We recently connected with Mike Martin and have shared our conversation below.

Mike, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

So much of the work I’ve done over my career was learned just from the creative brief. I’d always sign-on to doing whatever creative was asked and I’d just have to learn how to make it work, especially when it comes to the more technical works. Because of this, I do a lot of experimentation with new tools and workflows and constantly try to find new ways to make things. I think the most important skill I learned in art school was the ability to teach myself something. Being a motion designer is constantly having to solve problems creatively, and without the ability to teach yourself new skill sets you’ll never make it to that looming deadline. As cliche as it is, just getting in the tools and playing around will teach you so much about what does and doesn’t work, the Bob Ross method of making happy accidents.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Funny enough, I didn’t really have a clue as to what motion design was when I decided to pursue a career in animation. The summer before my senior year of high school one of my friends attended a summer workshop learning how to 3D model in 3DS Max. A group of us decided to take an elective “Media Arts” class where we all taught ourselves how to use the program just through the basic learnings he had. I was immediately hooked on playing with 3D and really pushed myself to learn everything I could about it. When it came time to decide where to go to college, there were some recruiters that came to my HS and gave a presentation for The Art Institute of Dallas showcasing a program for 3D Animation. Since Dallas was a quick 3-hour drive from where I grew up in Austin, Tx. it really seemed like the best option for me. Through a lot of unfocussed experimenting I started to click with the “Motion Design” track that the school offered for my BA degree, and I was really lucky in that, through school, I was able to find and surround myself with people that were so much more creative and talented than me. I looked at what others were doing, and tried to pick apart their processes, learn tools they weren’t using, and try to stand-out doing something different.

Through this weird pursuit to be competitively creative with my peers, in 2012 I partnered with a good friend and co-worker, Roger Young Jr. to create a motion graphics gif blog on Tumblr that we called Motion Addicts (later rebranding to Commotion.tv when we added Anuja Pothireddy as a collaborator). At the time, there didn’t really seem to be too many creative outlets for “abstract motion work” and the fact that Tumblr had such high-restrictions on GIF file size forced us to be really creative about making looping motion design gifs. Over a couple of years of just churning out motion gifs, we amassed a pretty sizable following for the time (+40k), and were getting client work for some pretty big brands (Gatorade + Wendy’s). We both ended up using the blog as a bit of a portfolio booster.

After working at a smaller ad agency in Dallas, there came a time where I sought work as a freelancer and looking into what the next steps of my career were, I took the opportunity to make the move to NYC, eventually ending up at Huge, inc. for the last 5+ years. Huge has been a great place to continue to develop my collaboration and leadership skills, and I’m now working as the Associate Director of the Motion Team, having oversight of the entire motion discipline at Huge.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

This may be slightly controversial, given that I work for a digital consultancy, but I really am not a fan of how NFTs actually functioned in the marketplace. In a way, it took my pursuit as an individual motion designer, just wanting to share creative work for the sake of making something beautiful and honing my craft, and it put this emphasis on having to grab the bag. Fundamentally, I really do want designers and artists to be able to make comfortable livable wages and be able to sell their work at a fair price for the efforts they put in, but the idea of adding scarcity bias to the work by tokenizing it and creating a stock pricing market just sits with me the wrong way. Don’t get me wrong, it did give spotlight and well earned compensation to some talented motion designers, but also flooded the market with thieves and scammers. At the end of the day, can’t we all agree it would be better to just pay artists what they’re worth?

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

If I can embody one of the pillars at Huge, the best advice I can give for managing a team is “First, Listen”. It’s so important to really hear from people and empathize with challenges they may be having. Having diverse perspectives on your team is the key ingredient to being able to creatively problem solve. Since everyone brings a different way of looking at a challenge, really listening to how they see things is the only way you can learn and adjust your own way of thinking.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.mikemartinart.com/
• Website: https://thecommotion.tv/
• Instagram: @indiemike
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemartinmotion/
• Other: I’m a skateboarder at heart, it’s a large foundation of my creative outlet, and it’s been mainly what I share on my personal IG in more recent years. Skating has really taught me how to visualize the world in unique ways and it’s the best lesson I’ve ever had for overcoming failure. Failure being a part of the process and getting over the hurdles is what has made me a successful designer within my career.

Image Credits
Portrait Headshot: Pink Lemonade Media Corporate Knights Magazine Cover: Art Direction: Jack Dylan Nickelodeon Branding copyright Paramount, client work for RECUR Movers+Shakers : client work for Amazon Ads Marketing Team