Mack Garrison 6/16/23 Mack Garrison 6/16/23

Meet the speakers: Macaela VanderMost

An interview with Macaela VanderMost, Founder & Executive Creative Director of Newfangled Studios. Under Macaela’s leadership, Newfangled Studios combines the strategic thinking of an agency with the craft and artistry of a production company. Whether they are creating social campaigns or developing short-form brand films, Macaela, and her team use storytelling and design as vehicles to combat stereotypes, amplify underserved communities, and move the needle forward for her clients.

Q&A hosted by Cory Livengood and Ashley Targonski.

Read time: 15min

Cory:

Hi Macaela, it’s great to see you and interview you for the Bash - we'd love to just know a little bit about what your career looked like before Newfangled. How you found yourself in the motion design space and the studio space even before you started your own, and what that journey looks like?

Macaela:

Sure. I started my journey as a video editor and I worked in reality TV. Anyone who's been a video editor knows that you're the one who ends up staying up all night long, because everything up until that point has had delays or questions around it. And I started feeling a little bit frustrated with that and thinking, well, maybe I actually want to be a producer because I could see the problems at the top. Also, I was in my early 20s. So at that point in my life, I “knew everything” and I could see that I would be a great producer. So then I pivoted to starting to become a producer, and I got a gig as a predator, so it was like a producer/editor on a reality TV show.

Cory:

I've never heard that term before. That's really great.

Macaela:

Oh, it was a thing back in the early 2000s. People were predators. Then I realized that actually it's neither producing nor editing that I want to do, it's creative direction. So it took me a couple of wrong turns to get to realize that I wanted to be a creative director. And that was because I started freelancing, I realized that TV wasn't for me and I really wanted to do advertising. And so I started freelancing at an ad agency and I would be the person in the edit suite working live with a creative director. And they had all the ideas and the vision, but they didn't have to execute every detail themselves And I was like, that's what I want to do. I want to be the ideas person. And so I pushed forward with what I knew how to do and knew how to get paid for, which was editing until I had more gigs than I could handle.

And I decided, okay, when that was the time I'm going to start my studio. So starting my studio meant, say I wasn't going to come in person anymore. Because at the time it was only in-office, and nobody took projects remotely. It just didn't happen. I said, Nope, I'm a studio now, so if you're going to hire me, I'm going to do it in my own space and I'm going to have an intern who's my assistant, and I'm going to put a TV in the room and you can come in and sit with me and this is my edit suite and you can hire me this way. And so some of the people who worked at that big ad agency thought, okay, cool. I'll hire Macaela. She's a post-house basically.

And I started getting gigs that way. I'm not a designer, but I've always had an eye for design and an ability to direct what I wanted it to look like and be able to see it in my mind's eye. At all the places that I worked, there was always a motion graphics component to the editorial work or the branding or the lower thirds or the show open and close. So that was always sort of part of what I did. And I surrounded myself with a lot of people who did that, and I would partner with them to get things done.

And then over time, and this was back in 2009, I realized, okay, if I want to start getting bigger jobs, we need to do the production as well because then I'm going to be able to do the post. So I started partnering with more people who could do production and then got one job at a time. I built it up to what it is now and was able to build it starting out with literally nothing. I didn't have any money or any equipment or anything. I just knew people and was a decent editor and can pull things in. And then I had producing chops so I could do the budget and the schedule and manage the job. And now we're 32 people and we have all the great equipment and resources and wonderfully talented people, and we handle all the way from creative; through concepting, live action, sign, animation, editing, and then the project management along the way.

Cory:

That's fantastic. So even with the live-action work, you're doing that in-house, you're not hiring out other crews and other things like that. I mean, your equipment, your studios, and your... Fairly mixed.

Macaela:

Typically, the way it works with live-action is that you would have staff producers and staff directors, and then the particular crew, you're going to hire out the right camera person for the job. The right gaffer, the person who's going to do the lighting, the hair and makeup artist, all those people are going to be freelanced. But for the most part, we have our go-to people who we've worked with over and over again. I mean those people really wouldn't be staff anywhere that you went.

Cory:

Yeah, that's similar to our experience too with our live-action, which is a little less than you guys, but yeah, it's a very similar process.

Macaela:

So you have your producers and directors in-house, and then you pull in your freelancers for the shoots.

Cory:

When you started was that the goal, going from a single person to a company?

Macaela:

Yeah, it was always that I was going to grow a studio. In fact, this is my third attempt at a studio.

Cory:

Oh wow.

Macaela:

I started Phatcaddy Productions when I was a teenager, and then I started MVM Post, and then I started Newfangled and Newfangled was the one that took off. I have always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I never thought about anything else. I never even considered anything other than entrepreneurship.

Cory:

That's great.

Macaela:

Yeah, there was really never, it never was like, oh, should I or shouldn't I? It was just like, this is what I'm going to do. And I just kept trying different angles until it happened.

Cory:

These days the inclusion and diversity components of a company have become, and I guess this is a good thing even though sometimes it has bad parts, trendy. But I wonder for you, is that always also part of the equation as far as bringing in underrepresented people as you built Newfangled in particular, the studio that made it? Or is that something that's just more of something that everyone's coming to terms with now and getting more visibility around?

Macaela:

So I'd say we started around 2011. So maybe it's just the stages of survival and what you're thinking about. But at the beginning I was just thinking about getting better at my own skills and getting jobs and partnering with the right people and getting the work done. And it wasn't really as much on my radar. And also I didn't feel very empowered to have a voice back then. And then in about 2011, I started getting a little pushier with my clients about being inclusive, specifically with casting, with the way that we drew characters, with storylines, with inclusive language, not always being ableist with your language or not always being heteronormative with your language.

But at that time I still wasn't... It's a journey like anything else. I was still at the beginning of my journey and then I put out the series Untapped, I think that was in 2016 maybe. So still far before what happened to George Floyd, when everybody realized that this is important. But at the time, that was when we first started really pushing hard beyond the LGBTQ and women or female-identifying people and really expanding it out. And we started doing a lot of pro bono work in the disability community. I think my horizons were just broadening, we were growing up a little bit as a studio. I was growing up a little bit as a human, by that time I was in my mid-30s.

And once I started to have bigger clients and more confidence that when I said something, they would listen versus always being afraid that if I pushed too hard, they were just going to go elsewhere or that I was going to come off as annoying and pushy. And it really had a lot to do with building my own personal confidence and as building the Newfangled brand, people would trust me because they trust my brand, so we started pushing harder and harder and making it more of our core identity. Untapped, I think, gave us some of that credibility.

We opened up the 3% Conference with that video, and we included some really big players from some really big companies that were part of that. And all of that was, we didn't get paid to do that. We just did that on our own time because we wanted to. I think that was really the catalyst for crystallizing it as a core value of Newfangled. But again, it was all an evolution because Newfangled wasn't started by hedge fund people, and here are the core values and our identity, what we're going after with this big business strategy. It was really like...

Cory:

How do I pay rent?

Macaela:

Yeah! I was just this dork who was obsessed with making videos and I did nothing but that for a really long time until it grew into a thing that is bigger than me.

Cory:

Well, and that's really, that's where the confidence to be able to make those, as you said, okay, now people know my brand and they know that I'm the expert and speaking as an expert on this, you get a lot less pushback I'm sure, than the annoying person you were worried about.

Macaela:

And also it's just the relationship with my clients. I mean, at this point, whether it's about DEIB or anything else, I'm very comfortable to, after the big meeting in front of everybody, call the cell phone of my client, and be like, can we offline about this? And I have that relationship with people. Whereas when you first start out, you don't and it can be scary to do that, to take a stance.

Cory:

Yeah, that's a really good point. Did you ever run into situations with clients where they were pushing back against that? Or have they all been pretty open to those conversations? How do you navigate?

Macaela:

Before 2020 it was constantly a battle.

Cory:

Interesting.

Macaela:

Even post-2020, there are times when we get a lot of the, wow, let's just do it both ways just to be sure.

Cory:

And you know that they're going to pick the other way. Right?

Macaela:

Yeah. I think typically before 2020, for the most part, the people who I was surrounded by had similar values to mine, but maybe not the passion to push it forward. And so while they wanted to see representation in the work, they didn't care enough to stick their own neck out. So I might have put something forward that maybe seemed a little risky to them in terms of will every stakeholder in the whole wide world, including middle America, be happy about this? No, let's just not take the chance. Let's just do the safer thing. So while it's not that, I don't think that anybody I was working with was a bad person or inherently racist or homophobic or any of those things, I think they just didn't care enough to take a risk and say to their boss, I stand by this and here's why. It was just easier to say, that seems a little forced. That was a line I'd get a lot. It seems a little forced.

