely see teaching in my future in some capacity. I would absolutely love to teach an online class if there's enough interest out there.
Bella:
As someone with over 8 years of experience in the industry, how do you think it's changed since you first started? Is there anything you're excited or worried about?
Dylan:
Oh yeah, things are always changing! When I was in school Motion Graphics wasn't even a thing; there was Animation, and there was Graphic Design— they are both very different from Motion Graphics. There may have been some private art schools somewhere that had motion graphics classes but for the most part, I wasn’t aware of it existing in the US education system at the time. Now, Motion Graphics is straight up taught in school, which blows my mind!
The ‘Elder’ generation of Mograph (*cries a little*) used to come from various backgrounds like film, design, or even architecture—so it was easy to meet people who had a good general knowledge of all Mograph trades and beyond. Now that it’s been integrated into the school systems, I’ve noticed a lot more specialized (and crazy talented) people, which definitely changes the vibe a lot.
As far as my fears for the future go—I share, with the rest of the art world, the hesitation about the integration of A.I. art into the field. I’m not afraid that it will take our jobs, but I do worry that the lines between Human created and A.I. created art will blur, and integrity amongst artists will be compromized. It is a dazzling tool, however, and I know we will find great uses for it.
“Workout” from Dylan’s personal explorations.
Bella:
What's it like working with We Are Royale? What does being the lead animator/designer entail?
Dylan:
At WAR we do things a little differently. Typically, a Lead Animator/Designer would find themselves mostly delegating and managing people. Because of WAR’s light staff footprint, and our passion for the work, the Leads are still “on-the-box” as it were, typically before the project has even started. We “Lead the Creative '' as our bossboss Brien Holman says, and then we disseminate this special knowledge or technique amongst the rest of the team as the project nears production.
Management was a natural step forward for me at this point in my career, but I just love animating so gol’ dern much that I couldn’t give up being an individual contributor—so I do both.
On bigger projects, I’m definitely finding myself delegating more than animating—but for the most part I straddle the line between Senior animator and management. I learned the hard way that delegating assignments and Animating/Designing are two distinct and very complete jobs, and you can’t do them together very effectively. The lovely people at WAR help me walk that line and help me pick up the slack where needed.
Bella:
When in a creative rut, do you find it helps to step away from what you're working on? Where do you find inspiration?
Dylan:
When I’m in a rut, I find a few things very helpful
1. Just get your first idea on paper, you overachiever, you. Got an idea that you hate because it’s “too basic” or “too obvious” and you can’t think of anything else? Or maybe you don’t have any ideas beyond what was already provided for you? I find it most helpful to JUST DO THE MOST OBVIOUS THING very quickly. Just do it, don’t overthink it. Feel free to keep thinking of ideas, obviously, but your brain just needs some stimulation. Get that idea down on the screen, there ain’t no shame in using your ol’ standby tricks of the trade. Then look at what you got, now tweak it. Still hate it? Please refer to #2.
2. Walk the heck away. Get some water, take a walk, or work on a different aspect of the assignment. Just do something else for a while—ideally with enough time to kinda forget what your art looks like. When I return to a piece after some good time, I definitely have a very immediate reaction, and my first urge gives me a pretty good idea what needs to change/improve; or at the very least, I hate it still and probably need to start over.
3. "Faked-it-til-you-make-ed”. If none of that has worked, boy oh boy, you must be pretty stressed, huh? Well, tough, you’re a hack and you just "faked-it-til-you-make-ed” your little heart out your whole career. Congratulations for tricking literally everyone, everywhere, simultaneously into trusting you. What a mess—your parents were right—wait until your boss finds out you have as much skill as a dressed up Golden Retriever sitting at a computer.
4. Chill out and start fresh. Ok, now that you got all that negative energy out, listen to how ridiculous you sound right now. You’re not a dog. Now breathe. You got this. Now put that thing you made away for a second and start over. I hear you, “But I spent so much time on it, I can’t start over now blahblahblahblah” STOP. Just DO IT. Chill out and start fresh. Stop fiddling with something that’s not working. You’ll either: make something way cooler way than you thought—way faster—and you’ll be very proud of yourself, or hate what you make and that makes the first idea not look so bad after all. At the very least, you’ll get more options for your AD / Client / Sentient Golden Retriever, and they can help steer you in the right direction.
5. Make it fun, silly! We make pretty pictures for a living. Creative brains hate work, so trick yourself into doing work by making yourself laugh. Keep it simple and don’t forget the original reason you started.
Earth Day!
Bella:
Your character animation has a lot of personality, but so does your non-character animation. How do you give personality to something that is not a human?
Dylan:
One main challenge I give myself is to try to move more properties than just the “Position, Scale, and Rotation.” When I just do the ol’ P-S-R, it can look pretty flat and lifeless—try to throw in some path animation, or some clever masking for depth, or maybe slap some effect on there for something unexpected. Surprise your viewer! When you treat a flat shape like a flat shape, it’s gonna look like a flat shape; there, I’ll give you that one for free.
Other than that—it’s pretty much Easing, Drifts, and Overshoots/Bounces.
Easing doesn’t have to be complicated, I have basically 2 Easing curves I use for everything, but that’s a secret so please don’t tell anyone.
Drifts are when something stops moving it kinda just keeps going forever—just like my responses to these questions. Learn how to master this move well and most modern mograph is in your bag. I like to use the loopOut(‘continue’) expression and make my curve kinda end abruptly—that’ll do it.
Overshoots and bounces are essential to breathing life into things. Nothing in this world moves from A to B in a linear way and just stops, nothing kills the illusion of life more than those silly diamond linear keyframes. Introduce ‘em to a nice ease curve and they’ll be living before ya know it.
Bella:
How did you start working with Balkan Bump? Are you interested in working with other musicians as well?
Dylan:
Balkan Bump is a band started by my brilliant buddy Will Magid. He was my neighbor in Oakland and he was always filling the halls with sweet sweet Trumpet sounds. We became friends pretty instantly, because how could you not? I started helping him with his album art and branding pretty soon after that. It has been a very rewarding experience seeing my friend climb in popularity and as a result I’ve gotten to go to his shows and meet some of my favorite music producers like Grammatik, and Opiuo to name a few!
I’ve also been privileged to have worked with one of my favorite bands, Vulfpeck, through a completely different set of friends. Woody Goss, the pianist of the group, asked me to help animate a little Christmas special reminiscent of Charlie Brown one year. It’s still one of my favorite pieces to this day!
I love working with musicians, because a lot of the work gets to be more interpretive and artsy than your everyday commercial work. No one hates you when you make it a little funky.
Bella:
Are there any upcoming projects or anything else you're looking forward to this year?
Dylan:
I am looking forward to getting a few more personal short short animations out there and venturing into the Tiktok world of animation—provided it sticks around with us.
Still from the motion graphic spot for Maksoi.
Bella:
Any final words of wisdom for our readers?
Dylan:
Don’t overwork, don’t burn out; energy is precious and finite. Don’t marry your job and don’t date your coworkers. Then, break every single rule I just said, and have a f*cking blast!