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

Grega, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. In our experience, overnight success is usually the result of years of hard work laying the foundation for success, but unfortunately, it’s exactly this part of the story that most of the media ignores. So, we’d appreciate if you could open up about your growth story and the nitty, gritty details that went into scaling up.

The “scaling up” story I want to talk about today isn’t even one that happened in my professional field, but rather one that I did as a hobby, outside of work, on YouTube. I’ve always been fascinated by 3D animation, which is the reason why I’ve gone into this field – and it all started with a rise of Minecraft music videos in 2012. I’ve wanted to learn how to do that, so I eventually stumbled upon a software called “Mine Imator”. It was still in it’s early stages and there weren’t many tutorials for it, but for whatever I did find, I always thought the explanation wasn’t really good. So through the years, I slowly began making tutorials about the things and concepts I understood. Because of the niche, I was one of the rare creators who talked about this software, which snowballed into me, becoming “the face” of the community. But my goal has always been mastering the “proper” 3D animation world, so I enrolled into a multimedia high school, since they offered 3D animation as one of the subjects. That’s where I also got to learn a whole bunch of other areas of multimedia, which greatly assisted the entire process. Fast forward to the end of college and a really messy diploma project, done in Autodesk Maya, a friend of mine directed me to Blender – which I’ve been avoiding until then – but when I finally tried it, a whole world opened up to me.
I have very much struggled with impostor syndrome at that point and I felt like I was diving into bigger, more professional waters, that have higher standards and expectations, but at the same time, I had all of these ideas of projects and concepts that I wish to visualize. So every new project turned into a “research and development” task, where I kept learning new things and unlocking new potential.
I’m the type of person who really wants to understand something, rather than memorize it, so I dove deep into everything I was doing – and through the years, the amount of content I’ve made, and the amount of knowledge I got from trying to attempt that kept growing. From new methods in 3D, to better title/thumbnail optimization, I eventually started earning enough money, where I had to open a company to keep that inflow legal. And through a couple of videos that went viral in the new, more professional community, I’ve started getting projects and private tutoring requests, so the answer to the question kind of sounds like cliche, but it truly was a culmination of years of learning and internalizing different aspects of the craft – along with a talent for explaining things, which got me on the board as a somewhat respected person in the field.

My company is currently at a point, where I’m slowly looking into quitting my job in 3D production and doing 3D production for my company – once it’s able to sustain itself.

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 background and context?

I am the owner of the brand “SharpWind”, which for the most part is a YouTube channel with entertaining and educational content about 3D production, with a few original production pieces in the mix as well. Given the nature of that position, my services started out as private tutoring, by people who were willing to pay for 1 on 1 time, so I could give them the answers to their personalized dilemmas when it came to 3D.
Over time, those expanded into modeling, rigging, etc. But all this time I also did photoshoots and filming shoots for the clients in real life (those are much more prominent where I’m from).

In terms of competence, I’m fairly confident in my skill, but I can’t rank myself against the best – I’m still working on that – but I genuinely feel like what sets me apart from others is my ability to explain concepts in all the ways to make anybody understand it. When my technologically-illiterate mother was able to watch my video and understand how bits are counted and how computers see color, I feel like that’s a valid reference :)

I feel like my clients trust me because of the mountain of “deep-dive” style educational content I’ve produced. Something about that just signals that you understand the craft well enough to create these knowledge wells.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

Once again, this answer will sound like cliche, but “market research” really does work. When my market was still “Mine-Imator” driven, I was a niche. The software was there and so were the users, but the educational/informational content wasn’t. I was the one who filled that gap and instantly became known because of that.

Once I moved onto Blender, the market was already saturated with tutorials and artists, so the gap to fill had to be different. Luckily, I’ve built a skill for creating captivating videos from my Mine Imator days, but that doesn’t really help if nobody clicks on the video to begin with. The most effective strategy, believe it or not, is actually a very careful and sensitive thing, because I’m talking about clickbait.
Most of us hear the word “clickbait” and think of a false promise, or a “scam” to your attention spam, but there’s a thin line of “good” clickbait – where the title and thumbnail are extravagant and mysterious enough, where it lures you in (baits you), but the content of the video still reveals the very questions that the clickbait posed, so the viewers are left satisfied regardless.
If the content of the video is good, occasionally it’ll get shared by someone, somewhere, which will generate random “spikes” in views – which YouTube’s algorithm sees and promotes it to more people. And a video with more views, naturally has more people clicking on it.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I’m a simple man. I’ve started learning 3D animation because I enjoyed watching 3D animations. And teaching things about that, will give me more amazing 3D animations to watch.

At the same time, I find the process really fun. It’s like a massive, somewhat-complicated puzzle that you slowly piece together and watch as it evolves into a better and better looking thing and being able to get paid for it is just a cherry on top.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sharpwind_official/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/SharpWind
• Other: Other links lead to my personal accounts, not connected to the brand, so I’m only providing the two links

Image Credits

N/A All the images were made by me.