PODCAST: The State of the Motion Design Industry

What's the real state of the Motion Design Industry?

At this point you’ve probably already seen the results our 2017 Motion Design Industry Survey. If not, go check it out...

In the survey we asked Motion Designers from around the industry about their experience. There was actually quite a bit of data that wasn’t included in the survey or infographic so we thought it’d be fun to put together a podcast sharing the results. In the podcast we talk about everything from the gender pay gap to the most popular After Effects channels on YouTube.

Prepare to learn something new...

SHOW NOTES

RESOURCES

• The Motion Design Survey
• Too Old for Mograph?
• Gender Pay Gap
• Hyper Island Motion School
• Freelance Manifesto
• GreyscaleGorilla
• Lynda
• Dribbble
• Behance
• Beeple
• Motion Design Slack

STUDIOS

• Buck
• Giant Ant
• Oddfellows
• Animade
• Cub Studio

CHANNELS

• Video Copilot
• Surfaced Studio
• Mt Mograph
• Evan Abrams
• Mikey Borup

Episode Transcript

Caleb: Our guest today is Joey Korenman of School of Motion. How are you doing, Joey?

Joey: It's good to be here, it's an honor really.

Caleb: We've been trying for a while to get you onto the podcast. I'm so glad that you were able to make time in your schedule to come on.

Joey: I had to clear a couple of things out, but for you Caleb, anything. I'm excited to chat about this. Doing this survey ... I learnt a lot about doing surveys in general, but then also as someone who has been in the industry for over a decade, which I kind of feel weird saying that, but it was really interesting, some of the data we got, and I want to try to read the tea leaves a little bit, so hopefully everybody will learn a little thing or two about what's going on in MoGraph right now.

Caleb: That’s a really good point. I find the motion design industry to be incredibly diverse, and not just in an ethnic kind of way or location base but in the actual types of jobs that people are doing and what their day to day workflow looks like. I think this survey, which is really cool at organizing all of that data together so that we can get a better idea of what the state of the industry is like.

I think, for me, the craziest stat probably out of all of the statistics here on this list is just the number of people that responded to the motion design survey. We ended up having over 1,300 people respond, which is not an incredible amount of people, but in the motion design world ... I didn’t even know there was over 1,300 motion designers that even knew about School of Motion. It's crazy to see that this response was just so positive from around the industry. Did it surprise you seeing that number of people?

Joey: Well, it surprised me just because it's a survey and it takes time out of your day, and people were so enthusiastic about it. It was amazing to see. One other thing I want to say, because you talked about how diverse the industry is, that’s one of the things that I think next year, because we’re planning on doing this survey as a yearly thing, I think next year that’s one of the things I want to improve about the survey, is trying to capture that diversity a little bit.

For example, we got feedback that we didn’t really represent studio owners; we sort of focused on employees or freelancers. There's actually a lot of studios out there, there's a lot of people that run their own agency, who run their own studio and we didn’t give them an opportunity to speak through that survey. I really want to get more granular about what artists are doing specifically, because you're right the industry is splitting off in these weird ways.

I just interviewed Casey Hupke who is working on augmented reality stuff using cinema 4D in unity, and we’ve interviewed Sally from Airbnb who is using code and after effects and body moving to do stuff, and we didn’t really ask about what are you doing in motion design. I think that would be really interesting too. Not to mention the fact that we didn’t really ask people where they were, so some of the salary information you might have to kind of interpret in your own country if you're not in the United States. We are going to improve it a lot for next year. Even with what we got, it was really interesting.

Caleb: I totally agree. I’ll tell you what Joey, why don’t we just talk about some of the data points here. If something is interesting, we can just chat a little bit further about it, and if not, we can just keep moving.

Joey: Works for me. Cool.

Caleb: The first question that we asked was about age, and the motion design industry is notorious for having people who are very young. I was really surprised to see ... That data basically says that over 30% of the respondents say they are either 26 to 30, and then 24% of the respondents said that they are 31 to 35. The average age is about 32.

I was surprised to see that. I think the motion design industry gets a bad rap for just being basically high school kids watching after effects tutorials. I think the reality is there are a lot of people that are quite a few years into this profession, because we've come a long ways in the last decade or so. In your experience, have you found the average age of 32 to be about right for this industry?

Joey: Well, I'm 36, so I'm kind of right in that average. Two things; one, it is a young industry still but ... And I think that there's kind of this coolness to being a young industry and artists like that it's a young industry and so we promote this idea, “Oh, it's a really young industry and it's the cool thing to do,” but the truth is that ... Noel [Honegg 00:06:53] who teaches our after effects kickstart class is 47.

There are now older ... Noel, I'm sorry, I hate to use you as an example of an older MoGrapher. I'm 36, I guess I'm like a middle aged MoGrapher in MoGraph years. The industry is maturing and I think that maybe it's time we start embracing that, that it's not this brand new thing. Maybe the average person on the street still hasn’t heard of it and doesn’t know what it is, but anyone in app development knows about it, VR and AR folks know about it, game dev people know about it, and obviously anyone in advertising, marketing.

To me, it's cool to see. Actually what was really cool was the 21 to 25 year old range. When I was in that age group I barely knew about any of this. It was so new that ... I think I got into it maybe when I was 23, and to see that there's this whole group of young motion designers coming in it makes me really excited because I know that in 20 years the bar is going to be so much higher than it is right now.

There's amazing work coming out right now, but I think in 20 years it's going to be even better. Tyler, over at Giant [Ad 00:08:15] who we interviewed for our after effects kickstart class, when we interviewed him I want to say he was 19 and he was working at Giant Ant. The industry ... We are bringing in people really young now and we are going to have them, they are going to have a full career in it and it's amazing to see. I loved seeing the age data come through on the survey.

Caleb: One question that I have for you as someone who is, don’t take any offense to this, but a little older in the industry; you are in the top quarter in terms of oldness-

Joey: You have to rub it in this way-

Caleb: As someone who is older in the industry, do you find yourself in any way feeling that angst with ... You have younger people coming in that can spend more and more hours in front of a computer working on projects where when you're older there's just more responsibilities that come up, do you feel some of that pressing on you as a motion designer in this industry right now?

Joey: Well, you just opened a can of worms my friend. Well, there's a motionographer guest post that I wrote earlier this year, it was called Too Old for MoGraph, and we can link to it in the show notes. It dealt with that exact topic, which was when I was in my early ‘30s ... Man, I'm not my early ‘30s anymore, I'm going to have a breakdown on this podcast, when I was 30, 31 that’s when I started to notice, wow, I'm in this generation ... I'm basically the second generation of MoGraphers, there were those before me, but I noticed where are all the 50 year olds?

You nailed it; studio culture, it's getting better but there was still this, especially ad agency culture, there was this push to work overnight and it's kind of a badge of honor like how many overnights you pulled and this and that, and when I started a family I just wanted no part of that anymore, and that’s one of the big reasons that I shifted to teaching.

I've talked to a lot of MoGraphers in that, on the back nine I guess, and they ... Almost all of them agree. Once you start a family your priorities shift, ending up being featured on motionographer and stuff like that it becomes less important, it becomes more about work life balance.

Fortunately, I think as our industry matures studios are catching on to that. I've talked to a lot of studio owners, we’ve interviewed a bunch of them and I've met a lot of them through School of Motion, and almost all of them now say that work life balance is super important to them.

Some of them send their employees home at six o’clock, you can't work late, and they don’t do weekend work and stuff like that, at least that’s the idea. I don’t know how accurate, how easy it is to stick to that, but it is becoming more and more important in the industry, because burnout is a real thing.

That pressure is still there, Caleb, but I don’t think it's as big of a problem as it used to be and I think too that ... What I found is that at 32 I was able to do in one day what my 25 year old self would take two weeks to do. I think that most motion designers who've been working in the industry for years they’ll agree with that. You get so much more efficient at doing the job that it takes you a quarter of the time that someone who is 10 years younger than you, so you don’t really have to work harder to do the same job. That just comes with experience.

Caleb: That makes sense. We should probably do an entire podcast about that exact topic sometime soon.

Joey: That’s a good idea.

Caleb: The next data point that we have here is gender; 80% of motion designers are male and 20% are female. Now, obviously the motion design industry, if you go to any meet up or conference, that ratio is pretty close to being, I think in my mind, indicative of the male to female ratio, but if you look at the entire labor force about 47% of the labor force is female. The motion design industry is very skewed male. Is that just historically something that you’ve seen?

Joey: Absolutely, yeah. That data point, it didn’t surprise me at all. It's disheartening, but I ... Two things. One, this is a known issue in the industry, a lot of people talk about this. Lilian Darmono, great illustrator, designer, she's very vocal about it, Erica Gorochow has talked about it. There's a facebook group for female animators called Punanimation that Bee Grandinetti helped start.

There is this effort to bring more female talent into motion design. Why is this the case? Well, I could tell you with 100% certainty it has nothing to do with ability; female talent, male talent totally equal in terms of capability and brilliance and all that.

If I had to guess, and this is just me guessing, I would guess that it probably comes from the fact that initially, the current generation of motion designers that are eight, 10 years into their career got into this ... A lot of them, like myself, got into this from the technical side.

There wasn’t, when we were starting out, a way to learn design and then animation and come in from the art side and then transition into using after effects, using cinema 4D, using these technical tools to make motion design. It was, “Oh, we need an after effects artist, we need a flame artist, we need a 3D artist. Oh, by the way, I suck at design, I should learn some design.”

I think that because it was a more technical thing, our school culture especially in the US, tends to drive more male students into technical things. There's a huge gender disparity in STEM things, which is science, technology, engineering and math, and there's a big initiative in the US to push more girls into those fields. I think a lot of people that end up in motion design come from that sort of background.

