Interviewing Idols: Joey Korenman
Flordia-based designer, teacher, author, and founder of School Of Motion, Joey Korenman, is a legend in the motion design community. He’s the reason so many people started their motion design journey, and endless people know who he is. I’m so glad I got a chance to talk to him, and hope you enjoy the interview.
Before I start, I just want to say that I’m incredibly thankful to Joey for taking the time to do this interview. He’s one of the biggest reasons myself and many other designers are working as motion designers in the industry today.
His courses, his book, and his forums all are full of incredible inspiration and information. He’s done endless talks around the world, and of course, is the founder of School of Motion a.k.a SOM, a dedicated school for premium motion design training.
Why does he inspire me?
As many of you in the Motion space will know, Joey’s book ‘The Freelance Manifesto’ is critically acclaimed and extremely popular. It’s a fantastic book, and I read it at the start of my university course. It’s easy to read, fun, and full of tips and tricks to get you on the right track as a freelancer. The book is full of tips on what to say and not to say to clients, as well as some great little sneaky ways of reaching out to the right people to get hired, and also how to keep your clients. Joey basically lays out 4 key phases (with an optional 5th phase) for taking control of your time as a motion designer. Finding your own work, dealing with clients, how to build your portfolio website. It’s all in here, and it’s super detailed.
From the book, it’s clear to see how passionate Joey is about helping people in the design industry, and that's where we come to School of Motion. SOM is an absolutely incredible platform built by Joey and his team. To date, there have been over 18,000 alumni. Yep, that’s right 18,000 people who’ve graduated from a SOM course. If that doesn’t get you excited about the next generation of designers, I don’t know what will! The courses range from basics from After Effects, to more skilled development in C4D with Octane. The courses are taught by true professionals, with people like David Ariew, Mark Christiansen, EJ Hassenfratz, and Joey himself taking you through their process and giving a great rundown of their skillset. They are all excellent teachers, and It’s clear that SOM is more than just a run-of-the-mill training platform — and a full-scale online school.
Joey also has been doing the occasional portfolio review over on Twitter, and has so many talks talking about his career and even more industry advice. He’s done plenty of podcasts with the likes of Scott Davis (great podcast), Motionographer, MotionHash, and through the SMO platform. If you didn’t know already, the SOM website has a blog section with some fantastic resources & podcasts!
Overall, Joey is a true asset to the community, and there are thousands of motion designers who wouldn’t be in the position they are in if it wasn’t for Joey and his drive to educate and help the new generation of designers.
The Interview part
I was lucky enough to be able to ask Joey some questions about himself and his career. I hope this’ll give you a little bit of an insight into his life, personal and commercial as well as his design process. It’s not every day you get to interview an idol!
1. Who are you, and how did you start your journey into the world of design?
Hey Charlie, nice to meet you! I got into motion design when I was a kid. I really enjoyed movies and special effects with my brother and sister — I always tried to make little home movies and was kind of obsessed with doing DIY special effects. I was born in 1981, so when I was in middle school and really getting into this stuff, it was the early nineties. There wasn’t much you could do on the average home computer.
Years ago, I had a bar mitzvah and with some of the money I got from it, I bought an early video capture card. It was probably like $500, a lot of money now and then! It could digitize video onto your computer at about 10 frames a second, 320 by 240 pixels. (Yep you heard me, 320 by 240). I just started messing around with that stuff really.
I didn’t really know what I was doing at all, but I knew it was fun.
I’m pretty sure at some point downloaded a cracked version of this early 3D app, True Space. So I was messing around with 3d animation probably when I was like 13 or 14. From this humble beginning, like where many of us motion designers came from, I went to college and picked a major in film television. In the end, I went to Boston University. While I was there, I learned a lot of stuff that I don’t use at all now, to be honest. I learned how to use a Bolex film camera and I learned how to edit on a Steenbeck machine. They were some great experiences, I really enjoyed it.
With animation, I’m pretty much all self-taught. I got out of school, I taught myself, and I learned how to use final cut pro. I bought the educational version for like 300 bucks. I used it for my senior thesis film, which is terrible and we’ll never see the light of day, but I did have some special effects in it, which is when I also figured out how to use After Effects. After that, I ended up interning at a bunch of places and getting a job out of school as an assistant editor.