So I would get pushback for that reason. Or they would say, let's do it with and without. So it started in early 2011 through maybe 2015. It would be a hard no. Like I'm cool, but other people might not be. So let's just be safe and take it. And then 2015 ish to maybe 2020, I get a lot of the, let's just do it both ways. I'm cool, maybe they won't be. And then from 2020 and beyond, all of a sudden it's like, hey, in the brief, let's just make sure we're being diverse. And everything is like this has to be a diverse cast. And it's like the cast is one person. I'm like, do you know what the word diverse means? Making your one character black didn't make you diverse.

Cory:

Yeah.

Macaela:

From 2020 and beyond, it was a mandate, even though they didn't know what they were talking about, and they would just call everything diverse. It just meant we don't have all white people. It's been a journey. We're all on a journey.

Cory:

Yeah. And when you get that pushback as a business owner, an entrepreneur, you don't want to say no to a contract or you've got to pay your staff and things like that. I mean, this is a delicate question but just wondering, how often do you acquiesce? Do you say, okay, we're going to do it your way, even though I know it's not the right way? Or is that something you had to do more of before and less of now?

Macaela:

I would say in that benchmark before 2015 where I became very confident in my viewpoint and not really worried if I was going to get the next gig or not.

Cory:

Yeah.

Macaela:

I would do, I mean, I went as far as editing myself. Personally, I was asked to be in the video and then they asked me to edit myself out of the video because not everybody wanted to see gay people.

Cory:

Wow!

Macaela:

So I definitely cried in the bathroom after that one.

Cory:

Yeah.

Macaela:

I would just do whatever they said because I wanted nothing more than my studio to take off. And these were big brands. Out of the gate, I was working with big brands and so I was intimidated. After 2016, I think partly because I had made this big public stink with Untapped, I just felt empowered to be like, no, I'm not doing that. And I did many times. I did take it both ways. I'll give you another just very personal example. We were doing a shoot for a company and there was a scene and it was like two parents picking up a baby out of a crib and nuzzling them. And so it was at the time I had a newborn baby.

So I volunteered my baby for the shoot and she was in the scene and I cast a lesbian couple. They weren't really a couple, but I cast them to look like a couple. And the scene is, they pick up the baby and they're kind of nuzzling the baby out. And this is when clients were remoted in, this is probably, well, I know which baby I'm talking about. So this would've been 2018. My daughter was an infant. And I get a client comment on the other end from someone who I know well and is a good person who said, Hey, I love that we're being diverse, but could we just get it another way? Could we just have a man and a woman? And I didn’t happen to have a second set of backup actors. So one of my producers who just happened to be a very good-looking guy was like, I'll do it.

And he stepped in with the more feminine looking lesbian of the couple and pretended it was their baby. And then for the whole rest of the shoot, every time that we had the lesbian couple cast for something, we'd shoot it that way and then my producer would step in and pretend to be the dad and we'd shoot it the other way. And that was kind of that mid-ground where it was “get it both ways”. I still made sure that the lesbian couple ended up in the cut, but I was riding the line during the shoot, even though I was pretty upset about it. And it was pretty awkward for my producer who knew what he was doing and knew me.

Cory:

Yeah.

Macaela:

It was pretty awkward for him. But there were a lot of things like that where it was like, I want to do this, but I'm also afraid that I'm going to get in trouble. So can you cover my butt and make sure that you just have the white straight guy in the shot too? And then I would fight the battle later in post. So sometimes it's just a matter of picking the time and place, but still getting to the same end goal of that is what ended up being in the co.

Cory:

Yeah. That's a crazy story. I'm glad that it worked out in the long run though. That's great.

Macaela:

There's just a lot of things like that. It's just very, very, very common that it's the, just get it both ways.

Cory:

And these days you have people on staff who DEIB advocate roles on staff too. And what does that role sort of entail and how does that play into the production, your client work?

Macaela:

We partner with Joy Channel who works as an extension of our staff to push our DEIB mission forward. So for diversity, they help us with qualitative and quantitative studies, so they conduct listening sessions with the staff about what any of the issues are. They do the quantitative, they keep track of our industry benchmarks and where we are so that we know, hey, we're doing good here, but we need to work on this over here.

So that's more on the diversity part. Equity is really about making sure that people have access to the tools that they need and can advance in their careers regardless of their background. And that can be anything from just something that really recently came up from a survey last week. We have some people who don't have great eyesight, and when we're screen sharing, we weren't sending out the deck in advance. We were screen-sharing the deck and sending it out after. That's an equity thing. Some people don't have great eyesight and they couldn't freaking follow along, but they felt embarrassed to say, I can't see it. So that's just an example of things that can be that simple that are about equity. Another example is when we went remote. I’m in my 40s, I have a house with a home office and a yard.

It didn't occur to me that not everybody has a private place to work. And at the time, my designers, I was like, here you go, take your workstation home. And it was two monitors and a giant tower and they were like, cool, I'll put this in the kitchen with my roommates. And so it was an equity issue that we uncovered by social listening. Where I needed to get certain people laptops so that they could go have a place to work. So things like that. That's the equity piece. Inclusion is really about how you include everybody's opinions, viewpoints in an environment where it's one very subjective, two, some people are just loudmouths on my staff, and some people are incredibly introverted. How do you make sure that everybody is included in the conversation?

And then also it’s about belonging. Inclusion is about, “Hey, we want you here for professional reasons. We value your opinion. We think you're good at what you do.” That kind of thing. Belonging is more about, we want you here because we like you, you feel like you belong. You're a part of this team. And it doesn't mean that you're a part of this team because we have a homogenous culture, but you're a part of this team because you uniquely bring something valuable. And we have people who are on the autism spectrum. We have people who are super outgoing and love to be social. We have people who came from very modest, low socioeconomic backgrounds, and we have people who went to Ivy League schools and come from generational wealth. Plus racial plus LGBTQ plus and age, how do you take all those disparities and create a culture where everyone feels like they belong?

We're still working on that, especially in a remote culture. But that was something that we needed to deal with as a studio because we used to all be in person and we used to all be pretty close, hung out, and we were kind of homogenous in that way. We might have had different genders and races, et cetera, on our staff, but ultimately we liked the same things we joked around in the same way we all lived in Boston, we went to similar colleges if not the same college. So we had all of that in common. And as we try to become a more diverse company, it's not going to be like that. And we're remote, so we have to be more intentional about the belonging aspect of it. So what they do is they do things to facilitate all of that internally.

And then for our clients, if someone comes to us with a campaign and we want to make sure that there's representation from whatever community that the campaign is targeted toward or whose story we're telling if they identify with that, they help us otherwise, they help connect us to the right people.

Cory:

Yeah, that's fantastic. I'm taking notes. It's great. I wouldn't mind learning a little bit more about your pivot to remote working too. Do you still have a physical office at all or are you fully remote at this point? And sort of how you pivoted that and the cultural aspect of that, the belonging aspect of that is something that we are struggling with, everyone's struggling with. And if you have any advice, frankly.

Macaela:

I wish I could say we've cracked the belonging aspect of it, we haven't. What I can say is that we're actively trying. But going back to when we went remote, it was probably the same story as every other studio. We sent everybody home with their big bulky machines. And we made a spreadsheet that wrote down what everyone took home.

Before that you could be remote one day a week, that was our policy. So everyone had one of those orange LaCie hard drives issued to them, and we had a VPN where you could VPN into the server and download something if you forgot it. But it was painfully slow. I mean, really, it was like if you needed an AfterEffects project file, you could grab that. But if you were trying to edit or something, definitely it wasn't going to work. So we had a little bit of infrastructure set up to be able to work from home, and that was it. Since then, we tried a whole bunch of different things that didn't work until we landed on something that works pretty well for our studio. It's robust now, but a lot of it is because we get security audits from some of our clients.

Cory:

Think of something else. Yeah.

Macaela:

Yeah.

Ashley:

That's really cool to hear that y'all have created a system where you're able to do a lot of that without it being such a huge pain point.

Macaela:

Yeah, it's really not a pain point at all anymore, but what it takes is dedicated resources. So we have two outsourced IT teams, one that is specific to the data center in Lucid Link and Iconic workflow, really the workflow for artists. And then we have another one who is specific to more general IT, making sure that our security and all of that kind of stuff is up-to-date. So we have two different IT teams, but then you need a point person, which is why we hired an operations manager.

Cory:

Yeah, that's currently me. So again, taking notes.

Macaela:

My God, you need a Kayla, that's my operations manager.

Cory:

We're getting there. I wonder a little bit too when it comes to some of the work that you're doing, is it mostly around producing packages of deliverables that you're handing to clients? Or are you pushing more into placement and strategy and some of those decision-making processes that go behind what to do with the videos that you're creating at Newfangled, or do you stay in your lane as it were?