I also think that to get ahead in motion design, it's still like this now, to really get ahead you have to be really good at self-promotion. The culture, especially on the internet, I think is definitely biased towards males being able to do that a lot easier than females. It just feels like if you're a female and you're really self-promoting it feels like you're sticking your neck out a little bit more. You're more likely to get slapped down or something like that, and just the culture of parenting encourages males to do that more than females.

I think it's like a very big cultural thing that needs to shift. Here's one thing I did, I looked this up, I was trying to find out what the actual School of Motion audience is. We have a lot of students now and so I think we might be like a lagging indicator for the industry to see, okay, well, what's the ratio of students. We don’t have a ton of data that’s easy to access yet, we will next year.

I looked at our facebook page which has, I don’t know, something like 32,000 likes or fans or something like that, and our page is 71% male, 28% female. That’s a 10% difference. I'd like ... And I can tell you that when I taught at Ringling in person, an in person college that’s definitely a lagging indicator for the industry, it wasn’t 50-50 but it might have been 60-40 male female.

I think that in five to 10 years that’s going to be a very different number. It won't even surprise me next year if it's shifted a few percent so it's more female. That’s my hope to female motion designers out there. I know it probably sucks to hear that only 20% of the industry is female, but everyone is aware that there is a disparity and there's active ... It's actively being worked on and I think it's going to change.

Caleb: Our next data point here is how many years have you been in the industry? This was one of the most surprising data points for me mainly because 48% of the respondents said that they’ve only been in the industry less than five years.

There's a lot of reasons in my mind why this may be true, it's probably because the people that are in the industry less than five years, maybe they're not full-time motion designers, maybe they're just learning, maybe they took a School of Motion boot camp but they're not quite 100% in the industry just yet, but still that’s about half of our respondents that said they have not been in the industry longer than five years.

Do you think that this is going to lead to an oversaturation of motion designers in this industry or do you think that it's a really good thing for everybody, for there to be just such a large amount of people that are new to this industry right now?

Joey: I agree that that data point was insane, I actually wrote down in my notes, holy shit. Those are two things. One, I think that that’s one ... That’s a data point that I suspect is a little exaggerated on our survey, simply because you have to think about who are the type of people that subscribe to our newsletter that are taking our classes that have the time in their day to take a survey, I suspect that number is a little bit higher, a little bit higher than it actually is.

However, that’s still a huge number. What I think is going on is that for all of the talk of doom and gloom that we hear about the motion design industry, typically from the studio side, because the studio model is kind of crumbling a little bit, I think that the actual field of motion design is growing exponentially. I don’t think that there's going to be oversaturation.

Every single producer, studio owner, anybody I've ever talked to who hires freelancers says there's not enough good freelancers out there, it's tough to find talent, it's tough to keep talent in this industry. It's sort of like in the software development world when all of a sudden startups, Web 2.0 hit and everyone needed to be a software engineer and salaries went up and up and up.

I think we are going to see a mini version of that in motion design, because the number of screens is not shrinking, the number of advertising channels is not shrinking, everything is turning into an advertising platform; Snapchat, Instagram, obviously Facebook, even Twitter, they're ramping up their advertising.

Then you’ve got the UX app prototyping world which is exploding, it's getting so big so fast. Then you’ve got AR and VR. I think that that’s a recognition that there's opportunity in this industry, not just to get a job and make money but also to do cool stuff.

A lot of the students that took our after effects kickstart class this last session are graphic designers that are finding that that industry is getting a little oversaturated, it's harder and harder and more competitive, but if you learn some animation skills all of a sudden you turn into almost like a unicorn and you can do different things. I think that’s what it is, Caleb. I think it's a reaction to just the explosion of opportunity in motion design.

Caleb: You were talking about the boot camps and how people can basically over the course of two months learn something that they may have taken years to learn on their own if they were to just go online or ask around or try to get experience. In your mind, even though the majority of the industry has only been in MoGraph for less than five years, is the gap between someone who’s been in the industry 15 years and for five years shrinking in terms of the type of output that they're capable of creating?

10 years ago, in my mind, it seems like it would have taken you five years to get to the point that if someone wanted to start new in the motion design industry right now it would only take them a year and a half to two years to get to it. Do you think that with companies like School of Motion that the gap between people who have been in the industry a long time and the gap of people who are brand new to this industry is shrinking?

Joey: It's a really good question. Obviously the resources available to learn this stuff are way better now than they were when I started learning it. There was no ... We had Creative Cow, we had Mograph.net, that was basically it and those weren't great for learning something from scratch. They were good once you knew a little bit and you could then ask tactical questions and get answers, but there was nothing like School of Motion or MoGraph Mentor or even ... I think we had Linda.com but it was a little smaller. They didn’t have quite the scope of material now.

Frankly, I don’t think anyone really realized at the time ... If you went to Linda.com at that time they had an after effects class, intro to after effects taught by I believe it was taught by Chris and Trish Meyers who were legends in the industry, and that class I never took it.

It may have been amazing at teaching you after effects but it touched nothing about animation and design. That was the big issue with the industry 10 years ago, is you had all these people coming in and learning the tools and not having a clue what to do with them. That problem I think is being solved very quickly, because now you can follow Ash Thorpe on Twitter and you can be exposed every single day to amazing stuff.

You could follow Beeple, you can watch Grayscalegorilla, there's just ... I think you're being calibrated to the high bar, the high quality bar you have to reach way sooner and you have resources, there's Slack groups, the MBA Slack is amazing, you can learn ... You have a question you get it answered in like a minute. I think you're right, I think that the gap in terms of the quality of the output between someone new to the industry and someone 10 years in, that is shrinking.

I still think that it's such a technical field, doing animation is just technical, and learning the tricks and the ways to talk to clients and all that stuff, I don’t know if there's a shortcut to that. I think that still just takes time but it's going to let people find talent and nurture them and bring them up much quicker than it used to be.

Caleb: I think that segways us actually perfectly to our next question, which in my mind was the most important question on the entire survey.

Joey: I agree, yeah.

Caleb: We asked motion designers from around the world, we were given this incredible platform to ask people any question and the question we asked them was which taco is the best, and the responses were ... I won't say they're shocking; beef, one out, 31% of people prefer beef, chicken 25%, we get that; that makes sense, but it's the secondary ones that are really just ... I'm scratching my head man, pork 18%, makes sense, but fish tacos are 15% favorites in the motion design industry, 15%, that seems very high. This is much higher than anything that I thought was going to be responded to.

Joey: I could probably explain that one. I think a lot of the industry in the US anyway is out west. You’ve got LA, and the truth is if you're in LA you're in taco heaven. You're not going to get a chicken taco. Chicken taco is like the safe option. Fish tacos, they can be hit or miss, but when they hit, “Oh boy!”

The best taco I ever had was a fish taco, but if I'm not sure I'm going to get a chicken taco. This is one of the things that we've got to do better next year Caleb, James Kern hit us up on Twitter, and he's an amazing artist, and he pointed out we didn’t offer shrimp tacos as an option on this survey.

I’ll tell you what, if your favorite taco is a shrimp taco I'm not sure, I just ... I'm not sure I can relate to that. I just don’t get that, but in the name of fairness I think we should offer that as an option next time. Veggie taco is a favorite taco. You could basically say that 12% of our industry is vegetarian. I think that’s what that number really says.

Caleb: Right, right.

Joey: If you're not a vegetarian, how is that your favorite taco?

Caleb: Yeah, that makes sense. It makes sense again because most of the people probably live out in LA or the west coast, got a bunch of veggie eaters out there. I'm from Texas, so it's all about beef, and obviously we prefer to eat beef tacos out there.

Joey: I'm glad we got to the bottom of this though, I am.

Caleb: One question we did not ask about this subject was do you prefer hard or soft tacos, because that makes a huge difference. I feel like the container that delivers the meat is very important for the type of meat that you are picking in the taco.

Joey: That’s a fantastic point, and also the guac or no guac controversy. I think we could probably shed some light on that next time.

Caleb: Absolutely, just learning opportunities. We’ll get it right next time. This segways us again into a much more serious question, the question everyone always has is salary, how much am I going to make if I am the average motion designer. We got a ton of responses from full-time motion designers from around the industry. The two big categories here are employees or freelancers, how do they compare.

From the results that we got, I was pretty shocked actually to see how kind of even it was in a lot of the data points. I’ll just go down the line here. Employees make $62,000 a year on average. Freelancers make about $65,000. The highest salary that we had come in from an employee was $190,000. The highest salary we had come in from a freelancer was $320,000 a year which ... Man, good for them.

The biggest difference that I saw was in the number of projects that they work on a year. The average employee said they worked on about 31 projects a year, whereas the average freelancer said that they worked on about 23 projects a year. That’s about a 50% difference.

If you actually think about the number of hours that you put into each project I imagine that freelancers are either able to focus a lot more of their time and effort on making their projects awesome or they have more time to work on their skills or just have free time to regain their sanity. I found that to be really interesting.

Then the number of hours worked per week, employees said they had 41 hours a week on average, and freelancers said they have about 42. All of these data points I think are really interesting. I thought it would be cool if you could talk to, about the number of projects that people work on a year in your experience working as a freelancer and then working in a studio where maybe it kind of felt a little bit more like you were an employee. Did you see the number of projects that you were working on increase whenever you were more in a full-time environment versus you just personally being a freelancer?

Joey: Yeah, definitely. It depends ... First of all, this data that we got about this, the difference between employee and freelance and all that, this is the thing that next time we do this survey I really want to get more. I want to be able to dig a little deeper because I had questions that we couldn’t answer with the data we got. To everyone listening, next year we’re going to split this up a little bit differently.

