I asked you to send me your juiciest questions about the motion industry and I'm gonna answer
them here now what is the income of a motion graphic 2d animator career in your country
so in Australia that will vary mostly based on your seniority if you're a junior i would expect
rates to start between 40 and 60 000 a year and a senior animator will be getting around 100 000
that is generally my experience for more niche and more sort of management roles you can maybe get
more above that for art direction and creative directing but generally people start around 40
50k that's how i started and then you know you slowly creep up the ranks until you decide i've
had enough of this i'm going freelance a starting mid and spicy hourly rate for freelancing in the
industry okay well this one is going to vary a lot mainly on where you're located where
your clients located but generally in australia which is the only place i've really freelanced
starting day rates going to be around 400 450 you can get mid-range 550 600 650 and really
spicy level top levels i'd be going to be charging 800 plus but you have to be pretty specialized
maybe doing some directing as well at that point offering a lot to get that kind of
uh payment but people do it i know people charging 850 us dollars caveats all over the place this
is not financial advice the best way to get an accurate answer is to ask someone a freelancer
in you know your local area and ask hey how much are you charging how much are the kind of rates
going for but some clients have a ton of money they got big wallets they got deep pockets and
they will just throw money at something to get it done because the people sourcing it's not
their money they don't mind they'll they'll pay a thousand dollars a day if you get a big known
client that you know is a large tech company you push to push your rate a little bit you can get
a bit more out of it but this is not financial advice seek seek local experts who will be able
to um help you better and most people are pretty open about sharing that stuff it's not as a um
well of a dirty word as you you might think any advice on talking the dirty word money or rates
with clients when freelancing talk about it as soon as you can within the project
you're gonna have to do it at some point you may as well get it out of the way at the start and i
normally bring it up within the first email and there's normally a bit of a standoff of
who's gonna announce what their rate is or versus what's their budget i think it's good if you can
include examples and you might say i charge 500 a day this project took me five days which included
storyboarding and design and oh this project took me three weeks the total was this amount that kind
of thing and i think those kind of examples really help the client understand oh they want really
good intense animation it's gonna take a lot of time and a lot of money maybe they don't have the
budget for that and maybe you're gonna have to get a bit more creative and do something a little more
paired back but i think mention money as soon as you can and bring it up as if it's not a
big deal and pretend oh hey we're talking money we're professionals people sort of get on board
and there isn't that hesitation and fear around it anymore that's at least help me do the fancy
motion design studios offer good pay well the only fancy motion design studio i've really worked with
is buck and that was a freelancer and from my experience the pay was good i'd suspect the
larger fancy studios all pay pretty well companies that tend not to pay well either really small and
starting or the ones that have just scaled up very quickly because they're struggling to meet
payroll and mine sort of nickel and dime you on your day rate but larger established studios are
probably working on projects that take up a long period of time maybe at least a month
with five people on it full time it's probably the smallest projects that one of the fan one of the
fancy studios would work with and at that point you're probably demanding a budget that's pretty
large so someone's day rate varying you know 100 or so isn't gonna be that big of a deal i don't
think what is your worst experience of dealing with a client okay i've been pretty lucky to come
to mind and there were mainly interactions to do with feedback one was for a charity we were doing
work with this is also while working full-time in the studio and i won't name the charity because i
think they probably do great work and it was just one bad egg in the mix there but they had feedback
on one of the edits that we made and that feedback included a soft but definitely a gay slur in there
we also did some work for a pretty conservative talk back radio station based in sydney
the most old-school media people you've ever seen like these are people who saw murdoch growing up
and they just made some pretty casually sexist remarks around the office but in good fairness the
studio did have like a meeting the next day and says hey just just so we're clear guys we're never
working with them again so that was a good result and i've been very lucky in this regard most of
the work i've done with clients has been really really positive and those are the only ones that
really came to mind but i know a lot of you have had some real nightmares with clients so please
fold the next video in this series leave down in the comments your worst experience with a
client especially your feedback if you can give me the worst feedback you've ever received or
the weirdest i would love to read them out and comment on them in the next video okay ben toyaram
asks could you please tell us about rive ah well thank you in particular to that question because
they happen to be today's sponsor rive is an amazing browser-based design and animation tool
but what really separates it is that you can use it to build interactive motion graphics
that transition and mix animations based on events and user interactions those interactive graphics
can run on just about any platform you'd need them to it's also not like other design tools
that are just mockups or prototypes that need to be rebuilt in code you're creating an optimized
final product as you're working and as far as animation goes if you are familiar with animating
in after effects you'll have no problem using and learning the interface there is a timeline
and properties of an element you can add keyframes and there's a graph editor right here alongside
the timeline that's really intuitive as well here are some awesome examples from the community that
you can interact with from basic switches to full character animation and more intricate interactive
sequences like this too and with everything that you see in the community you have the
option to open in write so if you want to know how they made a certain interaction or animation
you can just open it up and see exactly how it is built you can also choose to publish what
you make to the community to share your work as well try it out for free at rive dot app
what are your thoughts and feelings on how ai image generation will affect the design industry
now i've got a lot of questions about ai and i think that kind of demands its own video so i will
work towards that in the future and i'll put out a request for takes when i'm about to make that
but in general i am kind of scared by it a little bit i don't think it is going to take
away the industry as a whole and remove the need for artistic creation but i was kind of shocked at
how quickly generating really good images happened i thought we'd be at automated cars jetson's level
of ai before we'd get to sort of outsourcing creative industries but i guess it's here
and it's not great at the moment but it's pretty damn close and i can't deny there will be a large
