Takeover Tuesday with Laura Porat
Q&A with Laura Porat, a Los Angeles-based Motion Designer.
Q&A with Laura Porat
Read time: 10min
Madison Caprara:
Hey there, Laura!
Why don’t you give us a brief rundown on yourself? How did you get into the industry?
Laura Porat:
Hey everyone!
I’m Laura Porat and I’m a freelance motion designer living in Los Angeles, California. I’ve always been super into art and would make comic books back in elementary school. In college, I discovered After Effects and fell in love with motion graphics. After graduating, I moved back to LA and worked mostly in the entertainment industry. I shifted towards politics when I worked for Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden’s campaigns!
Madison Caprara:
Wow, COMPLETE shift. We’ll touch on that a bit later.
How would you go about describing your style?
Laura Porat:
I would describe my style as meta, fun, bright, and cartoony with vaporwave elements in it.
Madison Caprara:
Is there a certain subject matter you tend to gravitate towards?
Laura Porat:
I like to draw from real life and my own personal experiences! I’m deaf so I’ve created several artworks featuring my cochlear implant. As a minority, I feel like it’s incredibly important to tell stories about people from underrepresented communities, so that’s a subject matter I’m most passionate about.
Madison Caprara:
Pivoting back to your work in politics, so you’ve worked with both the Biden and Warren campaigns! How did that come about?
Laura Porat:
After the 2016 election, I felt really helpless and wondered what I personally could do to make sure that we didn’t have the same result in 2020. In 2019, I’d been following along the Democratic primaries with interest and really gravitated towards Elizabeth Warren. I’d reached out to her campaign, initially asking if I could volunteer my skills, and found out that they were in need of a full-time motion designer!
It just happened to be perfect timing. I packed my bags and moved to Boston where I worked full-time for her campaign. After she dropped out, I felt like my work wasn’t quite done and joined Joe Biden’s campaign a few months afterward.
Madison Caprara:
That’s wild!
Could you tell us a bit about what it was like working for a political campaign? Did it differ much from the average studio job?
Laura Porat:
Working for a political campaign is absolutely nuts. It’s so different from working in a typical 9-5 studio because for campaigns, you have to be on call basically every day, 24/7. It’s incredibly fast-paced and the work you do is so dependent on what the trending news is because things can shift so quickly. You have to work incredibly quickly and efficiently.
The really nice thing about working in politics is how diverse it is! You have people from all sorts of different backgrounds working on it. Entertainment and motion graphics in LA is very white male-dominated and often I would be the only woman motion designer working at a studio. Sometimes I was the only woman in the whole company. So politics was a huge shift from the entertainment industry.
Madison Caprara:
Did your own beliefs align with the campaign you were working for? I imagine it would be difficult if they didn’t. How did it feel for you when Biden won the presidency?
Laura Porat:
Personally, my own political beliefs are more closely aligned with Elizabeth Warren’s, as she was my first choice pick to be the Democratic nominee. To be completely honest, at first, I wasn’t totally thrilled that Joe Biden ended up being the candidate but ultimately I wanted him to win and defeat Donald Trump. As I worked on his campaign, I discovered that he was running on a much more progressive campaign than I’d initially given him credit for. Through the course of working on his campaign, I began to see him in a new light and appreciated his background and experience.
I was incredibly ecstatic to find out that he won. I was living in New York City at the time and when the election results were finally announced, everyone was screaming in joy and cars were honking their horns. It was like the entire city was celebrating. It was an incredible day and an incredible feeling knowing that all my hard work had finally paid off.
Madison Caprara:
We were popping bottles in my 900 sq. ft. apartment, so I can’t even begin to imagine what it must’ve been like in the city that day.
Now you’re on the West Coast. What’s the Motion scene like in LA? Dash is a bit of an outlier in Raleigh, NC.
Laura Porat:
The motion scene in LA is huge! There are so many different studios and companies that need motion designers in all different fields. Entertainment, technology, health, experiential, etc. There’s a ton of freelance work available which is super awesome.
It’s hard to break into initially if you don’t have any connections because there’s such a talented pool of animators to choose from. However, once you’ve worked at a few studios and do a good job, word of mouth is really paramount. Producers at one studio are always moving over to different studios and if they like you, they’ll bring you to the next studio. So an important takeaway is 1.) Don’t be an asshole, 2.) Show up on time and do the work, 3.) Make friends! Luckily LA has a ton of motion graphics meetups that you can attend and meet other motion designers.
Madison Caprara:
Noted!
How long have you been freelance? What attracted you to it?
Laura Porat:
I’ve been freelance on and off since 2017. Initially, I was forced into freelancing since I found it incredibly difficult to get a full-time job after graduating from college. It took me 10 months after graduating to get my first full-time job at a creative agency in LA. I worked at that creative agency for a year and honed my skills. I learned what it was like to work with a team of animators which is a skill that freelancing can’t teach you.
After working at that agency for a year, I quit and went back to freelancing full-time. I love the flexibility freelancing brings and I love to travel so I can plan my schedule around that. Also, freelancing allows me to take on projects that I’m passionate about and turn down work that I morally don’t align with.
Madison Caprara:
Do you ever collaborate with other designers? If so, what do you like, or even dislike, about it?
Laura Porat:
I love collabing with other designers!
I’ve been running Motion Collabs for about three or four years. Motion Designers from all over the world have participated in it. There’s such a wide range of people who have joined in, from total beginners to seasoned veterans. We’ve done things like making a music video, a pandemic-related video, steampunk pixel art, walk cycles, and many more. It’s super fun working with people who have completely different styles.
The frustrating aspect is that you can run into language and technical barriers. Sometimes I feel like a mom who has to keep track of 30 different animators while running Motion Collabs and making sure everyone follows the prompt. You can check out all of our full-length videos here.
Madison Caprara:
Are there any misconceptions that you have experienced, that comes with being a designer?
Laura Porat:
Probably the biggest misconception is that there’s no money in design. That’s absolutely false. There is money but it’s just a matter of finding good clients who will pay you what you’re worth.
Madison Caprara:
That was always a thought that made zero sense to me. Why would there be such a large pool of talent if there was no money in the business?
Now you know I have to ask it...where do you go for inspiration?
Laura Porat:
I take a lot of inspiration from real life! I like to go to museums and interesting exhibits. Aside from that, I watch a lot of movies and I get artbooks from the animated films that I enjoy. I try to get inspiration from industries outside of motion graphics otherwise I feel like it gets too same-y.
Madison Caprara:
Agreed, work gets stale if everyone is pulling ideas from the exact same sources.
As we’re wrapping up, is there any closing advice or statements you would like to share?
Laura Porat:
A speech therapist once told my mom that I would never learn how to talk or amount to anything. Clearly, that speech therapist was wrong on both fronts! My point is that throughout life, there will always be people who don’t think you can accomplish your goals. My advice is just to follow your own path and don’t listen to what other people have to say.