Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Thomas DeCarlo. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Hi Thomas, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.
I’ve known most of my life that I wanted to pursue a creative profession, but it wasn’t until my early 30s when I decided which path to pursue and what that life would actually look like. Since early high school, I had been involved in everything I could get my hands on: theater, photography, music, film, writing, and numerous forms of design. By college I had narrowed things down to filmmaking, but my interests still ran the gamut: writer/director, cinematographer, set photography, film scoring, etc.
After college I fell into 3D animation and spent a decade learning the medium while working non-creative day jobs. Eventually, I had the opportunity to ditch the day job and commit myself to working full-time to produce a 3D animated short film. After 45 straight days of round-the-clock production, I finally found my creative footing; my sprawling creative passion could only be satisfied if I was fully-engrossed in numerous facets of production, and bringing them all together into a single creative vision.
I proceeded to launch an indie animation studio and have been working ever since as an animator/auteur, leading most aspects of production.
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.
I am a life-long, multi-disciplinary artist whose love of complexity drove me to filmmaking (and later 3D animation) as a medium where I could combine all of my creative and technical passions. My thirst to expand my knowledge and tackle big projects led me to produce my first feature film before I was 20. I soon turned away from live-action film and spent the next decade learning the 3D animation pipeline before producing a multi-award winning 13-minuted animated short as a solo CG artist. In 2018, I founded DeCarlo Animation to develop full-length animated content for global audiences. As the primary creative force behind our content, I lean toward progressive sci-fi stories that are aimed at adult audiences. Our decentralized, artist-led production model is at the forefront of the independent animation revolution.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
Building a career outside the mainstream industry, I was constantly directed to seek advice from the handful of successful creative professionals in the region, or literally every industry insider who passed through. These encounters were treated with such reverence that it was ground into my head that I should be heeding any scrap of advice I could glean from these minor celebrities.
I eventually learned the harsh reality that the more established and successful an artist, the less helpful their advice! In many cases, careers were sparked by serendipity, and their advice for “breaking into the industry” was either years (or decades) out of date, or didn’t translate to even the tiniest deviation from that person’s career path. Ultimately, the only expert on your career path is yourself, and no matter how talented or successful a person you meet, their guidance and advice only amounts to a single data point as you slowly build an understanding of the complexities of creative industries.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
One of these such encounters was with an industry professional with decades of experience in visual effects, including directing a VFX-heavy blockbuster film. When I explained I was producing a 3D-animated short film by myself, he laughed in my face. “Once person can’t do that by themselves!” This type of feedback was constant throughout my career – the things I was trying to do “weren’t possible.” But rather than giving up, I pressed onward and completed these projects. Again, I learned that the deeper someone was in the industry, the less they can imagine doing things differently.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://decarloanimation.com
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/decarlo-animation/
Image Credits
Courtesy of DeCarlo Animation.