In terms of the number of projects per year, when you're an employee, and I've been an employee, I've been a freelancer and I've been head of a studio, so I've seen all three viewpoints. When you're an employee your boss is basically trying to maximize the utility of paying you. When you're a company your overhead is higher, and all that stuff, so the incentive is to bring in as many jobs as you can and try ... If jobs overlap but one artist can do double duty, that’s what happens.

As a freelancer, especially once you get into freelancing remotely, you're actually trying to go after projects and those projects may take two, three, four weeks, and that’s all you're trying to do, and you pick up little things here and there. As a freelancer, I like, towards the end of my freelancing career, I really was just trying to get projects and I was trying to avoid the, “Hey, we need someone to cover our artist who is on vacation for three days,” and you go into a studio and work on six different things and not finish a single one. I think that that number makes sense.

There's two numbers I want to focus on here ... Well, before I do that let me say that the parity between the yearly earnings was actually really surprising to me. When we were doing research for the freelance manifesto and before that our freelance you course that we don’t sell anymore, we got different numbers.

The average freelance salary that we got, I think it was three years ago when we did this survey, was 90k and then this year it's 65k. Either there was a massive drop in freelance salary or the way that we did this survey kind of skewed things a little bit, but to be honest I'm not sure. I've never met a freelancer who only made 65k, every single one I've ever known in my life has made more than that.

These freelancers might be right at the beginning of their freelance career. We also, like I mentioned, we didn’t adjust for regional differences. The rate a freelancer gets in New York City is very different than the rate a freelancer gets in Zurich or something like that. We have to account for that next time too.

The highest yearly earnings is crazy, $130,000 difference. I want to talk about that because people are going to see that number and be like, “Okay, so who is an employee doing motion design for 190k a year?” In my experience there's two types of employees that get that salary, one is the studio owner. If you own a studio you can pay yourself that salary if the studio is doing well.

If you are a creative director at a really great studio, Buck or something like that, I don’t know those salaries but I imagine they can be high up in the 150 to 175, 190 maybe, but really that’s rare. That’s super-duper rare. A freelancer, when we did our research for the book, I think the highest paid freelancer we surveyed at that point made $260,000 in one year, which is a lot.

Now to get this $320,000 number, that is mind blowing. You're talking about billing over $20,000 a month. Another thing we didn’t get into is that’s probably revenue, that’s probably not profit. I'm assuming the person who billed that had to hire other freelancers and had expenses, because there's really ... Unless you find a way to not sleep, maybe you're doing, probably phasing sleeping or something, there's no way for one person to actually bill that much in a year.

I'm sure that they didn’t take home $320,000. Still, that’s pretty amazing and I think it's indicative of what I talk about in the book, which is that when you're freelance there's a way to do it where you are scaling yourself like a studio without the stress and overhead of a studio.

The other number I wanted to call attention to is the number of funds/unpaid projects; an employee, 11%, which seems about right, and then the freelancer, 15%. That doesn’t surprise me but I would urge freelancers, if you're freelance, one of the best things about freelancing is that downtime where you get to do work that you want to be doing, you like to be paid to do this work but you don’t have any of it on your reel, so you can do speck stuff, you can do personal projects.

That is the ... Those projects are the things that elevate your career, allow you to get booked at studios to then get paid to do cool stuff. I'd like that number to be higher. There is this concept in Silicon Valley, I don’t know if Google does it anymore, but they used to have this thing called 20% time. The idea was that you're on salary at Google but for 20% of the time you work on whatever you want, and some ... I forget, there's some famous Google product that came out of that; employees just messing around doing stuff they thought was cool.

I think if freelancers took that mentality, that 20% time, I think you're going to find that your work gets better faster, you're getting better bookings faster. Another data point we have to add next year is how much vacation time, how much time off did you have as an employee versus a freelancer. That is another number that’s generally very different.

Employees, in the US anyway, at the beginning of your career you generally get two weeks paid time off and maybe after a few years it goes up to three or four weeks. Freelancers routinely take ... I used to take two months off a year minimum when I was freelance. I'd love to find that number out too.

Caleb: Yeah, absolutely. In your experience, people who are new to the industry, do you recommend that they do even a higher percentage of those fun and unpaid projects especially whenever those projects are not rolling in? I know it can be very easy for someone, if there is no project to do, to just not do a project to just go play videogames or go hang out with friends. Do you still recommend people treating their job even in the early stages like a full-time job, devoting those hours to creating speck work, to doing fun projects like that?

Joey: That’s a good question. I think that when you're new to the industry it's hard to know even how to do a speck project. It's easier said than done, like everybody should do more personal projects. Well, it's really hard because you have to come up with an idea and you have to know how to manage yourself and self-critique and go from start to finish on a project.

It's not that easy, but I think ... And I think that’s why it's easy to say like, “Oh, I don’t even have an idea. Well, you know what, maybe tomorrow I’ll have an idea. Today I'm just going to treat myself to some Call of Duty or whatever.” I think that it's ... And I'm not quite sure what the solution is, eventually when you're in the industry for a year or two you’ve seen jobs go from start to finish, you kind of understand how that creative process works, especially if you’ve maybe taken a couple of really good online classes or something like that, and that can help you kickstart that process.

When you're a freelancer it's imperative. I don’t think ... Depending on your goals, if you get to a point with your freelance career where you're happy with the work you're doing and you're happy with the amount of bookings you're getting and the clients you're working with, maybe you don’t need to do that, but at the beginning when your goal might be, “I want to get booked by Royale,” but you don’t have the work that’s going to get you booked by Royale no one is going to pay you to do Royale level work until it's on your reel. You might as well ... Unless you go intern for them or something.

You might as well take two weeks off and try to make something cool and treat it like a job. What I used to do when I was freelance is I would take two weeks off every year and I would totally re-do my reel. One week of that was basically coming up with and executing some cool reel opener and reel closer, because as we all know that tends to be the coolest part of your reel.

I treated it like a job. I would wake up and I would start at 9:30 or ten or whatever and I'd work eight hours that day on it, and I'd make myself do it and I wouldn’t allow myself to dick around, because if you don’t have the discipline to do personal projects it's going to hold you back for sure.

Caleb: That makes sense. There's a data point that we didn’t actually include in the infographic or even the article that we wrote about the salary information, but it has to do with the gender pay gaps. Everyone knows that that is a big problem in the modern workforce. In motion design there is still a gender pay gap by about 8%, so on average males make about $64,000 a year and on average females make a little less than $60,000 a year. It's about an 8% difference, whereas the average is about a 20% difference.

The motion design industry, I think it has a lot to do with what you were talking about earlier, Joey, where there's no difference between the quality of the output between males and females. It just so happens to be that a lot of these people that have been in the industry a long time that are making these higher salaries tend to be males.

I think that’s a super encouraging statistic to see. Obviously we want the gap to be 0%, but it's cool to see that that gap is shrinking and hopefully it just continues to shrink over the next few years.

Joey: I think the awareness of the pay gap and the awareness of the gender disparity, I think that’s ... Just employers and people who hire freelancers being aware does a lot. I think that as more and more ... One of the things that really, really helps in any industry and really in any endeavor is having people you can model and heroes you look up to.

As you have more and more Bee Grandinettis, more and more Erica Gorochows, and Lilians, and Lynn Fritzs, there's lots of amazing female talent in this industry; Sarah Beth Hulver from Oddfellows, as you have more of them that not only are doing amazing work but are also good self-promoters and on social media and putting themselves out there in public, that’s going to be the model for the 19, 20 year old female artist coming up in the industry which you didn’t really have 10 years ago.

They were there and you had your Karen Fongs, and Erin [Swarovskis 00:40:01] but they were at the very, very top and you didn’t really have these visible lower mid-level at the start of their career females to model, and now you do. I think that that’s going to help a lot. I think we are moving in the right direction. Obviously everybody wishes we could snap our fingers and make the disparity go away. It's going to take 10 years, but I think it's going to happen.

Caleb: 24% of the people that responded said they are not full-time motion graphic designers for many, many reasons. We asked them why, and 41% of the people who responded said that they are not full-time designers because they are working on their skills, 36% said they don’t want to do motion exclusively, 30% said they are new to the industry, and then there's a few other answers there.

I wanted to talk a little bit about the working on my skills data point here. I think for a motion designer who is aspiring to get into the industry you're never going to feel comfortable with your skills both technically or artistically ever, it goes back to that impostor syndrome that you talk about all the time Joey.

Do you have any advice for people who are still working on their skills, do you have any advice for them on how to just jump in and get started with actual motion design projects? Then at what point for you was it ... When did you realize that, “Okay, I think I'm capable of doing this full-time, let's hop in and get started with motion design full-time.”

Joey: That’s a really good question, and I agree too; when I saw that data point I was like working on skills should not be the thing that holds you back from being in the industry. There's never, you're right, there's never a point where you're like, “Okay, now I'm good enough.” Maybe 10 years into my career I started doing things that I thought, “You know what, I'm actually kind of proud of that,” everything up to that point I hated.

A couple of things; one, I think that the impostor syndrome in the industry comes from two places. One, it comes from the quality of your work not being up to what you're seeing from your MoGraph heroes. You look at something Jorge posts, or Zander or Dave Steinfeld and you compare it to yours and their stuff is way better, and so you feel like, “Uh, if there's an option to hire them and an option to hire me, why the hell would someone hire me when they're out there?”

What you’ve got to realize is that when you see work posted on Wine after Coffee or Motionographer or artists are sharing their work on Twitter, Instagram or whatever, that’s the best stuff. There is 95% more stuff out there that they are not sharing. Buck I think at the first [inaudible 00:43:07] conference, Ryan Honey, one of the founders of Buck said that Buck only shares something like 7% of the work they do on their website, 93% they don’t share. It's crazy.

