We were lucky to catch up with Mark Mcgillivray recently and have shared our conversation below.
Mark, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?
Nearly every risk I’ve taken has exponentially improved my career prospects, often after days and nights (and weeks, and months) of hemming and hawing both before and after the singular moment. The two most impactful that come to mind are A. moving to NYC with no job, internship, etc. lined up and B. quitting my full time agency job to strike out on my own as an art director.
I didn’t approach either of these lightly. I spend way too much time hedging for downturns and uncertainty, which delays each big leap – only for me to wish that I took each of those risks sooner, so as to reap the rewards. I wouldn’t have been able to be in this career at all if I didn’t move, and I would have much less comfortable and fulfilling of a career if I didn’t strike out on my own.
Suffice to say – take that risk! You can endlessly over prepare for the downsides for the rest of your life, but you can only take the leap once.
Mark, 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?
I’m an art director and CGI artist that makes movie posters for the entertainment industry, advertising industry, and editorial world. I like to take a concept driven approach to each project, distilling the story and feeling of a film/play/product down into a singular image – typically with a twist of humor or a visual pun to be solved.
Alright – so here’s a fun one. What do you think about NFTs?
They’re 98% composed of derivative slop – grey procedural goo that is an even more flagrant racket than the mainstream art market. An excuse to find yet another novel path to wealth, since the avenues of stocks, derivatives, housing, crypto, Beanie Babies are all mature and lacking the 1000x yield that we’re all conditioned to expect our investments to hit. They’re Pokemon cards for Excel monkeys, except you can’t battle them, and there’s no Charizard.
That being said, there are interesting and useful applications for the technology. The royalty/continued income for the artist as something is being sold around. The works that have an individual pay to contribute to it (The Monument Game by Sam Spratt). There are plenty of opportunities for the tech to enrich artist’s lives, incomes, and work – if it wasn’t only used to randomly generate a ton of weird monkeys or goopy cgi renders of Joe Biden. That’s what happens when a value system comes first, before the interesting work that necessitates that system.
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.
It’s still work. You still have to get up, bang out a boatload of concepts, comps, and presentations, tear your hair out, answer emails, procrastinate, invoice, make more comps, forget to get up and walk, give yourself back pain, eat dinner way too late, work more, and do it all again the next day. And you have to be innovative and mentally batting 100% each and every one of those days – because you don’t want to deliver a subpar product, do you?
It is a wonderful job – I get to make insane and weird images for money, and I’m beyond grateful – but the creative and mental load isn’t anything to sneeze at.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.markmcgillivray.com
