We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Yuni Fei a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Yuni, thanks for joining us today. Do you wish you had started sooner?

If we consider career as doing something professionally, I think it’s definitely possible to start too soon. I started basically after I graduated high school, and my social life essentially plummeted as a result. Everyone I worked with are usually 10 to 20 years older than me, so I didn’t have anyone to relate with, and everyone my age are busy with college, so for about 5 years I was basically isolated, stuck at home, doing nothing but work. It was miserable.

A good time to start it professionally is when you hit 21 years of age, I think. Or when you gradute with a bachelor’s of anything in college. That way, you have some real life experience to go with your creative ambitions. Nothing is worse than being creative with no actual knowledge about life. How to talk to people, understanding them, seeing their faces, that is just as important as being skilled at art.

Of course, when it comes to actually learning how to be a creative, or doing it as a hobby in free time, you can start whenever you like, young or old. That does not matter. Sometimes, I wish I was older.

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 a 3D animator. I focus primarily on character animation and my passion lies on complex character interactions and body mechanics, but I also really enjoy cinematography, storytelling and writing, so these two things come hand in hand for me.

For a while, however, I was making animation that only exists for the sake of being animated. When I created my own fight scenes, it was only to showcase my capabilities as an animator and nothing else. It wasn’t engaging both for me and my small audience, so I wanted to try and put it a bit of context and narrative within it. That soon ballooned into a level of ambition that caused me to essentially create a production! With voice actors, music, and sound design. It’s a lot of fun, so I intend to continue further and further. My plans at the moment is to make a short animated film, one shot at a time.

It is still very self indulgent in nature, since my focus is to create what I like, but I hope others can also enjoy them for what they are!

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

I think the full creative control is the most rewarding aspect for me.

I work as a contractor for companies that require my animation skills, but they are simply a job for me when looking at it from the creative aspect. I own nothing over it beyond the animation frames that are rendered, and while I enjoy working with them and I do my best to deliver the best that I can do, I do feel unsatisfied sometimes over not being able to create something that is truly mine.

So, being a creative and being able to create my own things, my own characters and story, is the best part.

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 many people cling to the past works of a creative a little bit too much. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it makes them easy to brush off the newer things the creator decides to do as something that isn’t “as good.”

As a creator, once you’re done with a project, the next project is always going to be an answer to the previous creation, in some way or the other. Better or worse is a subjective term, but in the minds of who created it, but the past work would somewhat become “irrelevant” in the minds of the creative.

At least, that’s what I think. I often forget about what I spent countless hours on to move on to work hard on the next, and that goes on. It’s a nice surprise for when I come back to it a long time later, and realizing what I was capable of.

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