Pretty quickly after this, I got myself a job as a full-time video editor. The main reason I got the job? It was because I knew after effects. At this place I was editing and animation for clients, mainly doing small commercials and working with ad agencies and stuff like that. This was my first real job, which I did for about two and half years. It took this time to realize what I really wanted to focus on, which was the After Effects part. I wanted to pursue Motion Graphics, so I quit and I went freelance when I was probably 23 or 24.
It all sort of just took off from there, and I started to work all over Boston. I managed to get a few freelance gigs at a studio there called Viewpoint Creative, and that’s basically where I learned what design is. It wasn’t probably until three or four years into my career that I actually felt like I was good at anything, but I was definitely hooked. Since then, I’ve just been kind of hooked on After effects and design and just figuring out how to animate.
I realized when I left that world to focus on School of Motion (SOM), and really focus on teaching, that’s when I got obsessed with looking at other artists projects. The best artists are so good, as they are the ones that always try to reverse engineer projects. They always want to learn more. I’ll say that maybe one thing that’s a little different about me, is like if you talk to Ash Thorpe or someone like that, a really world-class designer, a lot of those guys got into this because they love art and they’re artists and they just cannot help it.
They have to make art and visual arts specifically. That’s not me. I actually got into it because I like to problem solve and I like building things out of Legos haha.
Motion graphics for me is like having a problem. You have something to solve, and it’s like figuring it out is incredibly fun!
And it’s the same with C4D. I used to use Cinema 4D every single day as part of my role as lead animator at Toil, which was the studio that I co-founded in Boston — so I didn’t just reverse engineer 2D motion, but 3D too!
School Of Motion is the same thing. Running a company is exactly like that. It’s like, you’ve got this machine and you need to reconfigure it and make it work and make it into something that can self-sustain.
2. Could you give some insight into your creative process?
There’s actually a free class on SOM called the path to MoGraph. So if anyone wants, you can go sign up for that. It’s free and I basically take you through the entire process of how I specifically do motion design projects. I learned my process over years of doing it wrong and finally, with being around enough good people, I finally got it. I start with, always, what is the goal? It’s very rare that I’m sitting down to just make art. I don’t approach what I do like an artist who’s just trying to be inspired. Most of the stuff I do is for clients or students or something like that. So I’m usually coming at it from a very pragmatic standpoint.
“What is the goal of this? What’s the point? Why am I doing this at all?”.
Then from there, I find the goal. What’s some interesting concept that I can use to kind of build a path to that goal? A good example is the path to MoGraph. That’s a free class and I wanted to make a title animation for it. Basically, a hype animation for the class, that I also wanted to use as a case study for “how do you build a title sequence?”. I wanted that title sequence to kind of hint at what’s in the class and also be almost like a little microcosm of what motion design looks like.
I love using mind maps, they are a great free association exercise. When things pop into my head e.g. when I think about Path to Mograph, there’s the word path right there, and what does that mean? Okay. A path is like when you’re using after effects. You can literally drop paths. Like Desi paths. Well, that’s kind of interesting, so maybe there’s a digital version of that where there’s like a line and you’re following that. This is the device that takes you through the piece. If it’s going to be a microcosm of motion design, then I’m gonna want to see Photoshop. I’m gonna want to see illustrator. I’m gonna wanna see storyboards. I’m probably gonna want to see some rough pencil sketches because I do actually like to sketch things out with a pencil before I do anything.
I personally use drawings mostly to get the idea out of my head in a format where I know it’s not going to look good if it’s like a pencil and paper and I’m drawing it this big on purpose. So I can stop fixating on details. Doing roughs helps me focus on the idea before and get the idea to work. Then I can worry about what it looks like later. I’ll then take those little sketches, bring them into Photoshop or illustrator or whatever I need.
I’ll then use the design knowledge that I’ve accumulated a.ka. begged and borrowed and stolen, over the years to build out storyboards. I really want to know what most of the thing is going to look like down to the pixel before I ever opened after effects. Because once I’m in AE I find I’m in like animator mode, which it’s, it’s kind of like more of an engineering mindset that I take to it.
That will hamstring you if you’re not careful because you’ll be in after effects trying to design.
But yet at the same time, you’re worried about how hard it’s going to be to animate the thing you just designed. You shouldn’t worry about that. That’s why I like designing in other apps. After this, when I’m in AE, I do my thing and then I bring it into premiere usually to assemble and put the soundtrack together. And that's my process! It’s pretty much the standard way that everyone does it in the industry now, with a few shortcuts here and there. Some people add even more steps, there are mood boards and other things that when clients get involved that you might want to think about.