Just knowing that, just knowing that there's a lot of stuff out there that’s getting done that you're not seeing that doesn’t look as cool as the stuff you're looking at, that might give you a little bit of a boost. I would also recommend watching The Gap. It's this video ... We make all of our students in every single class that we teach watch it.

It's basically this rant from Ira Glass, the host of This American Life, and someone made this amazing video that goes with it, and it talks about the idea that at the beginning of your career there's a gap between your tastes and the images you're thinking of in your head and your technical ability to execute those, and it takes a long time, it takes years to close that gap but everybody has to go through it and there is no way around the gap, there's no shortcut, you just have to keep doing work.

I recommend as fast as humanly possible getting into the industry somehow. The best thing you can do is get a full-time job anywhere that will pay you to do motion design because then you're doing it every single day. If you're brand new and you feel like you're not ready you're ready, just try to get your foot in the door somewhere, and if you're having trouble I would actually recommend, this might be controversial, but I would recommend putting together some sort of reel and hanging out a shingle out on Craigslist or even Fiverr and taking on really cheap client projects.

I talk about this in the book. If you're going to be a freelancer, Fiverr and Craigslist is not a winning strategy. That’s not going to work for you, but if you're looking for practice, working with clients and doing projects that are for someone else, it's amazing because you can get work really easily. The bar is extraordinarily low on those platforms.

You're not going to make money, maybe someone has 200 bucks, they’ll pay you but just because they're paying you that means they're going to have an opinion, you're going to have to learn to work with them, to manage them, and at the end of it they are probably going to be happy with what you did and that’s going to boost your confidence and it's going to help erase some of that impostor syndrome.

I would say the first tip is just realize that there's no way around feeling impostor syndrome, there really isn't, everybody feels it, and watch The Gap because The Gap sums it up perfectly, and then get practice. Do these little Craigslist jobs, do Fiverr jobs. Once you're good, or once you're in the industry, stop doing them but use them as practice, use them as just like ... It's like going to putt, putt, batting practice, just getting some of that bats and just start working as fast as you can. Don’t wait until you're good enough. You'll never be good enough, I promise you.

Caleb: Do you personally feel like you get impostor syndrome every now and then, and do you feel like that gap has shrunk and is gone in your life, or do you feel that angst about not being good enough even at this point in your career?

Joey: It's kind of more of over my career, because initially I got impostor syndrome ... When I started I was actually an assistant editor and then I became an editor who was also doing motion graphics, and I got impostor syndrome every single time a client would come into the room and sit with me during a supervised session, I was like, “Don’t they know that I don’t really know what I'm doing, and I'm not really that creative,” and then after a year of doing that every day I didn’t feel that way anymore.

Then I went freelance and I was doing, I was a freelance after effects artist and clients would book me and I'd have to design something and animate it and I had crazy impostor syndrome, because I was looking at what Ted Gore was doing or Neil Stubbings, or like some of these legends, and I was like, “Don’t they know that there's people out there doing way better stuff, oh my gosh,” but then after four years of that I didn’t feel it anymore.

Then I started a studio and I'd go into these pitches, where it was me and my producer live at an ad agency screening our reel and talking about our capabilities and I'd be trembling inside like, “Don’t they know I have no idea what I'm talking about,” and then after four years of that that went away. It’s like you just keep taking one step at a time and then starting School of Motion and I'm teaching classes, and I had never taught before, and I'm thinking, “Man, don’t they know I'm not a real teacher, I didn’t get a teaching degree or anything.”

Every single person in the world feels impostor syndrome. It never goes away unless you do the same thing over and over again, but then the little secret is once you stop feeling it you're going to do something else that’s going to make you feel it.

Caleb: That’s really, really good advice. Do you find that that four year rule was pretty, I guess, standard for you? Do you think for other people, in doing something for four years, that’s a good amount of time to get over that syndrome?

Joey: I never really thought about it that way, but yeah it does seem to be that every four years I've kind of shifted in some way and it's probably because ... That might just be me too, it's one of the things I talked about in the Motionographer article, is it's easy to just keep trying to go further and further and further, but for me it seems like every four years there's ... The fear is at a low enough level that impostor syndrome is minimized enough where I have the cojones to kind of take the next leap. Maybe for some people it's one year, maybe for some people it's 10 years. For me it seemed like four years was the magic number.

Caleb: It makes sense, because if you think about that whole 10,000 hour rule, in a year there's about 2,000 working hours that you can have, and if you're freelancing it's probably a little bit more, and so after about four years you're close to that 10,000 hour mark and probably feel like an expert at something, or at least like you were saying no fear about something.

Joey: Interesting, I like that. It's fascinating.

Caleb: The other data point on this question here, why are people not full-time motion graphic designers, 36% of the people said that they are not full-time motion graphic designers because they don’t want to be full-time motion graphic designers.

Now, for someone who is just in the industry and all about motion design, that’s weird. For me, that weird, why would you ever not want to be a motion designer, but I think there's an increasingly large number of people who want to let's say use cinema 4D for a project that really consider themselves as all-purpose video professional. Do you find in the motion design industry that people are becoming more generalist in this way, or is this a newer data point that is shocking to you?

Joey: I think it's really just indicative of the fact that ... Caleb, you and I especially, but probably a lot of the people listening to this podcast are really into motion design and are on Motionographer once a week and looking at Wine after Coffee and checking out what Buck just did and hopefully checking out School of Motion.

It's easy to think that that’s how everyone in this industry is and it's not. You said something earlier; I didn’t even know there were 1,300 people that would take this survey. What you see online in the motion design industry; that is the tip of an enormous iceberg. You’ve got people working out in Silicon Valley doing motion design for apps that are probably more into tech than they are the motion design industry in explainer videos and octane and stuff like that.

I think ... My buddy, Adam Pluth, he's the guy ... He created rubber hose for after effects and a new tool which is coming out soon called overlord that’s going to blow everybody’s mind, but anyway he said something when I was doing research for the Motionographer article and he said that he thinks of himself ... I'm going to butcher his words, but basically he said that he sees motion design as a set of tools. It’s not his profession. It's a toolset that he possesses and he can use it however he wants to.

He loves to develop and code and make stuff, but because he's got these motion design skills he can make the UI the UX work really well, he knows what motion designers do, so he can create these tools that are just tailored to us. Is he really interested in the new GPE render, probably not, but he's into other stuff. If you asked him, “Are you a motion designer,” he might say, “Yes,” one day and the next he’ll say, “No, more of a developer,” and I think there's just more and more of that.

Look at YouTube channel that uses after effects but really what they are are writers and directors. We've had on the podcast Joachim Biaggio, and they are unscripted TV producers that they use after effects, they do motion graphics but that’s not what they do, they are TV producers. I think that that’s us being in this bubble where we think about motion design and MoGraph world all day long every day because we are crazy, but most people aren't like that.

Caleb: Personally, for you, if you didn’t get into the motion design industry, do you ... Is there another profession that is similar that you think you maybe would have pursued instead?

Joey: I really have always been into coding. I think in another life I would have been a developer. I really love that. There's a lot of similarities too I think between coding and motion design. It's like solving a puzzle. Motion design is a little bit more ... You get a little bit more leeway, because it's subjective, whereas with coding a lot of the time it's like, “Does it work,” yes or no. It's binary, but the creativity involved in that rush of figuring something out and making it work is very similar.

Caleb: It's super cool. I was talking to a friend last week, and he's a developer, and I said, “How much of your job is taking care of bugs and getting rid of problems in you code,” and he said about 80% of his job is fixing stuff. For me, as a motion designer, I'm like if I write an expression wrong and get an error in after effects I'm done and I'm angry at that expression. I cannot imagine the day to day patience that developers have to have to be in that industry, so in that respect all the developers out there working on rips and websites and all sorts of crazy things.

Our next question here is probably the most non-surprising data result that we had in the entire survey. We asked people, what is their favorite motion design studio. Staring with number one, Buck, then Giant Ant, Oddfellows, Animade, Cub Studio. Are there any surprises here for you?

Joey: Not really any surprises. Buck; huge studio, legendary. Giant Ant; small studio but at this point I think it’d be safe to say legendary, at least in five years you could say they're legendary. They are still new enough where maybe it's too soon, but they are legendary. Oddfellows; not surprising, but it's great to see that because they are really new, they're only a few years old and they just ... The talent they’ve managed to bring over to the studio and the quality.

Frankly, one of my favorite things about Oddfellows is how open Colin and Chris have been, the founders, with the struggles and what it's like to run a studio. Animade; I am happy to see them on there, because they are amazing. They are a little bit larger, I think they are maybe 20 or 30, and what I love about them specifically is that they are not just doing work for clients.

They actually created this amazing took called Boards, which is a tool for motion designers, that is now its own separate side business. Right down the street from them is Cub Studio ... Actually the one that makes me the happies to see them on there is Cub, because ... First of all, I love Frazer. He's an amazing dude, amazing artist, but they are a tiny little shop.

I don’t know what their staff is, it might be five, six, seven. It's really small. His mentality, we actually just did an interview with him, and the mentality he has running that shop, it's very different than other studios. He tries to get everyone there to direct their own pieces and be self-sufficient, whereas at a place like ... I've never worked at Buck so I'm kind of talking out of turn here, but there's a little bit more of a pipeline.

Design goes to animation, sometimes design goes to R and D, “How are we going to execute this,” then that goes to animation. At Cub Studio it's very flat, and Cub Studio is another one of these companies doing something outside of just the client work. They spun off this awesome company, MoShare, which is basically data driven animations that are automated through this tool.

