We were lucky to catch up with Aiman Samat recently and have shared our conversation below.

Aiman, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to start by getting your thoughts on what you are seeing as some the biggest trends emerging in your industry.

Speaking from someone who consumes a lot of Tiktoks/IG reels, I have been seeing a lot of contents revolving around filmmakers showing off fancy edits/transitions, whether its on content they shot themselves or an existing TV show and movies. The main focus is always on either how complicated or seamless the transitions are – a lot of content creators dedicate their posts to just transitions and tutorials on transitions.

I find it interesting because I witnessed (many of us, perhaps) the evolution of this trend, from back when Tiktok became popular a few years ago, where a lot of “tiktok challenges” include the use of transitions, whether its a dance, or an outfit change. In a way, a lot of young content creators start learning about transitions from TikTok. Some perhaps started their interest in filmmaking solely because they witnessed the most satisfying transition ever from a drone shot flying pass an ocean that slowly turn into a cup of coffee.

With that in mind, it makes sense that the younger generation appreciate fancy transitions in movies/TV shows more, or make fun of the purposely-cheesy transitions in Sam Raimi’s Dr. Strange film. I’m bringing this up because I’m curious with how this trend will affect the future of editing, or will they just stay in the form of short contents.

Aiman, 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?

Hello, my name is Aiman Samat and I am a visual effects artist. I got in the industry by starting filmmaking since I was 15, and to stand out from the rest I self-taught myself VFX and implemented them in my own short films. With that experience, I helped student filmmakers with VFX and gathered enough work to get hired by Ingenuity Studios.

It has really been a pleasure to be working there because of the variety of work I have been able to get involved with – from Taylor Swift lyric videos to a 7-11 Slurpee ad directed by Warren Fu. Everyday there are new challenges which helped me grow as a VFX artist. Recently we had to work on a BMW project entirely on Blender which I was not super familiar with, but with that project I am more confident in my 3D abilities and has since relied a lot of work on just Blender. (Including animating an R-rated *thing* for an upcoming Apple TV series).

I sometimes accept freelance work too, whether its from musicians who need graphics on the screen while they perform or helping out student films enhance their work. This gives me little time to work on my own passion projects but I try to get to them as much as I can.

A recent project worth mentioning is a portrait series called “Kill Club”, where I take portraits of friends/models as killers, shot on analog film to sharpen my skills on camera/lighting with the limitation of analog.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

Artists or creatives are feeble little creatures so we all know that we like reassurance that our work is being appreciated by people. It’s really satisying when I post a random render I did for fun and its shared around 100k times. A lot of times I cannot predict what people/viewers will connect to and when something clicks (rarely), that feels good.

To badly paraphase Ethan Hawke as well about if “human creativity matters”, where he describes how most people do not care about poetry/art until their father dies, or they lost their child, or someone breaks their heart. By then they find ways to cope until art becomes sustenance, and the most rewarding for an artist is when your art helps people somehow.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

There is a lot of time commitment with working in the creative industry. Whether its the unplanned overtime until 2 a.m. or working over the weekend, or spending your last remaining free time on freelance work or passion projects. More often than we want we sacrifice a lot of social time for our art which makes us look introverted. I actually am, but there are many artists who would love to be around their friends but they can’t because they have to rewrite their 12th draft of their screenplay which may not be made at all and that is just part of the process.

There are times where I am having fun with friends, and then in the back of my mind I am contemplating whether I am wasting time not working on something. In a way it can be unhealthy, but that is the sacrifice a lot of us have to make as creatives.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aiman_samat/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@filmjkk/about