If you’re doing an animated video there’s so many pieces to it. You really have to almost trick yourself into not focusing on the final thing right away.
3. Where did/do you get your inspiration for projects? Who inspires you?!
I haven’t done client work in a really long time now. But, I’ll give you some ideas!
In all honesty, I don’t really do much motion design anymore. For most of the last nine or ten years, it was running SOM and figuring out how to do that. I’ve recently stepped down as CEO and promoted Elena. So, to be honest, I’m not even sure like what my next project will be! What I found out in general, is that if, if I need to do a motion design project and I need inspiration, the easy thing to do is go get on Motionographer or go look at what Ordinary Folks are doing. Buck too! There are so many good studios out there now!
I remember watching Jorge, who now runs ordinary folk, early in his career kind of figure out, oh my gosh, you can animate really simple shapes and create visual metaphors for things. And all of a sudden everyone was doing that. So I started doing that too. I’m like, oh, this is great because, I’m not a great designer, but I can make a circle look damn cool! I was a pretty good animator, so I knew I could do something interesting with that. This was kind of like the hacky way of doing it haha.
I do think you need to be in a physical/mental state to design/be creative. There’s a difference if I’m sitting down to animate something compared to just normal everyday life. I need to block off my surroundings and get into a flow state. Currently, we are working on this project kind of for School of Motion, where we want to take the software that runs our school, which we built from scratch, and let other schools use it in order to do that. We need to give it some sort of brand.
I’ll do you a small demo of my ‘In the mode’ process!
So we need to name it something. How do you come up with the name of a software platform? If I sit down at a computer and I’m like trying to think of one and I’m typing them out into a Google Doc, I promise you it’ll never work. What works for me is basically being in some physical state where I’m not 100% focused and in front of the computer. I love to go for a long run because it’s a great distraction. I’ll put on like a podcast and I’ll run. And like 10 minutes later, my brain starts going and I’ll turn the podcast off.
When I’m running in silence and my brain just starts generating! There’s this great book, The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. It gets into the philosophy of like, where do ideas come from and how do you make them so that you can get the ideas.
Personally, I don’t think that you and your brain generate ideas most of the time. I think like the best ideas just pop into your head from God knows where, you know, the universal mind, who the hell knows where it comes from!
Literally, it only happens if I’m like on a run or a walk or a bike ride, or I’m in the car by myself. If I’m in a quiet room at home, it almost never happens, right? Like I need to get the idea somewhere else and then come in and execute and I can execute the idea in my office, close the door, go into a flow state, and knock it out.
To be honest i’d love to try a sensory deprivation chamber. It would be, I think, ideal for me.
4. What are some of the largest challenges you had to overcome during your artmaking process?
In the beginning, with animation especially, but in design generally — it’s like you’re fighting the tools.
The tools are complex even something like Photoshop. Photoshop is incredible don’t get me wrong, but there’s so much to try and play with. Things like Procreate are great because they are so much more intuitive. After effects is not an intuitive tool, you have to learn how to use it. It’s tough and doesn’t make a lot of sense. At first, it really takes a couple of years to get used to it and get wrap your head around like pre-comps and layers properly. The next big struggle for me was, you know, like the gap between you and other artists.
There’s a great video from IRA glass about ‘The Gap’. And now what you’re trying to do is basically mimic good work that you’ve seen that you like, and you can’t, and you don’t know why, and you’re not sure why your work just doesn’t look like that. It creates this, this horrible feeling of,
Here’s where my work is. Here’s where my taste is. My taste is really up here, but I can’t reach that high yet with my work.
It really just takes time and hard work and practice and practice and practice, practice, and good feedback. Then once you’ve put the hours in and practiced a massive amount, you’ve then got to deal with clients and learn to manage that process. It can be really challenging, because first of all, they’re paying you, right? So this creates a whole different dynamic. On top of that, they’re, they have a different goal in mind than you. Your goal is probably to make money and have something good for your reel while their goal is to sell more toilet paper, you know, or whatever it is. Stuff like this makes it really hard, to actually have fun sometimes doing your work
There are plenty of challenges in a design career, but I think those are probably the big three challenges. Learning the tools. Closing the gap between ability and taste, and then learning how to do those things while managing the wants and needs of someone who’s paying you.
It’s a tough job!
5. Do you have any big designs/projects in the works or anything that excites you about the future of your career/industry?
I’m not doing any motion design work professionally anymore, other than teaching it and occasionally doing a tutorial or making something just internally for SOM. But there are a lot of other people doing amazing things in the industry, and there are a lot of big projects in the works that I’m excited about.
