We recently connected with Garrett Lewis and have shared our conversation below.

Garrett, appreciate you joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

Chirpmail is an animated series I created where I animate birds set to real life voicemails. I find a lot of joy in this ‘creature-comforts’ style of animation and it’s been a lot of fun bringing other folks’ voicemails to life. I got started by animating silly voicemails from family members, but now I open up voicemail submissions from anyone. One of the reasons I find this series meaningful is I get a lot of creative fulfillment out of it. The animated birds are composited over live-action footage, so the series involves me wearing a lot of creative hats (filmmaking, compositing, rigging, animating, etc.). I also love seeing the reactions from people.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is Garrett Lewis and I’ve been obsessed with making films since I was a kid. That obsession eventually led me to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where I studied all aspects of the live-action filmmaking process. I switched gears to 3D Animation my junior year, and have been doing that ever since. After receiving a BFA in Film & Television, I spent about a year freelancing in NYC for some VFX Studios, and then moved out to Los Angeles to work in video games. In 2015, I joined the world of animated feature films to work at DreamWorks Animation. I currently work as a character animator for Walt Disney Animation Studios. In my free time I like to work on personal projects, including Chirpmail and The Animation Happy Hour Podcast!

As a CG Animator, I am often frustrated by how difficult it can be to create animations without hi-tech rigs, expensive render licenses, and other prohibitive roadblocks. That’s why I really enjoy discovering new ways to create animations in more accessible ways. I strongly believe animators can tell stories and entertain people without the resources of big-budget studios! It can be challenging but with leveraging new tools, and utilizing clever techniques it is definitely possible. If anyone is interested in this stuff, I am sharing my entire process of creating my next Chirpmail from start to finish on my Patreon.

How did you build your audience on social media?

I’ve always been someone who enjoys sharing my personal work on social media. This has caused me to steadily gain followers throughout the years. One of my personal projects (an animated voicemail) went viral and that’s when my social media following grew significantly. I think the animated voicemail series lends itself to spread on social media — especially on Reels/TikTok/YouTube Shorts because it’s fun to see real people’s voices animated on derpy birds.

My advice is to anyone trying to grow their social media presence is… don’t! Make stuff you’re actually passionate about or interested in, and not for the purposes of going viral or for social media followers. Grinding out new content for the purpose of growing your social media is a recipe for burnout and I see it happen all the time. I promise you that social media fame isn’t even as useful as you might think.

I do have one more practical tip… The sooner you can get over your perfectionism and actually share your work to an audience, the better! I see a lot of artists struggle with this (myself included!) and it’s so important to continue to fart stuff out and continue improving and looking forward, not back.

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

First of all, we need to stop allowing generative AI to scrape artists’ work without their consent. We also need to support and celebrate actual artists making things from scratch more. In the age of social media, we have trained people to expect unlimited free entertainment at their fingertips but we need to really acknowledge that making good quality stuff is difficult and takes time (which is a good thing!).

I’ve noticed that the economics for independent animation are pretty tough especially when it comes to trying to make a living off of social media. The ad revenue that you might get from your work usually does not justify the time required to make compelling animation. Unless social media companies start paying animators a bigger slice of the ad revenue pie, artists will have to continue to leverage crowdsourcing platforms, sell merchandise, or get creative with other related content like educational courses, etc. That being said, I don’t think it’s all doom and gloom for indie animators! The industry is constantly changing, and I’m seeing a lot of cool, innovate stuff happening in the indie-animation space!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.garrettanimates.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/garrettanimates/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv0XOMWOeAlaWkVAHExuZVQ
• Other: Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Garrett_Animates
  Podcast: https://www.animationhappyhour.com/