amount of the industry that will be made redundant i think hopefully that leads to more creative
fulfilling positions where people can use these tools to make better art but if you look at the
image generation at the moment that you can't really deny that will remove the need for stock
photography pretty soon vlad asks what part of the motion design job do you hate the most
the part i like the least is um the design back and forth with the client i think once design is
locked off and you're animating that that is that's the best part that's my favorite part
but trying to align yourself with the client on the style can be really tricky especially
if they are inexperienced and they don't really know about the process which means you're gonna
have to you know explain more and educate them a little bit more and especially if a client
doesn't know exactly what they want but they'll know it when they see it it can be hard to find
that balance i think the best thing to do in that case is show them reference and examples
maybe have a mood board show them hey some studios have made designs in this kind of style of this
style of this style and get them to find you know what they are what they want what they're after
quickly that way rather than you doing revision them saying no we don't like that and then you're
coming back and then no we don't like that and repeating that for an eternity did you find a
good balance between industrial work and joy of creation yes i did when i think i had that balance
the most in check was when i was freelancing probably around 2018 just before i started the
youtube channel and at that point i was taking on freelance clients and in my down time i had
a personal project which is the um the what is goon video and i had that project sort of planned
that i knew whenever i had down time whenever i wasn't booked or hired i can always work on
that and that did a couple of things one it meant that i was always working towards this big project
that would at some point get finished and if i wasn't working on it it was okay because i was
getting paid i was getting hired good things were happening but when i wasn't hired i at least had
something to distract myself and not stress myself out too much about i'm never going to get hired
again this is the last time i've ever been booked i'm going to be destitute within weeks i had a
project that was like well i'm not booked but i've been really keen to work on this animation so it's
kind of win-win that really helped me should demo reels be vertical format should they even
still exist at all yes i definitely think show reels should still exist i don't think we should
call for the mass genocide of show reels by any means there's a rather extreme opinion actually
it's good to have one thing that says hey if you don't have time to look it all through my
work and pick out the best stuff because people hiring you do not have that time i don't know
about being vertical though i still think most people are going to be looking at your work
on a desktop if they're hiring you i think if you want you can make a vertical and horizontal
one i know a lot of the work we do nowadays is vertical so it's hard to get that into am
into a horizontal format but honestly either crop it in just put black bars at the side and
it'll be fine have you ever done work for a client you feel morally bad about okay when i was working
full-time for a studio it was their client so not i was working directly with them so there's a nice
nice clever distance i can put between me and them we did work for a couple of betting agencies and
a casino but that is yeah not something i'd do now do you think mograph should form a union
i definitely think there is a growing interest in unions but that might just be from the bubble
that i'm in seeing some pressure mount especially from the vfx and gaming industries i know blizzard
activision have made some big steps on that front recently but it's a hard thing to organize and
implement i highly endorse it though and you know would welcome a union absolutely do you think
design slash animation schools are unnecessary with all the options available online i think
online options are generally probably the better way to go i had a great time in art school and i
think there's something intrinsically valuable about having a sort of gateway stepping stone
between being a school student and then being a functional adult in society but it's mainly like
the social skills that you learn at university like the time i had with my friends there were
some of the best times of my life that i think is very hard to replicate online but the online
options arguably way more affordable also probably more up to date and also university in a lot of
countries can be ridiculously expensive so i would certainly encourage the experience of university
but i'm not sure about going into debt for an art degree what's the release date of your new course
i am working very hard to get it released by the end of the year but there will be updates on
that as as i progress what's motion design in one sentence so that everyone can understand it easily
i normally say it's graphic design but animated that's what i would say to an uber driver so i'm
not going down a rabbit a hole of well yes well not quite like pixar no more have you seen ads
when things move in ads that's what we do what keeps you motivated when you're overwhelmed slash
don't feel creative uh normally the only thing that motivates me at that point is a deadline
and all the fear of letting people down when will there next be a sale or discount for your course
there will not be a sale or discount i'm not running some sort of bargain basement here
this is a fine boutique of quality courses and products i will have occasional extra features
for certain promotions but no sales no discounts it'll be that price what's the highest level a
motion designer can get to there's no limit believe in yourself where does your sense of
humor come from my insecurities and the need to deflect are you happy please rate one to
ten today's a good day i'll give it i'll get it 7.5 today oh hu-vu asks what's your dog doing
do you have any tattoos just one it's keeping up with your social media stuff stressful yeah
yes it is i think almost everyone finds social media stressful i'm certainly not an exception
and that relates to this next question how do you deal with imposter syndrome i feel like it's very
common issue in our industry i deal with it i want to say poorly i got a lot of questions like
this so i thought i'd address this with a little more detail i think i struggled particularly with
comparing myself it's really the to the work of others but also the output of others as well i
always think like i should be doing more that i should be more productive and that i don't have
many excuses for not just making more and more work and putting more and more stuff out there
and actually think that comparison to others and that pressure to make more work is the
biggest hindrance to both of those i think the best way to deal with imposter syndrome
is to just accept that everybody kind of feels like that no one feels as though they are doing
the best possible work they could be doing and that they're on top of everything everyone feels
like they could be doing more and i think social media doesn't help with that at all it makes us
think that posting great work all the time is the norm when i think really that's just an illusion
that doesn't really reflect uh reality as far as um as far as i've seen so if you're struggling
to make work that you're proud of or if you're thinking that you should just be posting more
or that you're not really making the most of your day if you're not on that sigma grind set non-stop
um go easy on yourself life is hard enough as it is it'll be okay there's no rush it'll be fine
you