I think that you're seeing those studios on that list because of the amazing, amazing work that they do, but at least the bottom two I'm also really excited to see because they are kind of pioneering a new business model.

Caleb: A lot of these people, whenever they release a new product or a new video, they will create a blogpost on their own site with breakdown videos about how they did it. They’ll send out press releases to different websites to get their stuff seen by other people, and in a way they have this whole another backend system, it's public relations really where they are getting their name out there whenever they create new work.

Buck, you see their stuff all over the place. If you go to their website they have case studies about how they put together this work, Giant Ant is the exact same way. In your mind, is there something to learn from the fact that these motion design studios are ... I wouldn’t say that they are self-promoting to the point that it's just gross and weird, but they spend quite a bit of time sharing with other people how they created their work and their process. Do you think that there's, for someone who let's say owns a small studio or is a freelancer, that that mentality in promoting yourself and getting a good website and landing pages that will get many, many more people over to your site might be a tool for getting people excited about the work that you're doing?

Joey: You brought up two things. One, I will never say to someone that you're doing too much self-promotion, it's gross and weird. The reality, the dirty little secret is that if you're not self-promoting, if you're not making people aware of you and reminding them constantly that you exist and showing them new work you're not going to get work, especially at the studio level.

Studios, the successful ones typically have biz dev people who are on the phone calling people constantly, taking people out to lunch. At [Toil 00:58:52] we had an executive producer who would take people out to lunch four times a week. We would do these dog and pony shows. We’d go to agencies. I recently interviewed Zack Dickson, his episode will be coming out soon, from IV and the host of [inaudible 00:59:05], and they have a full-time biz dev person helping them get work. You have to do that. There's just no way around it, and using social media to do that is just ... In 2017, that’s just part of the deal, you have to do it.

No one should feel gross about it. Everyone should be actively promoting yourself. If it makes you feel gross to promote yourself, get over it however you can. Have a couple of beers at lunch and then come back and make a bunch of Facebook posts. I wanted to talk about that.

The other thing you talked about was case studies. There's a whole chapter in the freelance manifesto about this, because it's such a strong way of showing people that you can be trusted. If you're a studio like Buck, you're going after clients and you're asking them to come up with probably hundreds of thousands of dollars for these big budget jobs, and a big part of that is instilling trust in them that if they give you this money you will deliver a result that is going to make them happy.

It's a little bit easier when you're Buck, because their reputation precedes them, but let's say you are Cub Studio or you're Oddfellows and you're newer, you're untested in the industry’s eyes, one of the things that can happen is you can have an amazing piece of work even as a studio that your studio is responsible for, there's no question, but someone could see it and they could be like, “Well, it's great, but did they get lucky, did the ad agency have some amazing art director?”

There's always this question in your mind like, is that result repeatable, do they have a process that will allow them to get that good of a result every time. If you show a case study and you show the process it proves to your client that this wasn’t an accident, you have a process, you’ve thought about this, you iterate it until you arrived at this result and that’s what your studio does. As a freelancer, that’s insanely valuable, but even as a studio it might even be more valuable.

Caleb: Yeah, good advice. In line with this, we are talking about what is your favorite; we also asked people what is your favorite source of inspiration. Obviously, Motionographer tops the list.

Joey: As it should.

Caleb: Yeah, as it should. They do great work. What surprised me was the number two result, YouTube. In fact, Vimeo really wasn’t close on this list at all as a source of inspiration yet. It seems like a lot of the motion design industry tends to congregate on Vimeo. Do you find this to be a shift in the industry in the way that people find out about new motion graphics projects?

I know that Vimeo can sometimes feel like it's the place where artists hang out, but we've even at School of Motion found that in putting our stuff on YouTube it gives it more likelihood to actually get seen by more and more people. Do you recommend motion designers who are sharing out their work to look at YouTube as a potential opportunity to get their work seen by more people?

Joey: It's interesting, the fact that Vimeo wasn’t on that list blew my mind, because when I started School of Motion it was the place. Nobody went to YouTube for inspiration, and frankly even tutorials. There was this perception that Vimeo had the high quality stuff and YouTube had the garbage. That has flip-flopped I think.

Vimeo still has great content obviously, but I think that they’ve been very slow to update their platform. Their business model seems a little strange. They just launched this live streaming thing ... Frankly, I can tell you as someone who’s had the Vimeo pro account for years, the ... Just the experience of watching videos on Vimeo has gotten worse and worse.

The videos ... The streaming takes forever, they don’t load fast, stuff like that, and I think people are frustrated with Vimeo and switching to YouTube, and at the same time YouTube has been improving the platform at a crazy rate, and it's totally free.

As a content creator I can tell you, you should be on YouTube. That was one of the first things you did when we hired you Caleb, was you convinced us to move over to YouTube, and what a good idea that was. I am surprised though that it's a source of inspiration. That surprised me, because ... I don’t know, I just don’t use YouTube that way, but maybe you can. Maybe you can find feeds of work on YouTube.

I'm sure that sooner or later some channel is going to come along that sort of, I don’t know, aggregates great work on YouTube. For now if you're looking for MoGraph inspiration, Motionographer by far, number one, it's not even close, and I have to say too I have to give them props because they were number one years ago by leaps and bounds and then they started to dip, and it wasn’t their fault, it was just the internet changed and all of a sudden you had 20 sources of inspiration you could go to on demand and so Motionographer had to find a way to stay relevant and when they hired Joe Donaldson to start running the content arm things got better really fast.

Now they’ve even got contributors. Bee is a contributor. Sally is a contributor, they’ve got other ones, and the quality of the insights in their articles and their interviews, it's insane. That should be every motion designer’s homepage. I am surprised by YouTube.

Then I want to say us being number three, that made me feel really good to see that. I also know that this is our survey. I’ll tell you what else surprised me was Instagram is not on here. I'm guessing it was six or seven, it had to be pretty close. Those little ... I'm not sure what you call those, but Instagram and Dribble, those types of things, they are good for short little micro inspirations I guess.

You can flip through a hundred of them really quickly. You're not going to go on there and watch a two minute motion design piece. [Inaudible 01:05:45] is interesting too, because I always think of it as more of a portfolio site, but I guess they are building in ways to kind of recommend things to you. It's a great place to go for design inspiration because it's not set up in a great way like Vimeo or YouTube to scroll through videos really quickly, but to see different designers and their portfolio at a glance, it is pretty great.

Caleb: Do you find for yourself other artistic disciplines influencing your motion graphic work?

Joey: Well, at this point I don’t do as much motion design. I'm doing more teaching and keeping up on the industry and stuff. When I was planning the studio in Boston and we would have to put together mood boards and stuff like that, I wasn’t great at that. I wish I was better at that at the time.

Now I have Mike Frederick, our instructor who created design boot camp, that was his world. He was my creative director partner, art director. He would look on these weird photography blogs, he would get on these architectural blogs, he just found all these weird little places on the internet where there was this really cool stuff that had nothing to do with motion design. It wasn’t even on the screen. It was just these weird art things, and his work was super-duper unique because of that, and that’s one of the things we tech in our classes.

If all you're doing is looking at Vimeo and Dribble and Instagram and you get in this feedback loop where it's recommending things to you because you’ve looked at other things ... And I think that’s one of the reasons that for a while every explainer video looked exactly the same, it was all that flat vector style because it was cool and then you liked it and so then you kept seeing more and more of it and then people copied it, I think that’s getting a little bit better. I think is super important to not just look at motion design stuff if you want to be a really strong designer specifically.

Caleb: Transitioning over from the inspiration side of things to the education side of things. We asked people what is their favorite source of information or motion graphic tutorials, and the number one result was YouTube, which was not super surprising. I think it made sense. I have a question for you Joey. The most popular after effects tutorial on YouTube is a degeneration effect tutorial. Of course it's some sort of crazy visual effects tutorial, right?

Joey: Yeah.

Caleb: How many views do you think that video has?

Joey: I don’t know. It's got to have ... If it's the most popular one on the internet it's got to have a million views.

Caleb: Yeah, 3.7 million views. That’s insane. I feel like that’s like every motion designer watching a tutorial 20 times, because if there are 3.7 million motion designers in the world I would be very shocked, but again it's one of these visual effects things that 14 year olds can watch and make it with their friends. You know that type of thing?

Joey: Here's the thing, when I hear numbers like that they used to shock me. It actually doesn’t. The industry is so much bigger than everyone realizes. I've talked to people on the Adobe team, and Creative Cloud had millions of licenses out there, there are millions of people with a Creative Cloud license. Never mind the people pirating it, which is probably twice as many people. There's a ton of people that are into this stuff.

Obviously we are more focused on motion design than the visual effects side. The VFX side of the after effects tutorial scene, at least on YouTube, is much bigger. A video co-pilot tutorial in a week gets more views than every tutorial we have put out in the past four years, plus Andrew Kramer is just very handsome, a very curious guy. Man, 3.7 million, that’s insane.

Caleb: Well, I have another data point here. We were talking about the difference between YouTube and Vimeo. The most popular after effects tutorial on Vimeo ... And again, we are not trying to crap on Vimeo here; they are a great company, I go to them every single day for inspiration, fantastic work that they are doing over there, but the most popular after effects tutorial is about color crashing. How many views do you think that has?

Joey: On Vimeo? I don’t know; let's say 150,000.

Caleb: That’s close; 218,000 views, which is about 5% as much as YouTube. That 5% number is something that we’ve really saw on our own channels between our own personal Vimeo channel and YouTube channel. I just think it's so interesting to see that consistency between YouTube and Vimeo.

On YouTube there's tons of channels where you can learn about motion design and I'm willing to bet that you know quite a few of the most popular ones. Can you name the five most popular after effects channels on YouTube?