The thing I love about SOM is that it’s basically built on top of the motion design industry to assist it. So the new generation of designers, with amazing projects, are always bubbling underneath. If you think about like the motion design industry as the ocean, SOM is probably like half above the surface and half below the surface in the actual ocean. I’m on the top half. Someone who’s actively freelancing is going to have their finger on the pulse of what’s actually going on far better than me, which is why there’s a lot of people at school motion who are like, you know, freelancers and stuff. In turn, these designers keep our fingers on the pulse.
Personally, I’m really excited about the future of SOM and what new courses, lessons and resources we now have to help the motion industry — but also the whole design industry. I’ve spent my whole career doing motion design, so I’m always excited to see what's next. Whether it be advancements to NFT’s or software etc… I love filmmaking, audio and I’m getting more and more into product design, web design, and app design. And these are all areas where the way we teach classes, I think could be very, very useful.
Charlie here! Below is a great article about NFT’s from Joey, really informative
6. I read your Freelance Manifesto book, and loved it! Have you got any more book ideas/or things you’d like to create as an educational tool alongside School of Motion?
You read The Freelance Manifesto? Right on Charlie!
I thought about that book a lot actually. I think it’s funny because the freelance manifesto, if you could see SOM revenue, the freelance manifesto is like a little drop in the bucket. Like it was something that I wrote basically because I did a paid webinar about freelancing and it was very popular.
I didn’t realize how many people out there really were struggling with ‘How To Freelance’. And then I thought, well, if I turn this into a book, it’ll be like, oh, I’ll never have to like answer any questions again haha! I’ll just send them to the book. And also a book’s a really good way of building authority within the industry really quickly.
It was really difficult. Even though it’s not nearly as much of a revenue source as our courses, the feedback I get from people who’ve read that book is insane! Like people take our classes and I get messages all the time saying, oh, thank you so much for building SOM. And this was really helpful. But when people tell me, I read your book a lot of times it’s like some life-changing story, which I love. So I would love it if I was going to do another book, I’d want it to do that. I wouldn’t want it to just be like, here’s a nice coffee table book, right?
If I wrote another book, I’d want it to be another one of those kind of game-changer books for people.
I’m currently thinking of writing a book about how to build an online school and how to teach online. This would be especially good in today's society, with everything like COVID and many businesses working from home. I have a brother and a sister and my brother works for SOM. My sister is a teacher in Texas. She teaches I think sixth grade and her husband teaches high school. And when COVID hit, all teachers had to teach remotely. I was like shocked at how little prepared every teacher was to do this. They were given no resources, no help. None of the schools had a clue what to do. And I wrote this long article, about how SOM works and my philosophy.
I got a crazy response from that. So I think that would be the next book is like my philosophy of teaching online because I think it’s different than a lot of people’s. I think it could really help make online learning. It’s a huge industry.
I don’t think most of whats currently available isn’t very effective, you know? I think I could help make teaching easier, and help people. And that’s my ultimate aim.
7. I’ve listened to many of your previous interviews and noticed how well you communicate and discuss ideas/projects. Have you always been interactive and talkative with people?
That’s a great question. I definitely feel like an introvert, which may sound strange but it’s true! When you hear me on a podcast or you see me in a video, um, I’m kind of bringing my energy to that I learned this by the way, because I was a voiceover artist for many years, which is a whole other funny story, how that happened. Doing this, I learned what the energy was when you’re sitting with someone and just talking to them — it always feels dead. When there’s a camera or a microphone in front of you, it’s like, there’s something just, it’s like when you’re there in the room with somebody, their facial expressions, and their voice and the tone of their voice, all that stuff is so important. It’s just the fact that they’re there, right?
And their energies in the room with you, you feel it more than when you can have that exact same interaction over a camera and it feels deadly.
When you learn to do voiceovers, you have to basically amp everything way up so much more than feels comfortable. It’s really awkward for a while when, when you learn to do it. So I just sort of brought that philosophy to being on camera and when hosting the podcast. This energy is definitely intentional, but because I’m an introvert, bringing that energy drains shit out of me. I was just at NAB, which is this giant conference in Las Vegas every year. When I go to these things, I’m recognized quite a bit in the motion design spots, which is fun, but it’s also really draining because I have to constantly talk and talk and talk. It’s frustrating because so many people are saying really nice things. And I’m like, “Oh my God, thank you!”. It’s so nice to hear that. But at the end of the night, I’m exhausted. My wife is actually an extrovert. So when she talks to people, she could talk all night and she gets more energy, like feeds her haha!
