We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Michael. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Michael below.

Hi Michael, thanks for joining us today. Are you happy as a creative professional? Do you sometimes wonder what it would be like to work for someone else?

The interesting thing about this question is that I am a creative in a “regular job”; Right now I am a digital media teacher at a high school, so I get to teach all about the creative process like design, website building, photo editing, video editing, and all things of that nature. I am happy, but it’s a different kind of happy than if I were to be fully following my dream of making films.

I’m a director, writer, actor, producer, a billion different roles all wrapped up into one-package as a teacher. It’s all for the stuff I like doing… but at a price. The field of education is hard. We work on certification tests for Adobe programs so the students have a verifiable skillset that helps them get jobs in the field if they’re not necessarily college-bound, but to me it comes at a cost: standardizing art. To me, Photoshopping something or creating a video should be fun. Sometimes it feels like we lose sight of the beauty because we need to measure technological goals by a standardized curriculum. I don’t want to use the word “soulless” to describe it, because it’s not, but maybe draining is more apt.

However, probably like most subjects in school, there are some students that are so incredibly passionate about what it is we do. They’re the reason I get up at 5:09 AM on the dot every weekday. They like the structure of the program giving them something to do, or they find the soft skills hidden underneath all of the hard skills. It’s having the weight of the world on your shoulders but then catching lightning in a bottle a couple times every hour.

There’s no easy answer to “Are you happy as an artist or a creative,” for me, but if there was, maybe I wouldn’t be doing this right. The back and forth is what drives us to do more.

Michael, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I started off as a kid with a hyperfixation on YouTube video game “playthroughs” in 2009. Naturally, this led to me begging for a video camera, which was this rinky-dink blue camcorder about the size of my hands. That’s probably one of the best gifts I’ve ever received; it opened my world so much.

I’d say I’m mostly into film, but I’ve made a decent portion of money freelancing for TikTok content whether I was acting for ads or adding captions and B-roll to stock trader monologues. I did a brief stint as a photographer at some tourist attractions, like the Hard Rock at Universal CityWalk.

The small amount of people that have heard of me will most likely recognize me from a YouTube channel called ToughCookie Media, where I’ve posted films, mostly related to my own fan-made Spider-Man videos. In addition to that, I have a small Instagram following dedicated to cosplay for things like Marvel or Resident Evil.

ToughCookie Media is something a friend suggested to me back in 2015, and it stuck ever since. I like to make art that revolves around human tenacity; we can see ourselves in a character, even if the problems they’re facing are 10 times bigger in scale – but they feel the same feelings we are.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The money.

Haha.

Belief.
Knowing we have someone in our corner makes you feel like you can take on the world. For me, it’s my wife. She’s the one that pushed for me to get this job, and stick with it when things got hard.

I’m not a celebrity with mile-long lines at Comic-Con, but I don’t need to be. Seeing a student’s face light up when they “get it” is awesome. I get to be that “belief” for them. It’s such a humbling experience, and an honor I don’t take lightly.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

Talk about them. Think of art as a person; living, breathing, alive. People need oxygen. And in this situation, we are the trees. We provide the oxygen, whether by talking about an artist, sharing their work, celebrating them, commissioning them.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/toughcookie_media/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@ToughCookieMedia

Image Credits

ToughCookie Media Logo – Trae Gonzalez