We recently connected with Mick Lauer and have shared our conversation below.

Mick, appreciate you joining us today. Earning a full time living from one’s creative career can be incredibly difficult. Have you been able to do so and if so, can you share some of the key parts of your journey and any important advice or lessons that might help creatives who haven’t been able to yet?

I graduated from NYU in 2003 with a BFA in Performance Arts. While I was honored to be a part of the NYU graduate showcase, it unfortunately coincided with an actors’ strike (which was later followed by the writers’ strike). Agents weren’t interested in new talent, and reality television was propelled into the mainstream. Needless to say, finding work in an already highly competitive and saturated industry during a dry spell of scripted shows and striking unions felt impossible.

While I did follow the well-travelled cliche of food service industry jobs, I had been building a graphic design portfolio since the beginning of my final year of college. Designing promotional materials for off-off-Broadway shows for my colleagues. Eventually I’d move on to creating mock ads based on campaigns I’d see while riding the subway. After a couple years of balancing bussing/serving, the occasional audition, and continuing to build up my design portfolio, I was finally hired part-time by a small marketing team.

A year into working with the marketing team, I was asked to build a website for one of their clients. Being a graphic designer with no web experience, I essentially slapped together a glorified PowerPoint (hotspots for buttons, entire pages were single jpgs, you get it… a mess). The team saw substantial opportunities (and profits) in the burgeoning website industry and wanted me to take on learning how to properly design and front-end code.

Using html/divs and CSS was just beginning to gain mainstream popularity (over tables/cells and inline styles), so I picked up a couple books and took a couple weeks to learn everything I could. And with the second website I built – everything clicked. There was seemingly no shortage of work and I was finally able to quit my other job as a server at ESPN Zone in Time Square.

Three years later, my partner (who handled the office work) and I (who took on the design load) started our own website/promotional material company: ArtistUpgrade. Our focus was the voice actor market. At that time agents and studios still preferred hard copies of demos, but were also requesting links to websites. We were a one-stop shop and clients were able to work with us face-to-face, factors that very much worked in our favor.

During the decade our business was around, I’d taken an interest in Adobe Flash animation. While the program was meant for web oriented motion graphics, I was seeing all sorts of other applications for Flash on sites like Newgrounds.com and a couple others. Between design gigs, I was learning as much as I could about Flash and animation fundamentals. Eventually we were able to offer animation to interested clients, but behind the scenes I was working on personal animated shorts under the internet pseudonym “RicePirate”.

I’d also begun dabbling in voice acting. Mostly for online creators through Newgrounds, but also the occasional professional gig. It was a fun and less time-consuming way to exercise my passion for acting. I took on every role I could, paid and unpaid, just getting my name out there and clocking my hours behind the microphone.

In 2014, the business and my partnership broke up. Essentially starting my life over at 33 years old, I moved to Philadelphia and focused on animation and a newly formed production company along with a small crew of extremely talented creatives (animators, writers, voice actors, musicians): SleepyCabin. The bulk of the income was generated from advertising revenue for our podcast, but we all had other means and other jobs to fully supplement our personal incomes. I continued to animate for my Youtube channel, design websites and promotional materials, voice act, and was also hired to write animated shorts for another Youtube channel, MASHED.

A few years later, I moved to Los Angeles. As fate would have it, I had a recording gig for Maker Studios the week I arrived at OutLoud Audio in Burbank. After the session, the head of the studio asked who I was (he hadn’t seen me around town before). I gave him a quick-ish rundown of my life story, and he asked if I had representation. I did not. He hooked me up with a meeting with the head of Disney Animation’s voice department. A few days later, I had an in-house demo session with him. Once again, I was asked about who I was. And once again, I gave the lowdown. He also inquired if I had representation. I still did not. And he got me a meeting with Abrams Artists. I met with their voiceover department, auditioned live on the spot, and signed with them within the hour.

Ironically, back in 2004 in New York, right after graduation, I’d interned at Abrams (East Coast division). Never made it passed photocopying and fetching coffee. And suddenly, over a decade after giving up acting, just a couple weeks after moving to Los Angeles, I had bi-coastal representation. I was fully aware of how fortunate and unreal it all was.

