We were lucky to catch up with Yimin Zhang recently and have shared our conversation below.
Yimin, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?
I discovered my passion for animation pretty young in Middle School. I was fortunate in that my school had a news program that played videos in the school cafeteria and my social studies teacher recruited me to make title graphics. At home, I was also making videos for club penguins that gained popularity on a video streaming site. Having an audience both at school and online helped push me to learn new editing skills in Sony Vegas and After Effects online from Youtube.The learning wasn’t as structured because I was learning these tools all by myself, but I think pumping out videos constantly helped me build a good habit and the muscle of self-learning in the future. Being connected to a core audience also helped propel my creative endeavors . But after graduating college, it feels like you’re on your own. So finding ways to have an online presence and grow an audience on different platforms becomes the new challenge that’s been pushing me forward on my creative journey.
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 am Technical Artist currently working at Meta. For those who might not be familiar with the role, technical artists serve to accelerate art production. We can create complex rigs, effects, or tools that leverage both the technical complexities and artistic sensibilities. We often help bridge the gap between engineers and artists as translation layers for both. I started my career when I landed an internship at 20th Century Fox, where I met a mentor who helped paved the way for my first job as a Technical Artist at DMG, which was producing for a transformer theme park in China. During the pandemic, I switched my career direction to film as theme-park around the globe shut down. I then joined The Third Floor, where I served as the Technical Artist for Marvel’s Ant-man and the wasp Quantumania. I had switched career paths a bit over the course of my education and early career, but they all revolved around similar skill sets and were at the intersection between technology and art.
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
I think a lot of non-creatives tend to over-romanticize creative professions, when in reality there’s a lot of monotony from day to day jobs even for artists when iterating on the countless notes coming from supervisors and clients. Also the process of getting to a finished creative product is not usually as straight a path as people think. It takes countless revisions and iterations, and sometimes hitting the wall to get to a great product. But when everything comes together in the end, when every team players’ work is consolidated into the final thing, then it is truly beautiful and magical, and the highs will make you feel you have the greatest job ever.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
I think artists have the unique super power of transporting others to adventures they have never seen. They have their wildest imagination at their arsenal, and their mastery of the craft allows them to pull the imaginary world into reality, either on screen or virtual space. Artists create joy, sadness, laughter, anger, and every other emotion possible. They channel their experience and share them with the world, and help others see the world in a different perspective. Being able to make others feel the whole spectrum of emotions from consuming pixels is the most rewarding aspect of being an artist for me.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.yiminfx.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/creativeelf/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yiminzhangusc/