Macaela:

No, we're very much involved upfront. We have a seat at the table with the media agency, so we don't place the media, but usually, before the media plan even comes in, we'll make recommendations based on the brief and say, oh, well, this could be really cool if we did X, Y, Z. And then once the media agency comes in, we'll usually have a phone call with them and talk about where your media plan and our creative really push one another. But we started getting credibility with that because we got this project with Google where we're creating the playbooks of how Google can best use the different social media platforms. And we're creating, they're these hundred-page decks that explain everything about the platform, how you can use it, the different ad formats where creativity and ad formats can intersect.

And then we work directly with those platforms to build them out, and then Google uses that to train their teams. So because of that project, which has been ongoing for a few years, we're the people who do that. We really have become experts in all of these different ad units. And then it ends up turning into a lot of consulting work also for Google. So for example, Google has hired another agency to do, I can't say too much about it, but a large project that drops in the summer that everyone will see when it comes out, and there's a TikTok component to it. And so any creative that's going to go on TikTok is getting run by Newfangled for notes and consultation. Then the pre-pro book is being run by us, and then we'll do the edit for it because they know that we really understand the ecosystem of TikTok and not that we're completely reinventing what they're doing, but we can nip and tuck and nudge in different directions to make it more social for us.

Breakdown of Newfangled's Google Chrome Integrated Social Campaign

Cory:

That's really interesting.

Macaela:

The understanding of the social ecosystems is our superpower I think.

Cory:

Is there any advice you might give someone who is a freelancer now who's decided to or is trying to decide to take the leap into creating a studio, making that pivot?

Macaela:

A couple of things. I guess if you're already successful, you probably have a decently large body of work. Edit it down. I don't need a portfolio with 50 examples of your work on it. Be really particular about what you put out there, have a really badass reel. I think that's super important. But probably the most important thing is the relationships. So you're only as good as the last gig that you did. If you phone it in on a project, a studio owner or a producer is going to know it, clients are going to know it, and they're going to feel it. Be willing to go slightly out of your lane. If you're an animator, I know that you know how to mock up something in Illustrator, be willing to do it, even if I've hired you for the day as an animator. And I think those are the types of things that help you go from being a successful freelancer to having a studio. Because if you do those things, and I know you're going to work hard, you're going to put in the extra effort. You're going to treat us with mutual respect and kindness. You're going to push for it to be more creative, but you're going to stay on brand, you're going to do all those things that that is what the studio owner wants.

Then trust is built. And once you have trust, I mean, that's when the relationship can take off to anything. And you have to remember that, you might be working with someone who is at such and such a job now that person is going to move up the ranks and move on in their career, and they may take you with them. So many of the most important clients that I have today were not very senior level. And they were working at an ad agency when I met them, and now they're executive creative directors at some of the world's largest brands. So it's really treating everybody with that respect, regardless of where they are, and being really honest and not taking on more than you can handle so that you can do everything really well and then let it build on itself.

Cory:

That's great. Great advice. Yeah, a lot of our clients are born out of those similar relationships. I knew this person at an agency I used to work at, or I used to work with them at this company, and they quit. And then two years later, we get a phone call from them when they're somewhere else.

Macaela:

Yep.

Cory:

Never burn the bridge.

Macaela:

Yeah, exactly.

Cory:

That's great. Just one last question, as someone who you mentioned at the top has tried to start a couple of studios and failed, frankly, but succeeded in the long run, what would you say to someone who's sort of struggling right now, someone who's new in the industry, or just hitting up against that wall, is there any advice you might give someone to get back on the horse as we mentioned earlier?

Macaela:

This might sound rough, but the truth is that this is a hard industry to break into and that the people who are successful almost make it their entire personality. You have to eat, sleep, breathe, and dream it. If the passion is not burning inside of you for it, my advice would be to take those skills and apply them to another role. If you are completely obsessed with it, like, you would rather do tutorials than hang out with friends. You can't watch anything, commercials, anything because you're thinking about “how did they make it?”

Then I think I would just say, just keep going. You continue to make yourself ready and then the door will open and you'll be ready standing in front of it, but you can't wait for the door to open to get yourself ready. So I think it's really just about knowing that level of passion. It's just an industry where you're not going to succeed unless you're completely addicted to it and have that much gas in the tank, which is why I was able to start the studio in my 20s that I probably couldn't start now.

Cory:

Well, thanks so much for taking the hour with us and talking through your career we really, really appreciate it!

Macaela:

Yeah, thank you. Bye.

Mack Garrison 6/9/23 Mack Garrison 6/9/23

Meet the speakers: BIEN

An interview with Ricardo Roberts, Executive Producer, and Hung Le, Creative Director of BIEN. Founded in 2017, BIEN pioneered a unique methodology called Inclusive Motion Design (InMoDe™) that helps brands be more profitable and effective through accurate representation on-screen and behind the scenes.

Q&A hosted by Cory Livengood.

Read time: 15min

Cory:

Good to see you both! So I'd love to hear from both of you what your careers looked like before BIEN. Where were your paths before they converged into this endeavor?

Hung:

So yeah, I started my journey in Houston, where I learned graphic design. I was in a really amazing traditional graphic design program at the University of Houston. I think my path is very relatable for a lot of people in the industry because I did not come from a very prestigious background, both in education or starting at a big studio. I started out at a local university because that's what I could pay for and learned graphic design, print design mainly. And I think upon graduation, and I think obviously all of us at that point in school, you look at everything and you get inspired by motion design. But I did not choose that if you will.

It's just that in my first job out of school, I had a few different offers either from web design and then there's a TV station, local TV station. So my professor, I remember, told me, "What do you have to lose? Even if you don't like it, you just quit six months later." So I went with her advice and I went and worked at a local CBS station and got myself familiar with what the heck is motion design and from more of a TV, network news perspective too.

So after that, I just went on and worked at a local production, live-action production house. They needed an artist, like a graphic designer or motion designer to be on staff. And the title was super enticing. "You'll be the Art Director." And I was a couple of years... Not even that, a year and a half out of school, and I'm like, "I'm going to be the Art Director."

Cory:

That's awesome.

Hung:

But I would direct myself because there's nobody else there.

Cory:

I was going to say you're the Art Director, but you're probably also the motion designer and editor, the-

Hung:

The Rotoscope artist. Yea, whatever they needed. So titles don't mean anything. So that's where I worked. And the pay bump was so great from my first job out of school living in Houston that I thought that was it. I felt good. My family is still in Houston, so there was no need for me to go anywhere. So I felt fairly settled and stayed there for, I stayed at that job for over five years. And then that's when I guess the needle rose when I felt like, I guess, I didn't have anybody to bounce ideas to. I just went to mograph.net to learn stuff from other people.

So I guess like, I'm going to want to try to freelance, and I put my portfolio online. And then at that time, mograph.net was huge. So if you wanted to do something in motion design, with AfterEffects you go to mograph.net, so that's where I was. Ricardo found me on mograph.net actually in those early days when I put my portfolio up. And then the other person who contacted me was a producer from Chicago. And I still had my full-time position at that time because I just put it up. People tell you, you don't quit your job and look for new work, right? You gotta prepare.

Hung:

So they hit me up and said, "Hey, we got this job. We need AfterEffects artists. Today's Wednesday. We want you to show up in Chicago Monday. Can you do it? Actually Sunday." And I say, "Yeah, sure, of course, I'm ready."Because to me, I think normally I would not do that to other people. If I worked for you, Cory, that would be terrible, right?

Cory:

Yeah.

Hung:

Last minute. But I think you have to understand the context is that I have been a small fish in somewhere that, at that time, if you want to do cool work, you have to be in New York, Chicago, or LA.

Hung:

So to me, at that point, I just said I could not turn this down. This was free Harvard Education waiting for me. So that's when I said, I said "Yes," and I apologized to my bosses at the time and just picked up and went. And from then on, I started freelancing, and that's when I met Ricardo on mograph.net and started working with Ricardo and Myriad Media in Raleigh on a freelance basis. And I just freelanced at different shops. Digital Kitchen was the biggest shop that I worked at. They would fly me up to Chicago, and I stayed there, worked there on commercials and things like that, for months on end.

And I also freelanced remotely for a lot of studios in New York, LA. And you have to understand that my portfolio was all oil and gas at that point. That's what the Houston portfolio was if you worked in Houston at that time until now. So my portfolio was just full of a lot of oil and gas work, I did not have any big studio, no Nike on my reel, none of that. So I felt very grateful to have the opportunity to be a freelance storyboard artist to contribute to big pitches for different studios. And I worked remotely for years until my wife and I decided to move to New York, and we moved up to New York, spent five years there working at different shops onsite and offsite, continued to work with Ricardo at Myriad and then moved to LA, and started BIEN with Ricardo in 2017. So I'll pass the story to Ricardo there.

