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

Nicholas, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

My journey as a producer began as a young kid, lost in the virtual worlds of video games. I spent countless hours exploring the worlds of video game hits like Zelda, Starcraft, and Harvest Moon. They were so lifelike and immersive that I began to wonder: Could I create one of these worlds? At age 11, I made a life-changing Google search, “How do I make a video game?”

I was thrown into a rabbit hole of creative exploration. I started teaching myself everything I could about game engines and programming languages. I even started making tons of small games myself! My hunger to learn quickly grew to include learning about the high-quality graphics of animated movies, as well as the storytelling and production of live-action films. This led to most of my early teenage years being spent making games, animations, and films. By the time I was 18, I had accumulated well over 100 small projects in these three fields.

Ready for my next chapter, I flew across the Pacific to attend USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, where I fell in love with virtual reality. Virtual reality is a technology where an audience’s sight and touch are fully transported into a virtual environment. It was the ultimate medium that brought all my interests together. However, as projects grew larger, I realized I couldn’t do everything on my own, so I started collaborating with directors and transitioned into a producer role, where I am mostly responsible for managing the team and ensuring the project is executed on time.

Looking back, I think the biggest challenge through this journey was understanding the difference between dreaming and doing. There have been plenty of times when I’ve spent way too much time dreaming. Hours spent fantasizing over all the beautiful possibilities! It’s so fun and tempting! We get to imagine how amazing things will be without doing any of the work! Doing requires us to take on responsibility, work long hours, and carry the burden of potential failure, it’s much less attractive than dreaming. Because of this, dreaming has such a seductive pull on us, it tells us to keep thinking, keep ideating, and keep planning. The danger with too much dreaming is that we’ll never get anything done! So we need to push ourselves to take the leap into the unknown and start doing. This means committing ourselves to deadlines, immersing ourselves in rigorous work, and opening ourselves to the possibility of failure. The more we do the more we create, the more we create the more we learn, and the more we learn the more fulfilling life becomes!

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.

At its core, my work is about translation—translating complex ideas into something that can be consumed as a story, game, or experience. In the virtual reality museum Ama’s Momento (2019), we had to take the complex, 80+ year life story of Taiwanese grandmother Yoko Kung and communicate it into a tangible 30-minute experience that people could walk through. With the project I’m currently working on, Inner Space, we’re taking the intricacies of cell biology and creating a platform where people can navigate around a cell in virtual reality and engage with the science in an easy-to-understand way.

I love working on these kinds of projects because they become a bridge between storytelling and technology, art and science.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Throughout my life, I’ve always heard from teachers, peers, and the media to champion specialization. The message was clear: if you want to be successful, you must pick one path and get really good at it. This gave me tons of anxiety, especially in university, because I had so many different interests!

Here’s a list of all the different jobs and hobbies I’ve had: cinematography, video editing, 3D modeling, tech art, game development, production design, photo retouching, directing documentaries, gymnastics, violin, oil painting, contemporary dance, martial arts, and rock climbing.

So, I’m definitely all over the place! Conventional wisdom would say I’m way too spread out and that I’m “a master of none.” But over the years, building projects and meeting a lot of really smart and talented people, I’ve come to appreciate the idea of late specialization—the notion that we should first develop multidisciplinary skills and then apply them to our primary path. Now that I’ve explored so many different fields, I’ve worked to connect the dots and bring them all together into my producing practice.

The biggest gift my multidisciplinary exploration has given me is the ability to listen deeply to people from different backgrounds. When we work with various people—whether they’re engineers, artists, or directors—we’ll notice that they all think in very different ways. As the producer, it’s our job to be the bridge of communication, so it’s critical to develop deep empathy with whoever we’re working with. Because I’ve dabbled in engineering, art, and directing, I understand their language and where they’re coming from. This has made it so much easier for me to negotiate and learn from them. It’s also allowed me to see how everything fits together, enabling me to build balanced and synergistic teams. I believe that’s the true power of having multidisciplinary skills.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

On the topic of late specialization, David Epstein’s Range (2019) is a great introduction to that idea. It’s a refreshing read that helps us understand how life isn’t as clean-cut as the media often portrays. A great reminder that we don’t have to start our profession at 4 years old to be successful!

I’ve also been heavily influenced by Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969). The language is a little challenging, but it offers really profound commentary on systems thinking and seeing the bigger picture.

Aside from books, I’m a strong advocate for simply exploring life and learning everything! Travel, learn languages, hone a craft—these experiences will all come together and make us better at whatever we do.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.nickpudjarminta.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholas-pudjarminta/

Image Credits

Sean Chee
Harris McCabe
Kavin Kapoor