Joey: All right, let me guess. Mount MoGraph is definitely one. I would guess that Evan Abrahams maybe.

Caleb: Yeah, yeah.

Joey: Okay, all right. I know Mikey Borup has a ton of follower on YouTube.

Caleb: Yeah, there are.

Joey: Let's see, after that ... I think that’s all I can think of. I don’t know, maybe Premium Beat or Rocket Stock, one of them.

Caleb: No, no. Video Co-pilot, you already mentioned them-

Joey: Oh God, I forgot Video Co-pilot-

Caleb: Right, you kind of already mentioned them; 379,000 subscribers, 379,000 people. That’s an insane number, and then below that is Surface Studio. They do after effects, visual effects things. You got it, so Video Co-pilot, Surface Studio, Mount MoGraph, Evan Abrahams, and Mike Borup are the most popular channels on YouTube. They're great channels. You can learn some really fantastic things from those guys, and they're all super, super nice. They definitely deserve a subscribe.

We are back on this question of what's your favorite source of information. School of Motion is number two, but again it's our survey. It's kind of a little [inaudible 01:12:14], let's not go there, but Grayscalegorilla, Mount MoGraph and Linda are in the three, four and five slot there.

The team at Grayscalegorilla kills it, they do great work. Then Linda is another fantastic source of information. I've found in my own MoGraph education that Linda tends to be a little more conceptual in terms of ... They focus on the technical side of things, how to click the buttons in your software to do the thing, tends to be less of these more design focused tutorials but it's still a great place.

If you want to learn after effects or cinema 4D just from a technical standpoint it's a great place to go. Then that transitions us over to our next question which was how many tutorials have you watched in the last year. This result is not super surprising, 75 was the magic number here.

I wonder how many people watched 75 tutorials all the way through or how many people did the classic motion designer click through until you find the spot in the tutorial that you were actually looking for and then bounced away. How many tutorials have you watched?

Joey: I've watched ... I can't say zero, because I watch them as research. I want to see what other people are doing and stuff like that, but that’s ... I make tutorials for a living and ... I do that too. It's like when someone who makes commercials for a living skips them on the DVR, kind of biting the end of the feet, but I've got to say 75 tutorials in a year it's like ... That seems like a lot to me.

Although I guess at the beginning of my career I used to try to watch one a day. I've got to say this too, watching tutorials that’s how I learnt to do what I'm doing. The only problem with doing it is that you get your knowledge in little bits and pieces that are unconnected, and so you have to watch a ton of tutorials to finally get some connections to start happening between things.

One of the things that really helped me was finding tutorials, like Grayscalegorilla was amazing at this, finding tutorials that linked together and then I started taking FX PhD classes. Tutorials are amazing but that’s like the Swiss cheese strategy of learning motion design.

If you want to get better fast ... And yes we sell classes, but try an FX PhD class, try MoGraph Mentor, try the Grayscalegorilla learn cinema 4D series, try to find things that are a little more structured because you learn ... It's not twice as fast, it's a hundred times as fast if it's structured the right way.

Caleb: We asked all motion designers in the industry, would they recommend the motion design industry to someone who is looking for a challenging and fulfilling career, and 87% of the respondents were recommending the industry to people who are looking to get into it.

That number is high, 87% is a really high recommendation rate for any industry. I thought it might be fun for us to play a little game here. I call this game lower or higher, because I'm not good at coming up with game names. What I'm going to do is I'm going to say an industry, a thing, or a person and you have to tell me if their approval rating is higher or lower than 87%, the same as the motion design industry. All right.

Joey: I like this one. Sounds good, all right.

Caleb: Number one, with 60 seconds on the clock. Mechanics.

Joey: Would you recommend being a mechanic as a challenging industry? I'm going to say that’s going to be lower than 83%.

Caleb: Much lower; 20% of mechanics would recommend it. CarneVino in Las Vegas, your favorite steak place is the [inaudible 01:16:26] higher lower than 87%.

Joey: If it’s not 98% or higher I’d be shocked.

Caleb: It is lower actually, 70%.

Joey: Stop it!

Caleb: It's probably their price point, so expensive.

Joey: It is expensive.

Caleb: HR managers, would they recommend their industry?

Joey: I'm going to go with lower.

Caleb: It's higher, 90%.

Joey: Stop it, dude.

Caleb: You knew this question was coming, Donald Trump; is it higher or lower?

Joey: Well, I could tell you ... Depending on what part of the country you go to it's going to change, but I'm guessing overall it's lower.

Caleb: Yes, you're right. Dental assistants.

Joey: I'm going to guess that’s higher.

Caleb: It is higher, yeah, 90% of people.

Joey: It seems like a fun ... I've got to say, my neighbor said something to me once, we were talking about dentists, and she's an older lady and she said, “You’ve got to be kind of funny to want to play with teeth all day.” I don’t know, but those are the people who are out there.

Caleb: You’ve also got to be funny to sit in front of a computer and play with shapes all day, so we’re all a little funny.

Joey: Touché.

Caleb: Ice cream.

Joey: That’s higher.

Caleb: Yeah, 90%. Bartenders.

Joey: I bet it's pretty close to 87%.

Caleb: It's lower, 23% of bartenders hate their jobs.

Joey: Really, wow!

Caleb: We've got three more here. A CEO of a small company, you don’t happen to know any CEOs of small companies, do you?

Joey: Just one, just the one. Would I recommend it? Hold on, let me read the question again. Would I recommend being the CEO of a small company to people looking for a challenging and fulfil ... I would recommend it, yeah. I'd say ... I don’t know if it's higher or lower, I'd say pretty close.

Caleb: Yeah, it's higher; 92%. The Lego Ninjago movie, what's the Rotten Tomatoes score, is it higher or lower than 87%?

Joey: I don’t know. I don’t know ... All I know is that all of the happy male toys my kids are getting now are Ninjago. I'm going to say lower.

Caleb: Yeah, you're right. Then the last one firefighters.

Joey: Firefighters? I bet that’s higher. That seems like a badass job.

Caleb: It is actually tied, so it's the exact same, 87%. We are just as happy as firefighters.

Joey: I love it, motion designer or a firefighter. Done.

Caleb: In my experience, Joey, motion designers tend to be a little more outspoken maybe a little more pessimistic than your average folk, so I was kind of surprised to see that 87% number. It seemed actually a little high. Not to say that the motion design industry isn't fantastic, it's in my opinion the best industry in the world.

Joey: Wait, let me stop you there, because you bring up something that I see all the time and I want everyone to just realize this. I can say this with some authority as someone who has made myself very visible on the internet, which is when you're ... You have people who are happy and people who are ... You have optimists and pessimists.

When things are going good, when you're feeling pretty good your impulse is not to get on the internet and tell everyone how great it is, unless maybe it's Facebook and you're trying to virtue signal or something. Most of the time when are you going to get on the internet and say something, it's when you're angry, it's when you're pessimistic, it's when you're an Eor and you want people to commensurate with you. You see a lot more of that stuff. It's way overrepresented on the internet.

There are some pretty well known motion designers out there that are almost constantly complaining. I hate to see it, to be honest with you. It pisses me off. The truth is the vast majority of people in this industry are happy to be here and aware that it is a first world problem to be an after effects artist that has to do some revisions, and that’s the worst thing in your day.

I think that ... If someone out there heard Caleb say, “Oh, you know motion designers tend to be optimistic,” I think that the most vocal ones that you hear on Twitter can be pessimistic, but that’s just because they're pessimistic and so their impulse is to complain. Nobody likes a complainy pants, almost everybody I talk to in this industry is happy to be here.

Caleb: Well, that’s good to hear. This survey, the results really speak to everyone’s positive outlook at the motion design industry. Our next question here is what is stopping you from being the motion designer you want to be. The number one thing was technical knowledge at 25%, experience at 20%, inspiration at 13%, family at 11%, and lack of motivation at 10%.

Each one of these things here we could dissect really deep. Technical knowledge at 25% is the biggest factor keeping people from being the motion designer they want to be. For you, is it hard to have sympathy for people that say they lack technical knowledge whenever there are so many tutorials and education resources out there to teach you about the motion design industry? For you, was that a big issue whenever you were first in the industry or is that a problem that you think is just slowly shrinking?

Joey: Two things. One, I definitely feel sympathy for people that feel that way. I wish ... This is one of the things I'd like to tweak for the next time we do this. I'd like to split this up a little differently and dig a little deeper. Technical knowledge could mean a lot of different things.

I don’t think that ... When I hear technical knowledge I'm thinking I don’t understand how after effects works, I don’t know how cinema 4D works. Those are very easy problems to solve now. 10 years ago they weren't, but now they are very easy to solve.

I doubt that that’s really what's holding people back. The being a good designer and a good animator and being able to come up with good ideas, that’s he hard thing. There are still great ways now; there's classes, our classes, other people’s classes, there's Slack channels you can join and Facebook groups and motion meetups, there's lots of ways to get that now too.

It doesn’t surprise me to hear that it's some form of knowledge that people feel is holding them back. Again, I would point to what I said earlier about impostor syndrome, I'm not sure you ever get to a point where you're like, “Now I'm finally good enough,” it never happens because as you get better you calibrate your eye to better and better things.

In 10 years you'll look back at something you did today and you'll think it is the worst piece of crap you’ve ever seen when ... Today you might do it and say, “Oh, it's not bad.” I would love to know is it animation skills holding you back, is it design skills holding you back, is it ... Or is it software, “I don’t understand the software.” I'd like to dig a little deeper next time.

Caleb: We definitely will. We've learnt a lot from doing this first survey. Next year we’ll hopefully perfect it, and I'm sure we’ll fall short again, we’ll just keep on revising this thing and do it year over year. Our next question here is what is the biggest challenge you face with working with clients, and budget obviously is in the number one spot at 51% of people say that it is a challenge for them; vision, 45%; time, 41%; revisions, 36%; and expectations, 33%.