Ricardo:

Yeah, so I actually never wanted to be a designer or be in animation, period. I wanted to be a recording engineer. So I was and am very much into hip hop, and just music in general, that has always been my creative outlet. So after I graduated from high school, I went Full Sail in Orlando. And it was funny because, A, I never thought I was going to be able to go to college. To me, it just wasn't going to happen. But ended up being able to get some loans and grants and stuff like that and was able to go.

So I was down in Orlando, I was learning audio stuff, but I was also learning video production stuff, and then also digital media stuff, which is kind of how they encompassed everything, design, and animation. And at the time, it was like DVD programming with Macromedia, all that kind of stuff. And it was in the beginning three months of school where you sort of learn everything. And I was like, "Man, why am I going to school?" Because Full Sail is expensive!

So I was like, "Why am I going to school to be an audio engineer?" And I already knew a lot of the stuff that they were teaching us. So I was thinking, "I'm going to pay all this money. I'm going to go out of school, I'm going to go to New York and get a job as an intern in some studio making $9 an hour getting coffee for DJ Premiere." And I was like, "Well, if I switch my major, I can learn how to do all this design stuff and make all this stuff and then I can apply it to my record label or whatever I want to do." So I always had an entrepreneurial mindset.

And so I just switched my major to digital media. It was a crash course in design and animation, and we learned character animation. So I was animating characters in Maya and Softimage and in 3D Studio Max. So I did that and I was like, "Yeah, 3D animation, that's going to be my career." But I quickly learned when I moved back to Raleigh, there ain't no 3D animation work happening in Raleigh…this was like 1998.

Ricardo:

So I was working at a Spanish-language newspaper. I was doing print layouts for the newspaper, and then my boss at the time said, "Hey, one of my buddies has a video production company. Why don't you go talk to him because you're not right for this job." He was looking out for me. And so I talked to these guys and it ended up being Will at Myriad Media. So we met and we hit it off. They were awesome. And they were like, "Yeah, you can come on board and do more 2D animation."

So long story short, I started working there in September of '98, and I really had to learn AfterEffects on the job. And it was really an internship for, I think I had three days a week. So I was learning AfterEffects. I was cleaning the office, I was doing whatever to become invaluable. That led to me working with them for many, many years.

Ricardo:

And I found Hung, we met online, as he mentioned earlier, found Hung, and then brought him in as a freelancer at Myriad. And that's how things really took off. That's when we met.

And then Hung said, in 2017, I wanted to get back to my roots in motion design, and I really love the idea of building a business from the ground up. So I wanted to just start over. So Hung and I joined forces, we started BIEN, and the whole idea is to do motion design, but do it through the lens of diversity and inclusion.

Cory:

Yeah, I think that they're relatable stories. I mean, at least for me, because I never studied any design or any motion or anything like that. I figured it all out after college and similarly just put work together. And then obviously Ricardo, I worked at Centerline, which is for those reading, a sort of competitive agency to the one you were at for five years and ended up leaving and starting from the ground up too. So I do think a lot of people look at these superstars who have these big brands, you mentioned your Nikes and all this stuff. But a lot of people who are in this career are starting out at these other...so I really think that both of those stories are really relatable to people.

I think that's a great segue to talk a little bit about BIEN and your methodology, the inclusive motion design. I'd love to learn a little bit about what that means as far as, from your point of view, I know that you've got a lot of resources about it on your website, which is really fantastic. So maybe talking a little bit about what BIEN is and what is the sort of positioning you're taking, the position you're taking on the inclusive motion design?

Ricardo:

So basically, when we started BIEN, we did a lot of competitive analysis and research, and I was working heavily on branding, marketing, and strategic positioning. So I knew we had to find something that made us different. There are so many studios out there that do amazing work, and Hung and I just kept going back and forth, back and forth, we can focus on this and that.
And we really just, when we drilled down to it, we realized, "Hey, we are both immigrants and we have a very different POV from most people." I'm originally from Ecuador, and so I moved to the United States. I didn't know any English, I only knew Spanish and I grew up, in what I would consider a multicultural household, and with a multicultural worldview.

And then the other part is Hung and I both have this urge to do more with our business than just commerce, and more than just creative output. For us, it's really important for us to feel like we are making some kind of a difference through our work. Because again, so many people... You can do amazing work, and the creative is so important, but also at the end of our careers, we want to look back and say, "Hey, we made a difference." It could be a small difference, but we made a difference. We want to be social activists in a way, through our work and through our business. So that's why we settled on inclusive motion design. And so for us, it's inclusive motion design, which we also call it InMoDe.

So InMoDe basically has two pillars, representation and accessibility. So for representation, that means a diverse team behind the scenes to create inclusive content on screen. So it's all about inclusive and accurate representation in the final product, through the character animation or whatever, even if it's live-action. But to us, it's really important to ensure that the behind-the-scenes team is also diverse. And that's something that we all know that our industry struggles with, like many industries. Like the Tech industry, or maybe all industries in the United States, honestly. But motion design seems to be particularly afflicted in that it's not very diverse. So we want to change that. That's our whole reason for being.

And then the second pillar is accessibility. So we know that the world's largest minority group is people with disabilities. So whenever we design, whenever we create, we create with that in mind. So that's like 15% of the world's population. So for us, it's all about design with, not for, that's kind of the whole motto. And that's a quick way to summarize what inclusive motion design is. And our "Why" as I tell everyone is we're doing this because we want to see the industry become more diverse and we want to make a difference. We want to create change, give back to our community, and we want to see more underrepresented artists in our industry and thriving and doing well.

Cory:

There's an image on your website, that I like, which is symbolic diversity versus true diversity because I think that these days, and ultimately is a good thing, diversity inclusion has become trendier. More people want to be a part of that conversation. But I think that image really sums up that a lot of people still maybe phone it in a little bit, like the symbolic versus the true.

Ricardo:

Yes.

Cory:

And so I wonder, how do you have a conversation with a client about this topic in a way that makes them want to be on board with it and not feel like they're being lectured or attacked or what have you?

Ricardo:

It's so funny, Cory, people come to us because they know that's what we focus on. That is our positioning, and that's where we have expertise. So we don't really run into client pushback. If anything, clients have pushed back and said, "Hey, we want this to be more diverse."

I thought at first we would have a lot of pushback, but honestly, I think especially since George Floyd's murder, that's when people really started to seek us out, because we are minority-owned and because inclusive motion design, or anything in the inclusive and diverse space, became more important, more sought after. We haven't had too many issues with that, honestly.

Cory:

That's excellent.

Ricardo:

Yeah.

Cory:

Yeah, so it sounds to me like a smart move and the thing that's helped is, you have positioned yourself as that's your space. And so no one's coming to you and getting surprised that you're bringing this up in a conversation, right?

Ricardo:

No, no. And from day one, we identified a category that no other studio was playing in or owning. So we knew, "Hey, we're going to create this new category and we're going to own that position in the marketplace." So you're exactly right. People come to us because they say, "Hey, they are the inclusive motion design studio." So they know from day one what we're going to focus on and what we're going to do for their brand or their company.

Cory:

I'm curious, from a production standpoint, when you're going through the normal steps of any kind of video-based project, what is different about a project that has this sort of mindset than let's say, a project that didn't before George Floyd or before all that?

Or is there a component to your engagements with clients that is education, not just production? How do you educate a client who even if they come to you and want this, they might not know how or they might be doing it the wrong way?

Ricardo:

Yeah, I mean, that's a great point. I think at the beginning of a project, we always try to find out what the strategy is. Who's the audience? Who are they trying to reach? And then we build a team based on that. So that's the whole design with a, not for, mentality. So once we have that in place, we always come to the client with various ideas, but we always try to push the envelope. And when we first started, we realized sometimes if you're doing a certain type of tech explainer and maybe there is no character animation, we realized maybe we're not going to be able to do something on the screen. So we started thinking about things behind the scenes. So giving an opportunity to an underrepresented designer or animator, or using a certain voiceover talent, like someone with disabilities, we'll use them as a voiceover talent.

It's really, honestly, a lot of behind-the-scenes things that we do. And then we tell the client and they say, "Oh, wow, I haven't thought about that. That's really interesting." But then in terms of when we do character illustration, we always do things through the lens of ethnology and just make sure that whatever we design is accurate and realistic, and it's a realistic portrayal of that particular population.

So when we put those forth in front of a client, then we talk about it, we tell them why, and we tell them, "This jaw line or this nose style comes from this region, and here's why." But in general, it's kind of a mix of both. We're telling them some things, we're also doing some things, and then showing some things.

Hung:

I think we kind of approach the client with the mentality that it's a collaboration. We have our expertise, you have yours, and we want to solve this problem together, your business problem together, while creating social impact in the process.