It’s been over 7 years and voice acting has been going strong. I’m blessed that the opportunities continue to grow and I continue to animate for clients, as well as myself. Some years, things are great, others, a little quiet. But I’ve been doing alright working for myself and in the creative industry for almost 20 years now.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

As a child, I loved computers, I loved art, architecture, LEGOs, and videogames. By the time I hit high school, I was convinced I wanted to become an actor. And by the time I would graduate from NYU’s Tisch school of the Arts, I’d realized that story-telling was my true passion – in any medium.

Art, animation, and design can tell a story. Functionality and clarity can help deliver a story. In all the work I’ve ever done, there’s always been an audience. If my client is a voice actor, their audience is casting directors. If I’m animating a commercial for an insurance company, their audience is potential customers. Effective communication is effective storytelling, and it can be done with words, images, sounds, even a user experience.

That’s been a personal mission since I started working for myself, because that’s just how I see things. When a client has requested an element be included because “they just like it” or because “it’s really popular right now”… if I don’t feel it’s in service to the messaging (visual or otherwise), I will push back. Not to say there isn’t value in riding trends, I just personally don’t feel inspired to do so. It can often “date” a project and ultimately just communicates “hey we’re cool, too!” to me. While I never want to alienate people, hand-feeding an audience can often come off as pandering. I don’t like being pandered to, and I try my best to treat others as I’d like to be treated.

What I love most about what I do now, is that I’ve been able to marry every passion I’ve had since childhood. Voicing acting in videogames and cartoons, writing and animating for my clients, telling stories with my personal projects. I’m building, designing, acting, drawing, writing – all in the service of telling stories. For my clients and myself.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

Someone close to me had been batting around the idea of writing a book. With the recent uptick in AI activity, they suddenly found themselves debating the necessity to write at all. It’s not a wild argument to make if the goal of writing a book is simply to produce a product. Sure, eventually, we’ll have AI comprehensive enough to knock out competent stories based on prompts, and people may one day find some genuine enjoyment reading them. But I truly believe, as many artists likely do, that the process is arguably more valuable than the final product.

Throughout the journey to complete any project (a book, a song, building a chair, building a business), there is growth, there are lessons learned, knowledge gained, trials overcome, and most importantly the creator’s voice and vision. Of course, the product is important, but I’ve always placed more value on what was gained from the process. These insights are invaluable and can be nurtured and applied endlessly down the line.

For those who focus more on the destination rather than the journey, it can be difficult to comprehend “why” someone would focus on creative endeavors. And for those who find fulfillment in the process of creation, I imagine it’s difficult to live a life void of creative pathways.

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

Oh boy…

So, being as objective as I can: there is potentially a timeline where NFTs could hold some genuine merit. I’m foggy on exactly how, but I’m trying to avoid a binary blanket statement.

That said, as far as I’ve seen, NFTs are a soulless currency for clout chasing tech-bros who have little regard for the environment and even less for the art they are monetizing.

The main goal of NFTs appears to be ownership and monetary gain. In my opinion, both of these qualities are void of respect for creativity or creators. I’m not saying that business and art or mutually exclusive, just that if the primary mission (rather than the bi-product) is the monetization, then the art and the creative process are limited to what is most profitable, rather than what is most expressive or artistically rewarding. Of course, I’m not an expert in the field, and I could possibly be missing an important angle to my perspective.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://micklauer.com — (sorely out of date)
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ricepiratemick — (don’t really use)
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mick-lauer-45b3629/ — (use it even less)
• Twitter: https://x.com/ricepiratemick — (my main, but have started distancing myself from socials in general)
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnX9ICBUU8WZgMhrZUcRyuw
• Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/ricepirate-mick/tracks
• Other: IMDB : https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1004585/

Image Credits

– Photo from the set of “In Space With Markiplier”
– Selfie
– Commissioned animation still from “The Cherry Family”
– Broden (voiced by Mick Lauer) from “Final Fantasy Rebirth”
– Chief Wheeler (voiced by Mick Lauer) from “Lego City Adventures”
– Personal animation still from “Blood Sun Vendetta”