We were lucky to catch up with Jon Ewell recently and have shared our conversation below.

Jon, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. One of our favorite things to brainstorm about with friends who’ve built something entrepreneurial is what they would do differently if they were to start over today. Surely, there are things you’ve learned that would allow you to do it over faster, more efficiently. We’d love to hear how you would go about setting things up if you were starting over today, knowing everything that you already know.

I’ve always had many interests and I’ve never focused or specialized in one thing. If I could start over, I would love to focus on one specialty.

Having a lot of skills and interests helped me to stay employed–or in business– through all of the recessions and other adverse events over the years so I’m thankful for that. But there is a constant need to learn and practice all of these areas to stay on top of my game and to compete with younger, hungrier creatives who are coming up.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

Over the last four years I’ve worked to transition my career from creative direction, design and illustration into that of multimedia which covers all of my interests in design, illustration, animation, photography, writing, video production and audio production.

Now I can produce podcasts, videos and motion graphics daily and I’m working on developing XR/AR content for the future.

I wish I would have focused on these things earlier but the cost-of-entry was very high for video production and the high-end computers needed for animation, motion-design, sfx and post production was very expensive. Now it’s still costly to get started but we have so many more affordable tools than before. The Iphone, for example, is not cheap but it’s a valuable tool for many uses, so just having a personal pocket computer that can shoot 4K video with onboard editing and scanning 3D objects using the LIDAR feature is extremely valuable these days.

I spent years as a dj and I’ve worked in radio so I thought that would continue but now I think it’s time to sunset the dj life (I’ll always continue for fun as a hobby) and use that time and energy for my personal audio visual work.

For my corporate career I now work full time as a multimedia producer for a company called Realm IDX, which is a pioneer in the field of integrated diagnostics, bringing together genetics, radiology, pathology and sophisticated artificial intelligence for actionable insights that can predict, diagnose and treat disease. It’s an exciting field and I love working in science so I’m having a great time now.

For my personal projects I’m working on a new audio visual series of stories, telling them using modern multimedia like artificial intelligence and machine learning to generate visual and copywriting. There has been so much innovation since so many people had to stay home for so long during Covid, that now the tools I need actually exist so I plan on taking full advantage of all of this new media for my projects.

For example, there are many apps like Wombo.ar, Midjourney and Dall-E that generate artwork using ai just by entering keywords. I can say, “woman in space with weapons” or Nebula viking” and the system generates the artwork automatically based on those keywords (see the included images for examples of this from Wombo.art). So now I can write stories and create my own visuals but I can also have the ai help generate copy, images and video. To me this is fascinating and a reminder that I’m very happy to be working in the future with all these fun toys.

Can you share your view on NFTs? (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

I think NFTs are great but there is a lot of volatility in crypto and blockchain so I feel it will change a lot over the next 5 years. Too many NFT owners are getting scammed by basic phishing attacks and there has been a lot of value lost because of hacks and theft. Cold wallets are key for now and hopefully they will develop better security. They also need a better solution for high gas fees because that’s a big problem if you can’t even mint an NFT due to outrageous gas fees on Etherium or other networks.

Users need to become more educated and knowledgable so they have a good experience. Music NFTs are now a reality and I think it’s the best way for musicians to produce their art and own it (or share ownership with NFT buyers). The development of Web 3 where NFTs and blockchain are crucial will be exciting over the next 5 years. I use a service called MetaVRse which is like a browser-based gaming engine (similar to Unreal Engine and Unity) fore developing XR (mixed reality) content and they have just announced their V2 operation which will help brands develop xr content, virtual shopping and automatic NFT generation. It’s a Canadian company and definitely an innovator so it’s one to watch. I’m also developing a lot using Niantic’s spatial mapping system. Most people know them from their Pokemon Go experience where you could play the”game” in the real world. I’m really interested in XR experience that are location-based out in the real world and we’ll see a ton of experiences like that in the near future. I want to be a part of that development.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

I have pivoted so many times in my life and career I could probably write a book on the subject. I’ve worked in hospitality, publishing, creative, radio and being flexible and willing to “pivot” are very valuable to me and have really helped me live a good life. I’m not wealthy or super successful but I really enjoy what I do and I’m never bored with my work.

The biggest pivot in my life was going from working for years in hospitality management to becoming a full-time commercial artist and designer. That was tough because I was making good money working in hotels and it was really hard to transition to my first “design” job which ended up being $10 an hour at a promotional products company in Temecula, CA called Pacific Sons back in 2002. My bosses Paul and Patti Bordas (parents of my good friend Scott) gave me the job and the opportunity to catch up with my computer design skills, since I was seriously behind in computer design at the age of 30. I worked there for 4 years and they let me practice on all of the design software when I was caught up with projects so that kindness really helped me pivot into what I do today. After that job I went to work for an ad agency and that gave me experience working for big brands using multimedia. So being willing to pivot changed my life.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://jwecreative.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jonwesleyewell/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonwesleyewell/

Image Credits
All photos and images copyright 2022 Jon Wesley Ewell.