And social impact might not have anything to do with your product that you're trying to put out there. It's the social impact that is happening behind the scenes. I think the key thing to keep in mind is for Ricardo and I, we really hone into how tactical our process is. We don't want talking points. We don't deal with things that are just talk and not walk. It has to be very tactical. So it's built into the business. The way BIEN operates, how we operate as a company from the inside out to the production process, to pre-production. Every step of the way, we have this methodology built in, in a way that would be inclusive to the staff and also to the process and to everyone involved.

Now, I think that's the key is that it's not just a talking point to get the client to buy in, and we do it on screen to satisfy that. It's what we do behind the scenes. And I would say that at this point for us, that process is owned by everyone. The producers own it, and they come up with their own processes and their own things. So we are not the ones who are there to say, "Let's follow this structure." The structure evolves, the methodology evolves because our team evolves it, and each one using their own expertise and live experience evolves it differently.

Cory:

Yeah, that's excellent. I love the thought that the final video might just be a bunch of cool shapes and texts, and there's really not an obvious place for there to be a diverse or inclusionary system to it. But that's the veneer, it's the people who put it together. It's behind the scenes. That's great.

Hung:

Our aim, I think, as a studio, I'll call it our top-level claim, and I'm not saying we are there yet, but our top-level claim is that BIEN wants to do top-level quality work, just like many top-level studios out there. But when you look, you peel back the curtain, you find a very diverse team behind the scenes making that.

That's the way we elevate the industry, changing it one person at a time and making it better.

Ricardo:

Yeah, and that ties back into our desire, our "Why" is, we want to see the industry become more diverse. And like Hung said, tactically, we're doing all kinds of stuff. Like, we have an apprenticeship. So we wanted to initially do an internship, but we felt like that was not enough. And internships are great, but if you can't afford to not work a real job over the summer and take an internship wage, which we all know, like a stipend, you can't live off of a stipend, especially in a larger city. We thought that an apprenticeship where we can pay a living wage would be much more advantageous for someone who is just getting started in the industry. And so, instead of a shorter internship, our apprenticeship is 10 weeks and then it goes on six months after. And so we also give our apprentices, what we call a motion survival toolkit, which is Hung and my knowledge and then the studio's knowledge on all of the boring, basic business shit that new newbie designers and animators don't know when they get out of school.

Like how do you submit an invoice that has all of the correct information so you can make sure you get paid on time? How to handle a late payment? How to get work? How to email people?

Cory:

Yeah.

Ricardo:

All of these things, we basically have this toolkit and it's like, "Here, go use this." And then anytime during that six months after the apprenticeship concludes, we want you to stay in touch with us, stay in touch with your art director or your producer or Hung and I. And we give advice, we do portfolio reviews, we do all of these things just like this is about going above and beyond because that is the way they make a change.

And we do that because we identify that at our level, at the senior level, diversity is very scarce. However, at the junior level, we're seeing a lot of diversity. Like Hung and I, we also teach inclusive motion design at Hyper Island, which is a creative school based in Stockholm. And in that class, those students are extremely diverse. And I think there's maybe 65, it's 65% female.

So it's amazing. So there's this new crop of talent that's coming in, and we want to do what we can to make sure that they succeed and that they go on to flourish in our industry.

Another thing I always like to talk about, and I always tell studio owners, and I'm telling you Cory, because we think it's important for us to look at what we do as. We view ourselves as a bridge studio. So it's not about what we can do for talent, it's what we can do for that talent so they can go on and succeed in the industry. So how can we be a bridge between us to bigger and better opportunities?

So what we do is, we practice something called Double the Line. Double the Line was originally an AICP concept. AICP is the Association of Independent Commercial Producers. So they do live-action work, but they started this initiative called Double the Line. And basically what it is, is you take a line item in a project budget and you double it. And so you bring on a junior talent and they shadow a senior talent. We found out about that initiative and we've adapted it and really brought it into the fold of our process at the end.

We do that on almost every project where we can, but it's a way for us to identify that very, very junior diverse talent and give them an opportunity. So they're able to come onto a job that they would not have gotten hired for otherwise because they don't have the portfolio, they don't have the experience. But we give them that experience, we give them that portfolio piece so then they can go and they can say, "Hey, Cory, look at this thing I did at BIEN". And so it's about taking a risk. It's about extending opportunities that may not have otherwise gotten extended.

So that's why I say, man, if you guys would think about doing that, all of us together, we can be a bridge studio network so that we all have a similar mentality. And for us, it's not just about BIEN, we want to spread InMoDe throughout the industry. And these little ideas that Hung and I have been implementing, they're not that hard to put into production. It's not crazy. And when we say double the line, if you can bring someone on for an entire project, that's cool, great. But a lot of times you can't, right? The budgets are not there, we're small studios. So you can bring someone on for a certain phase. It could be for help with storyboards, it could be for one character animation if it's cel animation. So it's these little small little plays, these tactical things that we want to spread throughout the industry. And hopefully, over time, it'll make a change, make a difference.

Getty Museum – 2-Minute Time Machine Series by BIEN

Cory:

I love it. When you do those sorts of programs or when you're shadowing you in a situation like that, what does that look like? I mean, are they literally making stuff and getting paid for it by the hour, like a freelancer on the day? Or are they Zoom sharing with your artist and just watching how they do something? How hands on is that?

Ricardo:

Yeah, it's kind of both.

Hung:

That part is part of production. They will have the hands in the project and it depends on the level of skills and experience. They could be working on something smaller or larger. So they will be in the production like a freelancer, just any other freelancer, that's equity and equality or in one. So when you put that person in production, it's not so much about what they are doing on that project. They could be animating just a tiny little bird in the background, but the soft skills they are learning, being in the same job, seeing how the art director is doing that scene, seeing how other seniors, say cel animators, are doing that. They're learning from that day to day. They're learning from the process and they will be part of all those conversations with the team.

So our hope is that, we only laid out the options and people can pick that up themselves in all the soft skills while on the job. And then at the end of the job, they can put this in the portfolio and say, "I worked on the job for this X brand."

Cory:

Yeah, I think that's great. And it is really important. We do internships usually twice a year, and it varies from one to three people, depending on our needs and stuff. But it's really important that we always put interns on client work. It's not just getting the coffee or doing the cool social media stuff for Dash. I mean, we do cool social media stuff too, of course, but throughout the course of an internship, you will definitely work on the client work.

And it's similar reasoning. It's like, people need to experience a little bit of that pressure of, "This is a real project for a real person. I'm involved in this actual client work." And then after the internship they're able to say, "I worked for this brand, I worked on this video." So I do think it's a great idea and it is definitely something that we want to do more of and have always tried to make part of our workflow when it comes to junior level people, especially interns or mentors.

Hung:

Totally. And I would say that Ricardo and I would never claim that we came up with these ideas. It's more like, if you can say what is unique about our approach, it's about us really being boots on the ground practicing many things, where other people practice one or two.

Cory:

Oh, yeah. And normalizing that stuff too, just making it a normal part of the workflow…

Ricardo:

And I'll tell you, Cory, to me, why I think internships and apprenticeships, they're so powerful, but Double the Line may be even more powerful because you can bring someone on for just three days, right? But those three days of their work will certainly add value to that project, AND, they also get to see everything going on in Slack.

We work in Slack, right? And so they see all of the production stuff happening in real time and what has happened before they got there. So they already have that inside view of a big project, and then they're contributing for those three days. And then another project comes on, we can hire someone else or that same person, and we always try to vary it up, but it allows for more variety. So when you have an internship... Because as you guys know, it's a lot of work on the studios' part as well. When you have that internship or apprenticeship, it's a long commitment.

But Double the Line can be a week, it can be two weeks, it can be three days, and it can be done for copywriters, it can be done for illustrators, animators, cel animators, 3D, whatever.

Cory:

That is a really interesting point because an internship could be three months, and that does take planning. And so there's something really cool about, "Hey, we're going to drop you into this project for this week, and you're going to get to absorb as much as you can absorb and then walk away." That's really cool.

Hung:

Yeah, I would expand on that a bit to see, okay, that's something everyone can do. But what we would do is with... We think about that process and say, "What can we do to improve this process?"

Pretend, Cory, if you are new, you've never been on a production before. If you are thrown into this process, you are going to be facing this giant blob and you're going to wonder what the heck is going on. So we kind of see that coming, and what we would do is, we do a pre-call with that junior. So if we have a kickoff set for Wednesday, then a day or so before we can have a pre-call with that junior where we say, "All right, do you know what the term cel animation means? I'm just throwing out some things that are kind of technical and unique to the industry, that if you're not, you haven't been exposed to, you wouldn't know. They get to see all the materials beforehand so they can see if they have questions.