Budget’s in the number one slot. A lot of motion designers want more money for their projects, clients don’t have the money, and so there has to be some sort of compromise there. Do you have any advice for motion designers that feel like their work, they should be charging more but their clients are just giving them a lot of pushback about what they're asking?

Joey: It depends where you are at. If you're a studio and budgets are shrinking, unfortunately that’s just the reality. The solution ... You have two options basically, you can find ways to do the work more efficiently, faster so it's still profitable to do it. Technology is enabling that.

I think that’s one of the reasons that the flat vector look has become really, really popular and still is popular because it's a lot faster to do it and execute it than a full blown character animation piece with cell animation or some really high end 3D execution. If you're a freelancer and you're finding that that’s an issue, I say get new clients because as a freelancer ... It obviously depends where you live, it depends on your skill set, and all those things. For the most part there's not enough motion designers to handle all the motion design work that’s out there.

Find the right clients. If you go to an ad agency, maybe their budgets are lower but they're still going to be great. They are still going to pay your bills, no problem. If you're working for local, the local tire store and they have lower budget this year than they did last year, don’t work with them anymore; get a better client.

The one thing about, seeing that budget was the biggest issue, which doesn’t surprise me because budgets are shrinking across the board, I wonder what that means for ... In motion design you can open after effects and you can shape layers and some ray dynamic texture and you can make something that looks really good and you can do it very quickly, especially with all the cool scripts coming out and tools to speed things up and rift and flow, you can pull off pretty awesome looking stuff very quickly, but you can't ... Even with things like Octane and Redshift, you can't go into cinema 4D and just whip something up real quick.

I wonder if the shrinking budget thing means that 3D is going to start to ... There's going to be a rift where only at the high end are we seeing really cool 3D stuff and everything underneath that is going to be 2D just out of necessity. I hope that’s not the case, but that’s one thing that I do worry about.

Caleb: Whenever you were freelancing and then also working at Toil as a studio owner did you find that budget was the biggest challenge, or what for you guys was the biggest issue that you would face when working with clients?

Joey: For us, I don’t think budget was the biggest challenge. We were getting budgets that were high enough to keep the lights on and earn some profit and all that stuff. I actually think that expectations was a huge one, and maybe ... I won't say vision, because when a client comes to you and they need something and you have a vision of what it could be that’s a very common mistake I think motion designers make, is you forget that most of the time if a client is hiring you it's to sell something, and as gross at that may make you feel that is the point of what you are doing.

If you're doing something for a client, it doesn’t matter what you want to do, it's what do they need. They need this commercial to convince people to click that link or to go to their website or to go to a store. Having a cool looking piece is far, far down the list of priorities. Having an effective piece that gets butts out of couch seats, that’s the thing. I was always very aware of that. I didn’t fight that very hard, to be honest.

I think the biggest issue is just managing client expectations of how long things take, how late into the process they could change things, and some of that was my fault and our team’s fault just not being great at doing that. That’s a big part of the job, of running a studio, is managing expectations, making sure clients know, “I'm showing you something, I need your revisions or notes within 24 hours. If not, then it's going to cost you money to make changes,” things like that; we weren't great at that. It's interesting, because that was the lowest thing on the list, but for me that was always the hard thing to manage.

Caleb: Do you find that working with ad agencies compared to working with individuals who approach you directly that working with the ad agency it's a lot easier to manage expectations because they’ve worked with motion designers in the past?

Joey: It's hit or miss, because ad agencies, especially the ones we worked with, are big companies. We’d work with Digitas, which is this global company, there's thousands of people working there. What that means is you have people there that have been working in the industry for 20 years and really understand how this works, and it is a joy to work with them because not only do they get the process and know what it takes but they're more experienced than you and they come up with these great ideas and they make everything better.

That was the funnest thing, was like when you are collaborating with it. Then at the same time they need bodies to throw at big accounts, and so they hire junior ... Everybody is a junior art director or junior copywriter. What that means is that this is their first job, they're right out of college, but they have the title art director in their name and they are looking at their bosses who are confident tough art directors and they act like that without actually having the knowledge to back it up, and so they’ll ask for thigs and demand things and confidently say they want this to happen not having a clue what that means in terms of schedule, in terms of budget, in terms of the problems that’s going to cause, creatively [inaudible 01:30:36]. It goes both ways.

You have a better chance working with an ad agency, to have someone who understands the process, than if you're hired directly by a client that’s never done animation before. I also think that that’s ... I didn’t realize it at the time, how much of my job it should have been to educate my clients. That’s one of the things I learnt after leaving Toil and freelancing again; the more work I put in up front teaching them how it works if they didn’t know, in a non-patronizing way, the smoother the process went.

Caleb: What does that look like? Do you think it's creating a schedule and saying, “Based on the information you're giving us, here's certain key deadlines in this project,” or is that just a simple email explaining what you're going to be doing and how long each step is going to take?

Joey: I think that it's that, but more than that it's just feeling comfortable being totally honest with your client. If they ask for something your gut is to say, “Yes,” because you’ve got a client, it's like, “I caught a fish, and I don’t want to lose him, I don’t want them getting off the hook.” Sometimes it's better if they ask for something to be like, “Okay, well, that is doable. However, this is what it takes to do that, it's going to take two months of R and D and we are going to have to [inaudible 01:31:57] because ... And so the budget is going to be a lot bigger, and that’s totally cool, I'd love to work on that. I just want to be realistic with you about what it will take,” instead of saying, “Um, yeah, that would be really, really cool. Let me look at some numbers and get back to you.”

If you lead the client on to think that what they just asked for is doable instead of immediately saying it's doable but, then you leave yourself open to lose their trust really quickly. It's more about just feeling comfortable saying, “Okay, is this what you want? You know, you can have that. It's going to take this and this and this, I suspect that’s not really what you want to spend. Here's another solution that’s going to cost half as much and only take a month,” just being confident in saying, “Yes, I can do that for you, but having done this a hundred times I don’t think it's a good idea. Here's what I think is a good idea.”

Caleb: Our last question here. We asked everybody to just give their advice to people in the industry. We got lots of silly results. We got some very serious essays that got into over 500 words about their advice to people in the industry. Some common threads were work hard, learn the craft and not the software, be patient, be humble.

Lots of people recommended the boot camps here at School of Motion. Quite a few people recommended the freelance manifesto, and then a lot of people recommended, and you’ve kind of already talked about this, going to maybe a studio or an agency early on in your career to just get your feet wet and get in a place where every single day you're working on motion graphic projects from nine to five.

What extra advice do you think people were missing here in this survey, or what advice do you have to somebody who is getting into the motion design industry?

Joey: I think that the most important thing when you're starting is to just be a sponge. Treat every single job you're on, every interaction, every client interaction, every time something goes wrong, every time you get to hear a call with a client, anytime anything happens, treat that as a learning experience because a lot of times it's easy to just get caught up in, “Okay, I got it done. We posted it,” and you're crossing your fingers and you're just hoping, hoping there's no revisions and then this giant email comes back and it's like revision, revision, revision, revision and you disagree with the revisions.

It's easy to feel bitter about it and be like, “Oh, this sucks.” If you look at it as, “Okay, what could I have done differently? What are the things that I can take away from this so next time this doesn’t happen,” if you show something to an art director and they say, “Uh, you know what, why don’t you just take another crack at it because this stuff is not going to work,” don’t take it personally; treat it as, “Okay, this is a perfect opportunity to ask, no problem, could you tell me what about this you didn’t like, could you suggest some things I do.”

If you go into it with that mentality what it's going to help you do is avoid associating your work with you. You need to separate you from your work and don’t be so tied to it emotionally and just ... The work, it's almost like just doing exercise. Just treat it like you're going to the gym and someone saying, “Oh, you know, your form is bad, you're going to hurt your shoulder doing it that way.”

You wouldn’t get offended if someone said that. If someone said like, “Yeah, putting those two tight faces together really doesn’t work,” that might offend a designer but it shouldn’t. You should be like, “Oh, thank you. Thank you for telling me that.” I'd say going hand in hand with that is be humble.

Most people in this industry are humble. You're not going to meet too many d bags, but they're out there, and when you met them especially in the ad agency world you'll ... At the end of the day just remember what it is you're doing. You're making animations and designs.

Maybe ... Some people out there might actually be doing real good with their work but most of us are not. Most of us are selling stuff and doing branding and stuff like that. It's fun, it's a great ... But keep that in mind, be humble. Don’t think you're ... You're not curing cancer or anything, unless you're curing cancer. If someone could figure out a way to use motion design skills ... Erica Gorochow, she's a great example.

She has now become pretty active in expressing her political beliefs through motion design, which I think is amazing and I hope more and more artists start to do. If you're not Erica Gorochow then be humble, but she doesn’t have to. She actually has earned the right.

Caleb: A lot of the responses were work hard, don’t give up, that type of thing. There was also quite a bit of conflicting data, and we talk a lot about this at School of Motion, but the biggest source of conflict, and it's not direct conflict, these are people just giving their own advice, but some people say to go to school, other people say do not go to school. The school that popped up the most, besides School of Motion, which we’re not really a school, was Hyper Island. Have you heard of Hyper Island before?

Joey: Yes, I have.

Caleb: To go to Hyper Island for a year, which I guess for anyone who is not familiar with Hyper Island, it's kind of like a college hybrid where you go into more of a mentorship program for a year to two years to learn motion design. I think it's out in, I want to say-

Joey: It's in Sweden.