I’m an introvert, but I’m not shy, which maybe that’s what you’ve noticed. It’s funny because in some situations I am shy, but in the world of motion design and talking to artists and stuff, I’m not. When I go to conferences, I don’t feel shy and I can get up on stage and speak and I’m fine doing that. I don’t think always been that way. I’ll actually tell you my theory of why, cause I do get that compliment a lot.
I think it’s because of my talent stack, and this is an idea that I got from Scott Adams and I think it’s really brilliant. The idea is this.
I am not world-class at anything. I really am not. I think I’m probably like slightly above average at like maybe eight or 10 things. But those eight or 10 things I’m slightly above average at are completely unique to me. So for example that would be things like playing drums. Voiceovers are another, and video editing, motion, and design teaching too. If you believe in the concept of some people are given gifts, I’d say maybe that would be one I would consider is that I’ve always found it pretty easy to learn something really, really fast and then explain it to someone else.
When you layer those things together and it’s like, okay, you’ve got someone who’s comfortable performing in. The reason that I am like this is because I was in bands for years and years and years I’ve played, I don’t know, 200 shows. I’m comfortable getting up on stage and goofing around. I’ve also done voiceovers for love for years. So I’m very comfortable speaking with energy and talking and using my hands and speaking in front of people that doesn’t bother me.
If you go back and you look at my first tutorial, which is probably still on Vimeo somewhere, I’m very uncomfortable on camera. After doing hundreds of these videos, I’m now very comfortable on camera. It’s really easy for me now to sit down and record a tutorial, but you need to practice these things and your confidence will grow. Most of the time people think you are just good at something — but in reality, you’ve actually spent years doing something!
Charlie here! One of my favorite interviews of Joey!
8. Have you seen any students work from any of the School of Motion classes, that you just love?
Yeah. My favorite thing of all time is our school emotion manifesto video that Ordinary Folk did. And if you haven’t seen it, it’s on their website, it’s on our YouTube channel. This was done by Ordinary Folk, but part of the deal was we’re going to hire you guys to do this, but you need to hire some school of motion, alumni freelance to help out on it. They had some students animate certain shots. And then later on in the video, they show you the shots that were animated and you see the student’s name and stuff.
Those students were handpicked and they were some of the ones that, have gone on to like do really amazing things. There’s Abigail Bacilla who works at Frame.IO, which has just been acquired by Adobe. There’s also Jordan Bergrin, who actually was one of our first students ever. He’s now freelancing for Elastic and Sieracki and directing title sequences.
Nol Honig who teaches the After Effects Kickstart course was a SOM student who took the Animation BootCamp course and now he just directed the title sequence for a Netflix show. There are a lot of fantastic graduates, and I love seeing them go on to amazing things. I mean, there’s probably like hundreds of stories like that. And we have, I think at this point, something like 15, or I think it might even be closer to 18,000 alumni now. So there are a lot of stories. I mean, we have a lot of students working at Buck and places like that!
9. Are there any creators that you feel like you just HAVE to collaborate with that you haven’t already?
I’d love to do more collaborations with Chris in the future. I love him. We’re good friends. I think he’s a genius. I’d also love to jam with Andrew Kramer. He’s really hard to pin down haha! A lot of like my favorite artists I’ve gotten to meet and hang out with, or at least interview on the podcast. But overall there’s no one that like on the motion design side, I feel like, oh my God, I really have to work with this person. Mainly I say this because I feel like I’ve been so lucky. Like I’ve really gotten incredibly lucky. Meeting and working with the Ordinary Folk team and them animate for SOM was one of the most surreal experiences of my life.
I remember when I got to host the Blend Conference the first year they threw it and they had buck do the opening credits to it. And they animated all of the speaker’s names and these funny ways, and they animated my name and like, you know, she had like a little kangaroo bouncing around. Cause you know, baby kangaroo is called a Joey. So I mean I feel like I’ve already won the lottery as far as that stuff goes.
There are a lot of people I love to jam with in the future, but they’re more like entrepreneurs. They’re more people that I look at the way that they approach creating new things in the world. You know some people’s work you’re just floored by. Chris Do is a fantastic example of that. Another would be Beeple. I mean come on, who wouldn't want to work with the guy? I’m just in awe of what he’s been able to do. I just hung out with him the other day so I know him a little bit. But it’s incredible to me, like what he’s managed to do with his personal brand. Gary Vaynerchuk is someone I’m really interested in too, along with Seth Godin. Working with Tim Ferris would be a dream come true.