The moment you can clear that out for the junior before the big kickoff, then they will feel more inclusive, there's a sense of belonging by the time they get on with the team, because they're not that new kid on the block. They know what everyone else is talking about.

So those little nuances are what we thrive on. That's the before, and what about after? So we think about that deeply.

Ricardo:

And it's funny you mentioned that Hung. What we're trying to do in essence is fast-forward someone's career by a year or two by giving them this inside track and not just saying, you know how it is, "Any questions?" A junior's going to be like, "No." They don't want to look dumb.

Cory:

Yeah.

Ricardo:

So we're telling them like, "Hey, look like we want you to ask questions. We need you to ask questions, and we're going to tell you some things that open up the conversation." But it's really maybe what we all wish we had when we first started, is sort of, not so much a employer/employee relationship, but a mentor/mentee relationship. That's really important to us.

And then one other quick thing that we've started doing is, this is an idea that we borrowed from the tech industry. They kind of brought it to the forefront, recording diversity metrics for our studio, but also the projects that we do. So I mean, I should have said our staff and then also any freelancers that we hire. So we look at those stats after every job, and a lot of those stats suck. I'm just being very honest. A lot of the stats are not what we want them to be, even though that's our focus, and we're actively recruiting people from underrepresented populations. So we use those numbers as that's the cold hard metrics. Those are the numbers that we can't run away from. And our producers, everyone on the team has that mentality of, we want to improve these numbers. We want to move the needle on, I wouldn't say every single job, that's the hope, but it's more like on a yearly basis.

Cory:

Well, you mentioned it before, it's not just talking the talk, it's walking the walk. And that's where the data, I'm sure, comes into it, where you can actually go back and analyze that and see. You're also proudly, it seems, a decentralized sort of global group. I mean, you have staff all over the world, all over the country. I wonder if you could talk a little bit on how, was that an active decision?

Was that a COVID decision? I know you and Hung are both in LA, but a lot of people are everywhere else. And so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that kind of mindset.

Hung:

I can touch on that first. So I think that what's unique about BIEN, when Ricardo and I came together and thought about the industry, is that we were both outsiders, right? I mean, I think I did not know what the Beatles were until I was like, I don't know, 14 or 15, because I lived in Vietnam in a post-communist world where all western media was kept out. But what that afforded me, learning design, going to industry, is that I don't see anything the same way anyone who had an education here had. So that POV, that lived experience helped me tremendously in terms of being more critical of the work we do as motion designers and studios, the kind of stuff we put out there to the world, talking down to other cultures in a visual way, and I will call that the imperialistic point of view. Because we can't escape it. It's just what we lived in, in here. It's what we learn.

So from day one, when Ricardo and I put the company together, we said, "We need diverse perspectives. We see this remote working thing..." I work remotely in Houston for all studios around the world, I mean the country. Back in the, I don't know, early 2000 or whatever, when that was not a thing, right?

So it was working, and I worked for Ricardo's company, Myriad, for years remotely. I didn't meet Ricardo until, I don't know, 10 years after I worked with them or something like that. So we knew that model worked. So from day one, we said, when we put a team together, it is not going to matter about where they are. It's more about what perspective they are going to bring into the studio. And just like anything, you work with someone freelance, at first you kind of click, you see something, you click, they like you enough, and boom, you're a team. And that's kind of how we are right now.

Cory:

How do you handle the logistical issues that come along with that when it comes to meetings or having a company culture that's sort of on the same page and things like that?

Hung:

Totally. We try to put names to everything so that it sounds legit and that it's easy to remember. So that's inclusive time zones. That's like, what does that mean? That means you have to be respectful of... If we put one of our art directors in Spain, for example, if we are going to have that art director on Delete The Project, then all meetings are going to happen at AM Pacific or whatever that is with the client. And the thing nowadays is, I don't know, I'm sure your clients too Cory, but a lot of companies you work with are global time zones.

Hung:

They deal with that daily on their end. It's like they have colleagues in the UK they talk to. So it's been normalized in a way that you just have to know that you work around these things. And then we just start to implement more asynchronous tools like recordings and stuff that you can set for people, be crystal clear on your feedback, step by step, things like that. And we've been doing it for five years and we never fail a delivery. So I think it's working out fine.

Cory:

Yeah, that's great.

Ricardo:

I'll just add to that too, just in general, our worldview, my worldview, Hung's worldview, we've always been international. That's how we think. We think globally, and so access to amazing talent around the world is something that appealed to us from day one. It's like, why limit to a certain geography? If someone's super talented and someone can bring a different POV, a different cultural nuance to a job, then that's the type of person that we want to work for or work with.

And if you think about it, the world's just getting smaller and smaller. And then COVID, like really, I mean, won't say there's no such thing, but there's almost no such thing as time zones and international barriers, because we're also used to Zooming and being connected just on various devices and via email and Slack and all that stuff. So just figuring out how to do it asynchronously, I think we've got that down pat.

But I will say there are challenges with culture. Our culture is robust and it's phenomenal and it centers around inclusive motion design and it centers around doing amazing work and telling great inclusive stories, but it is difficult. It's not the same as if you're all in the same room. So there's pros and cons, and we just try to lean into the pros.

Hung:

Also, we try to avoid the extremes for sanity's sake. Because in production, honestly, if you have someone in New Zealand, then they will say "Goodbye, have a good weekend on a Thursday." So obviously in reality, that doesn't work every time. Certain jobs you can do that, but when deadlines are looming and stuff like that. So I would say we are very global, but we are also very conscious of what makes a project realistically doable.

Cory:

Well, it goes back to being tactical, as you say. I mean, we had a project with a short timeline, and so in that sense, we were able to hire a designer in Australia to design our frames that were then ready for our animators in our morning. And so that would've worked out well from a tactical perspective despite the time zone. In fact, because of the time zones, because we could be designing while we were sleeping and animating while we were awake, essentially. And so there are always these weird little cases that pop up where you can move those pieces into place exactly how you need them, which is really cool.

Ricardo:

And you can always choose, you can look at the negative side of it or the positive side of it. If you lean into the positive, you can figure out ways to use it to your advantage.

Cory:

I'd love to hear any advice you might give someone who is thinking about moving from either a job or freelance into entrepreneurship, into starting a studio. Is there anything you might have told yourself when you were starting looking back?

Ricardo:

It's a hard question.

Hung:

Yeah, I mean, from my perspective, and this is just being really, really tactical, I would say that I would not have done it if I did not have Ricardo as a partner. Because I would say that I did not have the portfolio of a superstar in our industry who can attract a lot of talents around you and build a studio from scratch. I was grateful to have Ricardo to know the business side of it so that we could team up and make something together. I don't look at what we did as forming a company as an ego thing. It was more like a necessity.

I think that in our industry in particular, ageism is a big thing. Designers and animators, when they get to their forties, have to look at alternatives in terms of what they can learn, how fast they can learn, how they can adapt, and whether they have built up all the steps necessary to lead to their final season of their career or not.

So I think that that's kind of important to think about is, if you are young and you're thinking about entrepreneurship or owning a studio later, then you have to build all the necessary steps up to that point. And if you haven't done that, then you find yourself in a very tricky situation. So I would say it really depends on your will. The only thing I have to offer, honestly, it's just like I'm very good at making something out of nothing just because of my background. What I lived through, that's kind of my superpower in a way, not my design skills.

Ricardo:

We just make it work. And just real quick too, for any upcoming designers, I want to piggyback on Hung. Thanks for saying that, man. But I think you have to, most creatives, are like, "Oh, my work's going to sell itself." I think you have to really be prepared. If you're freelancing in particular and then want to start a studio, you have to get your portfolio, it has to be technically sound and follow best practices to get clients. And then you just have to really brush up on sales. Those two things are so important because the creative is just going to sit there because there are a million different portfolios that look as good or better. So you really have to focus on what is your positioning, what is your marketing strategy, and what is your sales strategy. Who are you? Who can you sell to? And then, you know, try to find market fit, try to find what clients would hire you, and then you try to replicate that and then expand from there.

Cory:

We really, really appreciate your taking the time to chat with us today. And it's really cool learning how the butter is made, seeing behind the scenes.

Ricardo:

Yeah, Cory, man, we're super excited I can't wait to come back to Raleigh, man. I miss it.

Cory:

Yeah, great. We're looking forward to it.

Hung:

Thank you. Bye

Mack Garrison 6/2/23 Mack Garrison 6/2/23

Meet the speakers: Ozlem Akturk

An interview with Ozlem “Ozi” Akturk, an Annie Award-winning creator, cinematographer, and producer in stop motion and mixed media with over 15 years of experience in film and animation.

Q&A hosted by Meryn Hayes & Cory Livengood.