Caleb: In Sweden, yeah that’s right. It's in Stockholm, that’s right. The cost to go to Hyper Island for one year is $152,000 Swedish kroner. Do you know how much that is in US dollars?

Joey: I have no idea. It sounds like a lot.

Caleb: It's like Yen. Whenever you hear Japanese Yen you go, “Oh my gosh, it's so expensive,” but it's not, $18,000 a year which is a lot but compared to an actual college it's actually pretty low actually. I think if anyone’s heard you talk for any amount of time about the motion design industry going to school versus not going to school definitely comes up in the conversation. What is your ... Maybe in just a few sentences because we definitely could spend probably an hour of talking about this subject, what's your opinion in going to school versus not going to school for motion design?

Joey: I've put my foot in my mouth a few times talking about this, so I’ll try to be very, very fair. I've talked a lot of people about this. It totally depends on your situation. If your situation is that in order for you to go to a four year school and learn about this stuff, to go to Scad or Ringling or Otis, a place like that, Art Center, if your situation is you're going to have to take out a ton of student loans to do it and you're going to go there, have an amazing four years, learn a ton, be exposed to the industry and make a network and all that but the cost is you come out with $200,000 in debt I say don’t do it. I strongly suggest you don’t do it.

If your situation is your family has the ability to send you to those schools without taking out student loans and you come out with zero debt or very low debt it's a great option, it is. I can tell you that, in my generation of MoGraphers, there are so many people that did not go to school for this at all that are great at it.

I went to school for film and television, and I guess it's related to what I ended up doing but honestly the skills that I used from day one in my career were self-taught. I taught myself Final Cut Pro, I taught myself after effects. In school I learnt how to use a Steinbeck and a Bolax and an Avid and I don’t really even think I learnt anything about editing theory. I certainly didn’t have design classes or animation classes.

I went to school for four years and came out and did something related to what I learnt but basically totally different. Casey Hupke, who I just interviewed, he went to school for computer science. I just don’t think it's necessary anymore to spend that kind of money. It's about the cost; that’s what it's really about.

It's not about the quality. If you go to Scad, if you go to Otis, you go to Ringling, you're getting a real good education, a really, really good education in this but the cost is so high I don’t think it's worth it if it's going to saddle you with debt, I really don’t. Now, there's another piece to it which I can't really speak to, which is that it's not ... With School of Motion, with MoGraph Mentor, with Learn Squared and other places it's possible to get extremely high quality training online for a small fraction of the price of in person.

With technology and the way we structure our classes, you don’t ... You're not there in person with people. We’ll never be able to do that, but you're not missing out on the training part at all. In fact, I would argue that what we do is better than a lot of the classes you'll get in person.

However, I've been told by people ... Like Joe Donaldson said that going to art school for him, not necessarily motion design school, but just going to art school and being exposed to our history and being pushed the way art schools push you and being around other artists, that that experience gave him the confidence and the skills to go work at Buck and no amount of online training is going to give you that.

That’s the flipside to it. If you're ... And what I would say to that is that for Joe, Joe ... If you’ve ever met Joe, and he's an amazing dude, he's an artist. He gets it. He's got more creativity in a booger. It comes out of his nose. For me, that was never my goal. I never wanted that.

It's not that I didn’t want it, it's that that wasn’t my goal. My goal was to make cool stuff and to be excited about what I was making and then eventually to be able to support my family doing it and to have a nice lifestyle and good work life balance. Not going to art school, it definitely hurt my work in terms of it could have been cooler maybe, but would I at this point say, “Well, that would have been worth an extra $50,000 of debt,” no I don’t think so. It's a very personal decision. It depends a lot on your financial situation.

I’ll say this with 100% certainty, at this point even now in 2017, very early in School of Motion, in MoGraph Mentor, in the future [inaudible 01:43:33] Company, even just a few years into this it is 100% possible to skip college, save yourself hundreds of thousands of dollars, do it all online, intern. Instead of spending 50 grand a year, do it online and go work for free at a studio, go intern and bartend at night, or something, and you will just be as capable at the end of it as you would if you went to Scad or Ringling.

Caleb: Do you know of people that have taken the School of Motion boot camp, not gone to college, and then gone off and had some of these kind of sexier jobs at some of these big name studios?

Joey: I don’t know for sure. I think it's too early to say that anyone has skipped college to take School of Motion classes. I don’t think that that’s happened. We have a lot of alumni that their only structured training that they’ve ever done in motion design is through School of Motion and they got jobs and are working and freelancing and succeeding and thriving solely through the training we've given them.

Now, they’ve also looked at tutorials, it's not like they never watched the tutorial came to School of Motion and left able to do it. We were the structured part. They used the resources, the vast resources of the internet to do the rest, and they did not go to school for this; they did not go to school for anything remotely related to this.

I think that ... There's a whole other side of the argument which is, “Well, there's other reasons to go to college besides learning the trade that you're going to do to make money later on,” and I would argue that there's also ways to do that exact same thing without spending $200,00, but that’s a much different longer podcast.

My advice in that regard is this, I can tell you don’t go to college for motion design. I can tell you if it's going to make you take out $200,000 of loans don’t go to college for motion design, 100% I would say that and stand by that.

Caleb: Okay. I think that’s, whenever you're talking about it depends on the person, and I think in a lot of ways we downplay that. Each person is very different in the way that they learn, in the way that they process information. For me, and I'm sure you're in a similar boat, learning motion design on your own is very possible, and learning through tutorials is great, but I know some people even in my family that they need to be in a group setting physically with other people in order to process information better.

I think it's just ... It's not unhelpful to say this, but it is so case by case, that you really just need to look at yourself and ask yourself how do I learn and what where do I want to be in a few years. I think it just changes from person to person.

Moving on to an equally debated question, a lot of people said, move to LA or New York, a lot of other people said live wherever you want. This debate is not going to be solved in this podcast here. We are seeing shifts in the industry where more and more motion design work is being demanded from smaller market hubs, like Dallas or Salt Lake City.

These are places where you very well can create amazing motion graphic work for clients and make a lot of great money in the process. Do you still think that people are benefited by moving out to LA and New York despite some of the things associated with moving to those places, like the cost and then just simply getting out of our hometown, do you think that it still would be recommended for people to try to live that life?

Joey: It depends on your goals. If your goal is to be at the top of the industry working on the coolest stuff, maybe getting something you worked on featured in Motionographer, getting some recognition, working on national spots or maybe even movie titles, stuff like that, yes, 100% move to LA or move to New York.

If your goal is I like this motion design thing, this is fun, I want to do cool work, I want to make a good living, I want to have a good work life balance and have fun doing this, at this point it doesn’t really matter where you work. There's more work in LA and New York, it might be easier to get started there. I got my start in Boston. If I started my career in Sarasota, Florida I think it would have been a different story, way harder.

It's certainly helpful to start in a major market just because it's easier to get a real full-time job in a physical location, but the truth is after a couple of years it doesn’t matter anymore, you can freelance from anywhere. We have students in almost every country in the world now.

There's a motion design industry in every medium to large size city and then every, per every company that makes a product, every marketing company, every ad agency, and frankly at this point every software developer, needs motion designers. There's work everywhere. If you want to work at Buck move to LA, move to New York; that’s the way to do it. If you don’t really care about that and you just want to have a good career, live where you want to live.

Caleb: We also got a lot of funny advice from people. I thought it might be cool if I could read off some of the responses here. Get a Creative Cloud subscription was some advice that people gave in.

Joey: Absolutely, yeah.

Caleb: Yeah, it's kind of important. Don’t be a jerk; you already talked about this.

Joey: Yes, super important.

Caleb: A lot of people, this is not just one person, quite a few people said do programming instead and then do motion design on the side, which-

Joey: Interesting.

Caleb: You're programming, you're going to make a ton of money, but it's just what lifestyle are you wanting to have here. A lot of people said practice, but one person went so far as to say practice until you die.

Joey: That’s actually kind of profound. You think of practice as something you do to get better and maybe at some point you're good enough, and I've said it a couple of times, you're never good enough. I don’t know, there's something kind of wise about that.

Caleb: Right, like the old less knowledgeable motion designer and you dies, and then this new motion designer comes in their place.

Joey: From the ashes, yes.

Caleb: From the ashes, yeah. It's the hero’s journey really. This was really funny, two responses back to back, one person said, and I quote, “Don’t do it.” The next person said, “Do it now,” two conflicting responses there. One person said that sleep is the enemy, but I have to have my eight hours of sleep every night.

Joey: I disagree with that comment.

Caleb: Then one person says, and this is ... Man, you want to talk about debates in the motion design world, one person said don’t post copies of tutorials on your demo reel, which-

Joey: True, true.

Caleb: There's a lot to be said about that. That is the end of our survey here. Obviously we leant a lot of information and we've had a lot of good positive feedback for next time. Next year we’re going to do a lot of location based questions, we are going to ask people a lot about their different job roles as art directors versus animators versus MoGraph artists. Going forward and looking at the industry over the next few years do you feel pretty positive about the direction in which motion design is going?

Joey: I think it's the best time ever to be in motion design. There's new ways of using it, the industry is growing. There are certain parts of it are shrinking, I think the studio model is going to shift a little bit because it's getting harder and harder, but overall, man, I'm super positive about it.

Caleb: Great, man. Thank you so much Joey. I appreciate you letting me be on here and ask you some questions for a change. We’re going to continue to do the survey for hopefully many more years in the future. Thanks,  man.

Joey: For sure.

Caleb: Wow, that was a lot of information. Hopefully you learnt something new about the industry. If you haven't seen it yet, go check out the survey results over on School of Motion. We’d be happy to hear feedback about what we can do better for next time. Thank you so much for letting me guest host this show. We’ll see you on the next episode.

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