We recently connected with Jonathan Winbush and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Jonathan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start big picture – what are some of biggest trends you are seeing in your industry?

I’m a motion graphics artist working professionally in Hollywood since 2006. I’ve worked on major projects for IPs with Marvel, DC, Warner Bros, Netflix, and Hasbro to name a few. Recently I’ve been seeing a shift with motion graphics and Vfx artist alike using real-time technology to achieve their end results faster and more efficiently as in my case Unreal Engine 5. This past year I’ve been traveling the world as a co-headliner for the Design & Animation tour showcasing new workflows to artists in our field. Through my travels, I’ve been talking face-to-face with a lot of artists who are just now starting to use Unreal Engine 5 as they’ve been seeing it requested more and more by top studios. I saw this trend coming years ago as I started teaching it freely through my YouTube channel in which I’m glad I did because it’s been helping a lot of artists around the world get up to speed on how they can use these tools in today’s creative field.

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 Jonathan Winbush but most people know me as Winbush, I’m a multi-award-winning motion graphics artist originally from Pittsburgh, PA but have been working professionally in South California since about 2006. I’ve worked with Marvel, Warner Bros, Discovery Channel, DC, Netflix, and Hasbro to name a few for projects such as Iron Man, Transformers, Power Rangers, Out Daughtered, and Deadliest Catch. One of the projects I’m most proud of is working on several seasons of My Little Pony plus the music video for the MLP movie with singer Sia. My daughter was a huge fan of the series at the time so being able to share that moment with her as I was working on the cartoon was really a great period in my career. Also when my son was young I used to bring him to Warner Brothers with me when I would be working on gaming projects like Lego Harry Potter and he’d help with recording some of the gameplay we could use in the marketing which at the time meant a lot to him. These days on top of working with clients I also teach/share all my knowledge through my YouTube channel because it’s my way of paying it forward to all the artists that helped me early in my career but with YouTube I can reach a larger audience around the world and help them get started in their creative journey.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

I’ve built my following on social media by just being me as corny as that sounds. My biggest following right now is on a Chinese social media site called Veer VR which is all based around virtual reality projects I have about 116k+ followers on there and they’ve even flown me out to Beijing to do workshops and presentations around virtual reality but stateside my biggest following would be my YouTube channel where I have about 50K+ followers. I’ve built that following by not chasing followers I just freely do tutorials teaching 3D programs like Unreal Engine 5, Cinema 4D, After Effects, and Photoshop. I’ve always enjoyed just sharing tips and tricks with artists even before social media so for me even when I only had 5 followers I put my all into every tutorial I created and several years later it’s brought me a lot of opportunities I didn’t even have in my plans such as touring the world on the Design & Animation tour and even going to Seoul Korea recently to present at Korea University with top education and government officials. I think the most important thing is being genuine and don’t chase trends or followers.

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

I was fine with it at first I was even involved with it before the NFT hype and it was just known as Crypto Art. To me, I thought it was cool to see artists be able to sell their artwork digitally similar to what I would see physical artists do at the artist ally at Comic-Con but as artists started to make ALOT of money selling their digital art then the sharks came in and ruined a good thing in my opinion. I still think it’s fine for artists to make money off their creations but where it sucks is the schemers and scammers came in and really hijacked the scene and now it’s left a bad taste in a lot of peoples mouths to where no one wants to go near NFTs. There might be a future where artist and sell their art digitally without the NFT stigma but it’ll probably take rebranding to make that happen I’ve even seen some places starting to call it other names like ordinals or digital collectibles.

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Contact Info:

• Website: https://winbushimmersive.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jonathanwinbush/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/jonathanwinbush
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/jonathanwinbush
• Other: https://veer.tv/vr/WinbushImmersive/home