Read time: 15min

Meryn Hayes:

It’s great to meet you! I would love to hear a little bit about how you got into cinematography in the first place.

Ozlem Akturk:

Well, in the first place, I was always into art and also photography. When I was a teenager, I saved up money and bought my first DSLR camera. It was a Pentax 35mm SLR camera. From there, I started shooting in black and white, still photography. I loved it, but I also had a love for movies. First I tried to get into art and photography, but then I had the chance to listen to a lecture at a university when I was young and they did animation and also 16mm film workshops. That experience made me realize that there was the possibility to study film and animation.

With that knowledge, I started looking for Universities all around Germany with the focus on film and animation. I love stop motion, but it was a niche everywhere, and mostly in Germany it was more of one. I found a place in Stuttgart and went to study there. I studied film and animation. We could do everything there: animation, filming, motion control. That got me way closer to working with the right tools, that made me realize I would love to do a real stop-motion short with fellow students.

Looking back, we all thought, "Oh, this is so great," and we are great. No, looking back it's horrible. Stuttgart also has a big animation film festival, the biggest in Germany. They invited international people for lectures and there was this guy Christian De Vita who was working on Fantastic Mr. Fox as the storyboard artist. After his lecture, I went to him and asked if he had contacts or knew if there's another stop-motion feature film planned.

It was indeed, Frankenweenie. He gave me the line producer's email address. I applied, a month later he replied back and said, "Yeah, we are still in pre-production. We are interested. It's happening in London." I was in Stuttgart. "Are you interested in moving to London?" I'm like, "Hell yes!" Then that's how my journey started. I went straight into Frankenweenie and what a dream. Because of my technical background, the camera crew wanted me to be there as a trainee.

They loved what I was doing and I worked my way up to become a camera assistant. Yeah, it was two years on Frankenweenie, because again, stop motion takes such a long time, but it was magic, wonderland.

Cory Livengood:

What are some of the differences between your live-action, traditional cinematography and pivoting over to stop motion?

Ozlem Akturk:

Well, as I mentioned, stop motion takes a lot of time. Live action, you shoot, have a little discussion and then you just continue shooting. On stop motion, depending how long the scene is, a second is the animator has to shoot 24 frames. If it's animated on ones, if it's animated on twos, it's a bit faster, 12 frames. But it's time, it's actually time. And a huge amount of details you put into it. It's less forgiving when someone kicks just a bit of light. If the light bulb pops and you have to replace it, you can immediately see the change. In live action, you don't have those problems.

Cory Livengood:

Is The Tiny Chef shot on ones or twos or depends?

Ozlem Akturk:

It's mainly shot on twos. On feature films, it's mainly on ones., but they have the budgets to do it. The other thing is whenever we have motion control, we have to do it on ones, because otherwise, the camera moves frame by frame. If the animator doesn't animate the second frame, you will see that.

Cory Livengood:

I would love to know a little bit of the inspiration. What inspires you as a cinematographer in the outside world? What do you see and bring to your sets?

Ozlem Akturk:

Oh, well, it's always nature, isn't it? Although I also like to get inspired by other people’s work and art as well and think internally about how to adapt it to my scenes.

Cory Livengood:

He does live in a stump, I guess that makes sense.

Ozlem Akturk:

Yeah, nature is one of those things. We always try to get some dapples, so it looks like from the top, light is coming through. Who knows? Through plants or leaves. I'm trying to get some structure into the background, some dapples with the lights, so that has a nice wrap around it. But then again, I work on a really small set, where it's sometimes really difficult to get the lights properly in. You just have to cheat a lot or sometimes you just go with it.

The other thing I love is when you can put practicals in it. Nowadays, LEDs are so helpful and powerful despite their small size. We sometimes have...oh, I have to build my own little lights and just put it into the scene, which I also love just working with miniature.

Cory Livengood:

Yeah, that's interesting. How much overlap is there between you and the set designer and fabricators and stuff like that? It sounds like you work hand in hand.

Ozlem Akturk:

Yes, that is right. We are in such close communication. Every time, we have to. There's no way around it. Yeah, it works perfectly. Jason is amazing, he's our production designer, and he's doing such great work and is very hands-on.

Cory Livengood:

How did you end up meeting Adam Reid and Rachel Larsen and coming up with this idea for the Tiny Chef? What was the synthesis of that idea?

Ozlem Akturk:

Well, I worked with Rachel on Isle of Dogs. We became friends and then after Isle of Dogs, everyone went their own path, but on Isle of Dogs, she showed me she had that green little puppet, but she didn't know what to do with it. So that went back into a box. In 2018, I wanted to do a live-action cooking show, my own project, because I was burned out from doing jobs for other people. I was like, it's not satisfying anymore. I was like, okay, let's focus on your own project. Because I was pushing it away and I was looking for a proper kitchen location, I was on a location scout.

Then Rachel was in New Zealand doing another animation series called Kiri and Lou. She was working there as an animator, but she started on her Instagram account doing miniature food. It looked really real. That just gave me the idea. I instantly contacted her, I was like, "Girl! Let's do a stop-motion cooking show, and your character, let's call him the Tiny Chef. He's the main character."

She instantly loved it. From there, we instantly got on Facebook, social media, Instagram, and YouTube to get the name, and see if that name was available. From there, we grabbed everything, and kicked it off. I told her, "We need an apron, we need a chef's hat." She did it. The next day, she built a chef's hat, but she didn't have an apron.

Cory Livengood:

It's really blown up so quickly too, which is just really crazy.

Ozlem Akturk:

Yeah, it was crazy. It was crazy. I instantly booked the flight to New Zealand and we were like, "We're going to bloody do this," and we did it. The moment I went to New Zealand, I helped again, setting up, lighting the first kitchen set. We did a couple of clips.

Matt Hutchinson is the voice of chef and that's Rachel's sister's husband. He always did that voice and she was like, "It might fit," and it did. It's crazy how everything just came together. Adam saw what we did and he wrote to us. Rachel knew Adam from a festival. He helped us with the website and that's how we came together.

Cory Livengood:

That's crazy. The moral of that story to me just seems like putting yourself out there, meeting people, and just never letting go of those connections. Or not being so worried that something's going to happen right in the moment, but you can come back to it years later. The fact that the Tiny Chef puppet was put in a box and it was later on, here's the idea. Like you said, meeting people at a festival or on a job or whatever it might be, and just cultivating those connections with people..

Ozlem Akturk:

The other thing is you don't have to do it alone. We are surrounded by so many creative people. If you find like-minded people and you feel like you can work together, then definitely do it as a team. It makes such a big difference to go through challenges together and push you up together.

Meryn Hayes:

What do you think about the Tiny Chef that just struck everyone?

Ozlem Akturk:

We had the idea, we wanted kindness and a change, showing people should be kind and also environmentally friendly. We are wasting so much food and we use so much material. We wanted to integrate it with him, as representing him as a soul of the earth and being kind, gentle, loving animals, avoiding littering everywhere, and just being mindful towards the future and hopefully doing a great impact on kids especially, but then we got so many grownups as followers, which is so funny. But it's great. I love that it attracts every age group.

Meryn Hayes:

I also love that with the world being so chaotic at times, just a reminder that being kind and reminder that we've got one earth. All of that kindness is important, and especially instilling that at such a young age for kids, it's just so important.

Ozlem Akturk:

Yeah. That's also why he's vegan. It's not that you have to be vegan, but just to introduce it to people who don't have a clue what it means.

Cory Livengood:

It definitely normalizes being vegan or being vegetarian, which is cool. What was it like when Tiny Chef went from a social media phenomenon to television?

Ozlem Akturk:

Well, the thing is, every storyline has a truth. It's all the things we went through, it took such a long time to find a network. I say a long time but on the other hand, if you compare it to other creators, we are in a fast lane.

Normally, it takes a minimum five years until you might get a show. We had a high interest of networks, but again, it took so long and it was such back and forth. That fear. Are you going to get it or not? We thought, we just put it in and he goes through the same story. Yeah, it's actually what we lived through.

Meryn Hayes:

How did that production timelines change from when y'all were doing it on your end and then for Nickelodeon? Did that change your process at all?

Ozlem Akturk:

Oh, yeah. You have to wait for approval and that takes a long time. You see it, and on social media, we have an idea and we instantly just flip it over and make it so we are just on it. That's how we also build up the social media accounts so quickly, because we are not discussing too much. We have a brilliant idea. Everyone is laughing. Every time when we know everyone is laughing, that's the idea. We just do it.

On the TV show, you have to wait for approval and have discussions with executives in LA to get the go. You have to understand the show was shot in Manchester UK and being in the UK and working with the 8 hour time difference just made it slower too before getting an answer.

