We recently connected with Stephen Anderson and have shared our conversation below.

Stephen, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

I like to live intentionally. Making choices bears results for the better or for the worse, and I feel the more I act in a way that moves me in a direction that positions me for happiness and success the more I’ll be able to achieve what I’d like to. This goes for everything in life, but it rings especially true for personal and professional projects.

The way the entertainment industry works is on a per-project basis. I decided as I was getting ready to graduate from college that the best way to stay relevant was through choosing personal projects that I could put into my portfolio that showcase my understanding of how to fit into a production. My goals fall around the idea of being gainfully employed, so anything I can do that shows that I understand the design side and the technical side of production help position me better when it comes time to join other studios or work on other projects.

During the pandemic, I felt driven to come out of it with new work that was fun to look at and work on. I started playing around with a lot of the DTIYS challenges that I saw on Instagram, and that helped me fine-tune some of my design sensibility through quick exercises. During my live-streaming, I decided to get very experimental with my designs, and I started creating a series of characters made out of food. I call them my Food Demons. They’re a lot of fun, if you ever get to check them out.

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?

I currently work as a Senior Character Modeling Supervisor on Overwatch at Blizzard Entertainment. It is a fantastic team, and a stellar project to work on. In my job, I supervise the 3D creation of several character skins that go into the game. This involves providing a lot of draw-over and written feedback, model tweaks, texture fixes, and getting everything set up in our game engine. I also do a lot of back-and-forth collaboration with the concept team and tech art crew to make sure everything is playable in game and fits the overall vision of the Overwatch universe. I would say that the thing I’m most proud of or most excited about is the way that my team works together and being able to see things come to full fruition. It really does take a village, and I’m grateful for the support of my teammates in seeing everything through.

On my personal end, I think what most sets me apart is my ability to provide creative direction and input as well as production work support. I’ve worked at a lot of other places such as Marvel, Netflix, Walt Disney Imagineering, Hasbro, Warner Bros Games, DreamWorks Animation and more, and each of those places gave me an opportunity to experience production differently. I was able to learn how to contribute to the various productions I’ve been on. I learned standards for various industries such as animation, games, toys and themed entertainment, and each experience has only enriched the next.

I went to school for animation, and I was given the opportunity to experiment with many industry-standard tools under the tutelage of people who had actually worked in the industry. However I quickly observed that my school work was not of high-enough caliber to get a decent job. This is when I started doing personal projects. I think more than just doing personal projects, the thing that helped me the most was finding people who worked in the industry that wanted to see me succeed. In my early school days, I got a lot of awesome support from Jacob Speirs at Pixar, Christopher Wright (from Disney Avalanche at the time), Paul Schoeni at DreamWorks, and Zach Petroc at Disney. Each of these people were exceptionally generous in providing me with feedback that I tried to learn from and apply. Learning from these people (and many others), I was able to begin to create a network that opened up professional opportunities for me as projects wrapped up. I recommend everyone find people like that–people that will cheer for you and encourage you, but also tell you what you need to hear so you know where you are falling short and need to improve.

My hopes for the future include continuing to work on professional projects that enrich and motivate me, and to start my own toy company. I might have more to share at LightBox in October. ;-)

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

I feel like we’re in an interesting societal climate right now. AI is a hot topic, and I’m going to use this opportunity to pounce on it.

I feel like it can definitely do some amazing things, but what I hate about it most (even more than everything surrounding the piracy aspect of it) is that it is replacing human expression and creativity with something generated. It cheapens art and creatives by creating imagery that is inauthentic. AI tries to solve the wrong problems. Instead of freeing people up to express the most beautiful side of their personalities or minds, it takes away any possibilities for doing something you love for a living and forces you into jobs where you’re doing things you don’t want to do. Imagine a world where AI solves problems and allows people to just live. That’s my dream.

I dream of a world where corporations fix pay disparity instead of trying to cut out their creative forces. Companies cannot make money without creatives. We are artists, writers, and designers, but we are human, and we have needs. We are the core of productivity and profitability. Without us, culture is diluted and fades.

What can society do to best support artists? Pay artists. Invest in artists. Develop a world where we can set the artist free and allow them to do their best work. That’s what we need.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

Living plentifully is my main goal in life.

I’m a family man. I’m happily married to Wonder Woman, and we have two amazing children. My biggest goal is to provide the brightest and safest future for my family as I can possibly do. I currently work three jobs (Overwatch and two teaching jobs), and I would love to get to a point where I’m making enough money from my own art to knock myself back down to just the one main job. I aim to start my own toy company and earn enough from that to send my kids to good schools and give them something significant to start their adult lives off with. I hope to retire at a decent age.

This season is tricky because my family is young, and I want to be around for the formative years. Luckily I get to work in a hybrid format, and I get to be around for a lot of simple things, but life is busy, and freeing myself up to better enjoy those things with my family is a major goal for me.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.smaartist.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smaartist