I really do have the itch to do something with music and musicians. I feel like it would be such a great experience being into music myself. I’ve gotten to meet a few fantastic musicians and bands, all because of SOM which has been really cool. I’m trying to figure out, especially now that I’m not the CEO anymore and I have a little more time coming up, maybe what I could do around this idea as music is a huge passion of mine.
10. What’s your absolute best advice for young designers wanting to get into the 3D space/career path?
Great question! It’s a tricky one though, as there are a lot of good answers. If you want to be in the world of advertising and motion and have a really easy time getting professional work, you’re still gonna want to learn C4D. It’s industry-standard, free for students in most education settings, and a great tool to learn as a hobby also. It also depends on your age too. If you're in college or you’re just out of college, I would stay, I would say C4D all day. If my 11-year-old daughter said, “Hey, I want to learn 3d!”. I think this is awesome. I would 100% have her learn Blender at this point because I’m blown away by blender. The technology is incredible, the pace of development, the tools they’re making, and of course, it’s free.
Maxon’s also doing an amazing job updating C4D and keeping it relevant. And obviously, the community is amazing and it’s way easier to learn than Blender also. I do worry that in 10 years, everyone who’s young is already gonna have picked up Blender because it’s free haha. Can’t wait to see the amazing talent that comes about in a few year's time!
First of all, you’re gonna need to figure out what the right app is, and then just start messing with it, start going through tutorials and just try stuff! 3D takes a while to get the hang of how those apps work.
It’s not just the apps too but theoretically how 3D lighting works. This becomes especially important when you get into the GPU render stuff, you have this extra layer of complexity because now to get a clean render, you need to know about noise and samples, right? It’s not easy this 3D stuff!
You can do it the easy way and make your renders take too long, or you can do it the tricky way and optimize and then you’re getting into, physically-based materials. And how do you make those? Do you go and get GSG plus and use their textures? Or do you make your own, what about lighting setups? What about cinematography? How do you learn what camera lenses to use? Do you need to learn modelling or just buy stock objects?
There’s all kinds of things to consider, but the main thing is you need to pick an app and you need to just start using it. Just start making stuff with it. Go get your feet wet and wrap your arms around 3D. You’ll learn it in no time if you practice, and enjoy the journey.
If you get really into it, take a class! Learning 3d through YouTube or free tutorials is really hard because of the abundance of tutorials pulling you in different directions. Youtube learning is possible, but It will take a long time. It’s way, way, way better to be given a specific problem, and then have someone that engineered that problem, knowing that you can solve this one with what I just taught you. For example, they go step by step through problems, and you learn as you go. Youtube is fantastic don’t get me wrong, but I’m biased what can I say! Our C4D classes are taught by the best, and in my opinion, if you want to learn C4D well, take our base camp. We also might have some blender classes out soon, so watch out for them!
Remember I was talking about The Gap? Learning new software is hard, especially quickly. You’ll have moments where you go “How come my stuff doesn’t look like that artist's work?”. Well most likely it’s because they understand composition, color, cinematography, lighting, compositing, post-processing, and all of those things, that’s the art of it. It takes time!
This is where it’s really helpful to have some design background, even understanding sort of like how illustrators compose frames, right? Because as a 3D artist, you’re still making a 2D image, unless you’re doing VR or something like that. So you still need to understand composition. You still need to understand hierarchy and things like that to make a compelling image. Then how do you make money doing 3D? And I think the easiest way is to, is to do client work.
I know NFTs are really big right now, and I think there’s like money to be made in them. Although I think a lot of the NFT projects that are coming out right now are not really sustainable. I think that in a few years, this will be a very saturated, diluted market, and you won’t be doing NFTs full-time unless you’re at the top, top, top of the industry. Everyone goes through the same process of deciding what to do when they start their career, but I think a studio before freelance is a good step. Learning the industry is just as much learning about processes and workflows as it is the software you need for the job!
11. Thank you for taking part in this for me, Joey! It’s been great having the chance to talk to you and learn more about you and your process!
I’m most active on Twitter, and it’s just Jory Korenman. You’ll probably get to see me yapping about whatever project I ended up working on there haha! Oh, there’s also the School Of Motion account too, can’t forget about that!
Thanks for the interview, and keep in touch! Cheers!
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Charlie