Cory Livengood:

You attracted Kristen Bell, which is really funny. I love that she's a regular on the show now and also a producer, is that correct?

Ozlem Akturk:

Yeah, she's also a producer, she's helping us. She's amazing.

*The Tiny Chef and Kristen Bell on* *S1 E1 ‘Pancakes/S’Mores’*

Cory Livengood:

Yeah, I know. It's hilarious. I was just watching before the interview. One of the episodes where they're just chatting on the phone with each other, Tiny Chef and Kristen just cracks me up. It's so funny. Did she just see it on social media and decide she wanted to be a part of that? How did that relationship form?

Ozlem Akturk:

Jackie Tohn found us first because she was obsessed with miniatures and she introduced us to Kristen Bell. Jackie Tohn is really good friends with Kristen Bell. Kristen Bell contacted us and said, "Hey, love what you're doing, and let me know if I can help you guys."

We are like, "Hell yes." We met with her. As you know, she has the production company, Dunshire Productions with Morgan Sackett and a couple of other creatives. She was saying how she could help us. We were instantly, "Yeah, all right. Let's partner up." As a person and Pro, she's amazing. No bullshit.

Cory Livengood:

Well, stop motion takes so long to do, that you don't need everything else to take so long to do. You just need to cut to the chase.

Ozlem Akturk:

But it still takes such a long time. I wish people would react quickly, but no. Especially again, when so many people are involved, you have to be patient and it's okay.

Cory Livengood:

Some of the things I really like about the cinematography of the show, you mentioned one of them, which are the practical lights that you've integrated into the sets and stuff like that. I think that's really cool.

Another thing I like is the depth of field. There are a lot of shots that have a lot of focus depth to them, which must be difficult to achieve. I don't know if there's any tips or tricks or ways of shooting that you've found or anything that allow you to achieve results that are a little bit more traditional feeling in that sense.

Ozlem Akturk:

As in live-action, you have a focus puller, second camera assistant. On this one, you have just an animator. What I do is, if it's really a difficult shot, where the character moves back and forth, then I work with the animator, because he will need to animate the depth of field too.

I will go with him through the points where he starts and ends, and a third point for the middle, I line it up on the lens, mark it up, and also show him how to do it. Because another thing is when you make a mistake and you have to redo the frame, you have to go back with the focus too. But the thing is, because it still lenses, the lens breadth in it. If you go in the wrong direction, it might jitter. I had to tell him that he goes over the point and then goes back in the right direction, so it goes in the right direction again when he rotates it.

Cory Livengood:

The attention to detail that I have to overshoot just to push it the right way so you're in the right groove to animate your focus. That's really interesting.

Ozlem Akturk:

But then again, if you have a bigger budget because, in feature films, we don't let the animator do that. Dragonframe is a stop motion program, which also can control the motion control. Then it's all automated, but again, you have to speak to the animator again to find those start and end positions and the middle point, but the difference is you have the tool which does it automatically

Another thing you do on a feature film, you block it through with everything, just a rough block just to see the focus hit the point. Then he goes for the real animation, but again, on TV stop-motion, you barely have time to block it. You have to go straight to it. Then the safest thing is the animator just does it himself. They are so good, but then again, it adds to the timing for him to finish the shot.

Cory Livengood:

Another thing you do a lot of, which is interesting, is to have Tiny Chef interact with real people in the same shot, which is really cool. I wonder, how much post-production work goes into some of those composite shots, or maybe just in the show in general when putting it together after the shoot?

Ozlem Akturk:

It all depends. The easiest is when they don't cross. That's really little post-production. It's just finding the places where it's the easiest to cut around and then getting the color to the same ratio, so you don't see the line where it's merged. The moment where they cross live-action and Chef, we will need to use a blue screen. Then, of course, that's more work for post-production to clean it up. But yeah, I love it. Just having the challenge and seeing him in the real world.

That's why we are also looking into new technology. Hopefully, who knows? Another thing is we would like to do handheld shots and hopefully build a CGI pipeline to have more and more in crowded situations and outside. We would take plates, film them, and then integrate the CGI into that scene. Hopefully, in a year, you have to always update your knowledge and technology and also implement it. Of course, we are going to keep doing what we love. Stop motion is always our first love, but we also want to push quality, and challenges and want to make sure people think he's real.

Cory Livengood"

Yeah. He is real. What do you mean?

Not only even in the world of video, but you also have books now. What's in the future for Tiny Chef, as far as just the universe goes?

Ozlem Akturk:

Well, the world is our oyster, right? It would be amazing as just said, if we can integrate more into the world and interact more with people outside being in a restaurant. Then the other thing is we would love to do a cooking game or maybe also... what would be amazing, a virtual reality game. People can be in his stump and have to do things as a chef. I don't know, that would be amazing, but continue building his universe.

Meryn Hayes:

I just hear all that and have to think through the business potential and the licensing and the contracts, and as someone who comes from a creative background, how do you navigate that side of this, which is the financials and protecting the copyright? A lot of the people that are coming to this festival, if they're freelancers, they've come into this as artists and are trying to learn the business end as they go. What advice do you have for people on the business side?

Ozlem Akturk:

On the business side. When we started, we knew we didn't want to sell the chef. We wanted to keep the rights as much as possible. That was the first mission. Without anyone agreeing to it, we weren't ready to go and contract with them. We protected our idea. We were really hard with that, but then on the other side, we had the leverage because a lot of people don't have we could build him up on social media and make a brand out of it. I think a lot of creative people struggle with that.

It's tough. They are all sharks and they want to take it away. It's sad, but it is what it is. The thing is, if you have a project where you are behind it with heart, you have to weigh in. If you take the money, you have to play with their rules. Or are you going to try it the hard way and go your own way without any financial help? Then hope you can sell merchandise and make money like that and support yourself, but that's really a long way and hard as well.

We tried that, but our problem is again stop motion, you have to see it as live-action because everything is physical. You have to build it. It's the same people we hire, you would hire for live-action to build stuff. It is expensive and we needed more investments. We said, "Okay, we need the network." That helped a lot, but again, our first mission was to protect the idea.

Meryn Hayes:

It sounds like you and Rachel and Adam had talked about that, the heart or the money, which is a very hard balance, especially early on. You need the money, but coming to the network saying, "We're keeping him, we're keeping Tiny Chef," that's great.

Ozlem Akturk:

Well, when we started, we were working on other projects and we did the extra hours at night. On the weekends, we still do weekends and nights, but anyway, we did the normal jobs or freelance jobs just to get money in. Then we focused on our free time on the Tiny Chef. We were like, we’re going to continue like that, but we're not going to sell it, because we desperately need money.

We protected it really, really well. Nickelodeon was willing to go with our needs and wishes.

Meryn Hayes:

Good for y'all. What advice do you have for someone who's just getting started or wants to get into stop motion or want to make their version of The Tiny Chef type passion project? What advice do you have for people?

Ozlem Akturk

If they want to see the professional side, I would say apply at one of the big studios, Laika or ShadowMachine ... these are in Portland. If you are in LA, then they're smaller stop-motion companies. There’s also Stoopid Buddy Stoodios, Bix Pix, and Apartment D.

I would say just write them, write to everyone. Be specific about what you like to do, but be willing to do anything when they ask you. You have to go through that process. Ask questions, a lot of questions. People are so kind, especially in stop motion ... they're amazing, seriously. Yeah, they're all chill and they will take the time and show you. Nothing to be afraid of. If you want to do it yourself, you can do that too. Nowadays, it's so easy, even with your iPhone, you can connect it with Dragonframe and take stop frames. You don't even need a fancy camera. Then just an easy light setup. Again, whatever you have in the house, if it's like a desk lamp or something, use that just to get a feel about how it works. If you want to become an animator or building stuff, just do it.

Again, there are so many tutorials on YouTube. You can find so much if you Google, it's ridiculous. But if you want to have professional insights, you should try to apply at those companies. Get the connection and networking game on.

Meryn Hayes:

I love hearing how welcoming the community is. I think it's really special that in these communities, people are so willing to help other people who are trying to get into it or offer advice. I think it's just one of the reasons why we do the Bash, is to let the community have a point where they can meet and talk and ask questions and get advice and help. I just love hearing that the stop-motion community is as welcoming.

Ozlem Akturk:

Yeah, it is. Everyone's so nice. It's unbelievable. I never worked in a kinder environment.

Cory Livengood:

This has been a great conversation. We really, really appreciate it.

Ozlem Akturk:

Oh, I appreciate you guys. Again, respect what you guys are doing and it is such a pleasure meeting you.

Cory Livengood:

Yeah, likewise.

Meryn Hayes:

Really excited to see you in July!

Meet the speakers: Macaela VanderMost

Meet the speakers: BIEN

Meet the speakers: Ozlem Akturk

The Dash Bash venue