Takeover Tuesday with Allen Laseter
An interview with Allen Laseter: an animator, designer, and director making stuff for brands and studios around the world.
Q&A with Allen Laseter
Read time: 5min
Mack Garrison:
Allen! Thanks so much for taking the time to chat with us for this week's Tuesday Takeover. For those who are not familiar with you or your work, could you give us a little intro and creative background?
Allen Laseter:
Thanks for having me. I am an animator/illustrator type, now working as Creative Director along with my wife and business partner Lindsey Laseter for our very newly formed studio, Lasso.
My background is really more in the live action world. I went to a small art school in Nashville where I still live and work and studied film, concentrating mostly on directing and cinematography, but the school was small and scrappy enough that you really were able to learn how to do everything, which in retrospect was a massive bonus.
Lasso Studio
My dream at that time was to make narrative films as a director, but when I graduated, reality set in and I started my career freelancing around town working on sets, editing, occasionally “directing” tiny commercials for local businesses, and trying my best to make non-commercial short films and other weird projects with friends.
I was doing this for a couple years until my friend who was really into After Effects and an all around technical wizard passed on a motion graphics type of job to me that he was not able to take on. The school I’d gone to didn’t have any sort of motion or even VFX program, but I’d picked up some After Effects tips from him and had made some stuff for fun just poking around on my own time. I decided to take on the project with my incredibly limited knowledge, and realized quickly how little ill-equipped I was. However, I was forced to learn a lot on the project very quickly, and by the end, I realized that I really liked working this way and wanted to seek out more of this kind of work.
This was still in the first half of the 2010’s when Vimeo had what felt like a really thriving and active motion community, and I was lucky enough to, over time, fall into a network and gradually improve my skills and find work until I had worked out a pretty nice freelance groove, working with various studios around the country as a remote animator, and occasional designer. I kept working on my chops until I began to pursue directing, and eventually got the crazy idea to form a studio!
Mack Garrison:
You've worked on a lot of fun projects over the years, but I'd love to know which have been some of your personal favorites.
Allen Laseter:
The first one that comes to mind is the first project I did for Ted-Ed on the topic of the Hedonic Treadmill framed around the scenario of Winning the Lottery and how it affects your happiness long term. I think this was the first time I had the opportunity to create a project from scratch, aside from the script which was supplied to me, and really approach a client project with a director’s mindset, in terms of really shaping how the overall piece would feel to an audience. It was also by far the longest thing I’d made, being over 4 minutes long. I think this project in particular gave me a big boost in my freelance career.
TED-Ed: Will winning the lottery make you happier?
Another memorable one for me was a short spot I did for Lagunitas as part of their “Mumblephone” series. The task was to take a voice mail that had been left on the company's customer feedback phone line and create an animation to it. That was basically the entire brief and I was allowed to do just about anything I wanted, which is rare and one of my favorite things. It was one of the early times where I got to really be adventurous and imaginative as well as really focus on a narrative for a client project.
Lagunitas: Mumblephone
Mack Garrison:
A lot of folks look up to you as a creative leader so I'd love to know who you look up to?
Allen Laseter:
That’s a really nice thought! This may sound like a cop out, but I look up to tons of people, from people who I know well to some I’ve never even met, and I hate to leave anyone out, so I will purposefully keep this short and limit it to our niche of the industry and name Zac Dixon and Sam Cowden who founded IV Studio here in Nashville. I look up to them for their rare mix of creativity and business ambition. They manage to seemingly keep their studio insanely busy with both client and self initiated projects alike and are extremely successful in both areas which is a huge inspiration to me.
Mack Garrison:
Our industry has been growing like crazy and we have more freelancers than we've ever had before. Any words of wisdom you could share with the next generation of creators? Things you wished you knew as a freelancer?
Allen Laseter:
When you get stuck or run into a problem that you can’t figure out on your own, tell someone quickly instead of burning time trying in vain to figure it out yourself for the sake of your ego. This was a big temptation early in my career and it never worked out well.
Be nice to people, even if they annoy you. It’s still a pretty small field. This will help from a business perspective and from a human perspective.
Hire a cpa.
Mack Garrison:
You and your wife Lindsey recently started a new studio called Lasso which is so exciting! What was the reason for the transition from freelancer to studio owner?
Allen Laseter:
Before Lindsey and I officially decided to start building our studio, I had personally been at a point for a while where I felt like I was ready to move on to something new, but wasn’t sure what. I had been freelancing for a while and enjoyed it but the thing I always craved was more influence over the entire process. I tried going the director route for a little bit and worked with a few different reps, but ultimately nothing ever really worked out all that well.
I was already feeling this in early 2020 and the biggest push in this direction came in March when the pandemic took over everything and we locked down and began to figure out how to work in the same space while raising our daughter and learning how to balance all the new things that stemmed from that. We also just happened to be beginning to collaborate on a project together for the first time ever, even though we were still independent freelancers. These experiences made us realize that, while we had to learn a new way of communicating (and are still learning it) we actually worked pretty well together and that our skill sets overlap very nicely and allow us to do work that we think is unique from a lot that is out there.
Some thumbnails from Allen’s portfolio
Mack Garrison:
What are you hoping to accomplish in the studio space that you weren't able to do as a freelancer?
Allen Laseter:
The main things for me are having more control over what work I take on, more influence over the end result of the work, higher quality/bigger scope projects that become possible when leading teams (as opposed to just working by myself which I’ve often done in the past) and finally, focusing more on actual directing skills, which was kind of my original goal back in film school, just in a different environment.
Mack Garrison:
What do you think the future holds for our industry? Anything in particular you're excited about or things that worry you?
Allen Laseter:
As things become more and more digital, I think that will create more and more opportunity for our kind of work. In particular, I’m excited about what this means for brand identities as this is the main focus for our studio, Lasso. In an increasingly digital space, it’s less and less necessary for a brand’s visual identity to be thought of as static first. It’s interesting to think of a brand in terms of its potential to be a changing and dynamic thing, which is what we are trying to do at Lasso.
On the other hand, and from a more zoomed out perspective, I worry about the increasing percentage of our lives that are spent in the digital realm and I think we should all go outside way more!.
Mack Garrison:
Last but not least, any new projects or creative endeavors we should be on the lookout for?
Allen Laseter:
Lasso will finally be launching a portfolio in mid-March, so keep an eye out for that!