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

Kris, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

The most meaningful project I’ve worked on would have to be my 3D animated short film I created earlier this year called Grump in the Night. It truly represents the culmination of all the work I’ve done up to this point. Meaning all the tutorials, lessons, short animated clips, and other things I’ve done led up to me being able to complete a project like this. Creating a four minute short film with multiple fully animated human characters and handling the entire 3D production pipeline all on my own is no easy task and it’s something I wouldn’t have been able to do even a year ago. Completing this kind of project, for me, was a testament to all the work I’ve put into learning 3D animation over the years and will always be one of my favorite projects that I’ve worked on.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am one of the Creative Directors at Something’s Awry Productions. We’re an animation production company that specializes in creating short form content such as commercials, branded content, and short films. Along with three others, we started the company back in 2015 after years of doing stop motion animated commercials for various toy companies such as the LEGO Group. This started back in 2011 and it was after this period of around four years that we realized it was time to formally setup the company and it into an official job for us. After a few more years of doing stop motion work, I slowly started to learn 3D animation and began incorporating it into my animations. By the time 2019 rolled around, stop motion work had been starting to dry up and I finally made the decision to push fully into 3D animation.

What I think separates the company and myself from others in the business is our adherence to a particular “fun” style of animation. Coming from a stop motion background, it’s always been my goal to try and emulate the tactile, hand crafted feel of stop motion in 3D animation. Something about the whimsical, vibrant, and playful nature of stop motion animation has always appealed to me and I try to imbue our work with that whenever possible. This, combined with our tendency for cinematic, kinetic camera angles and offbeat humor is what I believe sets our work apart from others in the field.

More than anything though, I’m most proud of how much we’ve been able to achieve with such a small production team. Often times for 3D animation, you’d have a group of people handling different aspect of the project. You’d have separate teams for lighting, modeling, animation, texturing, and so on. But over the years, I’ve been able to take on every aspect of the process and create shorts and commercials around this workflow. This provides those we work with a level of speed and maneuverability that larger, more cumbersome pipelines just can’t match.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Before I did 3D animation, stop motion was my chosen field. I had gotten my start doing stop motion animation back in 2008 after receiving a copy of iStopMotion for my birthday. I would often create little shorts using my Legos and after a few months I created a Youtube channel where I’d upload my films. I’d continue making short films every few months for the next four years until in 2012 when I discovered Tongal.com. This was a website for crowd sourcing commercials online. A company like Lego would go to Tongal and provide a job for everyone to apply for. This is what led to my very first commercial jobs and I would put my Youtube channel aside and commit to working on these Tongal projects (in between going to school). So stop motion animation was my job from 2012 to 2019 when the demand for stop motion animation started drying up. Leading up to this, I had noticed the decline in job opportunities coming my way and knew I had to make some kind of a change. Luckily, I had begun experimenting with learning 3D animation and had even incorporated it sparingly into a handful of my stop motion jobs. So once 2018 rolled around, I began to really commit to learning this new form of animation. 3D animation is an incredibly technical medium and the learning curve for it can be quite steep. Especially if you wanted to create the kind of short films I was used to making using stop motion. It was certainly a tricky few years trying to relearn the techniques I had used for stop motion and apply them to 3D animation. But by 2020, I had officially animated my last stop motion animation and had fully moved into the 3D!

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

For me, building an audience on social media is not something you can set out to do. It’s truly a mystery to me what kinds of posts will gain traction online and which will not. I, like many others I’m sure, started my journey on social media with the expectation of trying to gain thousands of followers and build an audience to share my work with. But after a few months of trying to “figure out” the secret to it, I eventually became discouraged and moved away from posting entirely. Once I accepted that I couldn’t intentionally “go viral” and just used places like Youtube and Instagram to share my work with no one in particular, that is when I started to gain a following. I stopped creating artwork that tried to appeal to a particular group of people and just made whatever interested me at the time. This method doesn’t yield a large influx of followers all at once, but is truly a slow and steady approach to growing a following. I created posts and videos just for me and let others look at them too if they so chose. Recently a YouTube influencer with a large following reviewed one of my films and told his followers to check out my channel. From that I had an increase of over 100 Thousand followers in just five days!

Contact Info:

• Website: somethingsawry.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kristheorin/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Somethingsawry
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kris-theorin-28097012a/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/somethingsawryp
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/somethingsawry