evolving.
Oh, wow, thanks, Meg.
I appreciate it.
My name is Nick Campbell.
I run Grayscale Gorilla, where we make 3D applications
and software for Cinema 4D, plug-ins.
And I also do Banana Camera Company,
which is like this iPhone app making thing where
we make your photos all messed up.
But we'll talk about that later.
What I thought about Creative Mornings,
I watch all these Creative Mornings all around the world.
Now they have all these cities.
And my favorite stories are from people
that are kind of in a certain part of their career.
And they wanted to make a transition
into the next part of their career.
And they tell that story on how it worked
and how it didn't work.
And if it was difficult in some of the things
they learned along the way.
And those are my favorite stories.
So I figured I'd try to share a little bit about my story
as well as far as that goes.
When Meg said this month was happiness,
it's even more perfect.
Because I think that drive from being somewhat satisfied
to trying to be more satisfied in any creative career
is driven by doing more of what makes you happy.
So I think this will help out a lot.
And so I hope to just give you a little bit of a story on how
I ended up where I was kind of like 80% happy
and how I tried to transition into a career
and to do work that made me more like 92.
I'm still working on it.
So it all starts when I got my first job when I was 15.
That's kind of the age that my parents decided,
get the hell out, get a job.
They still had me at their house.
I'm not saying get out.
But go get a job.
You almost have a car.
You're like, go start your stuff.
And it never dawned on me to just go get a job at some place
that would hire me.
It made more sense to me to go, what am I into?
What can I do?
What do I like doing anyway?
And what can I go learn on the job and do that?
Even when I was 15, I said, I didn't want to work in clothes.
I didn't want to work in food.
And I didn't want to work with kids.
I was 15, kids and food.
I didn't want the typical 15-year-old job.
So I went to the mall, which is where you go when you're
in the suburbs of Detroit growing up to get a job.
And I started walking around looking at where I would want to
work.
I wanted to work at the record store.
I was really into music.
I was playing guitar and piano and all that stuff.
I wanted to work at maybe the science store.
They had all those cool toys and stuff to play with, and
books about space and stuff.
But there were too many kids there.
And then maybe at the bookstore, they had all these
magazines about high-five stereos and home theaters and
crap that I was into at the time.
But I walked in kind of a pass, and these little carts were
new at the mall.
They haven't always been there.
I'm dating myself.
But these kiosk things in the center of the aisle of the
mall were just popping up.
And one of them sold magic tricks.
And I go, I want to work there.
So I walked up to him.
There was a little sign.
It was perfect.
It said, we're hiring.
And I walked up, and he goes, do a magic trick.
So he had cards.
I pulled it out.
And I memorized them all from those crappy books you get at
Toys R Us, or those little kits with the hat and the
crappy wand and all that.
And I did a couple of them.
And he said, you're hired.
Learn these tricks.
And my first job was standing in the middle of the mall,
approaching people walking to go buy real stuff.
And then saying, hey, do you want to see a magic trick?
Doing a trick.
And then they go, how do you do that?
And I go, well, for $10, you could buy the book, or you
could buy the fake deck, or you could buy the trick coins,
and you could do this for your family.
And that was the first of quite a few jobs when I was
younger, growing through high school and college, where I
was mostly doing work that I liked doing.
I was lucky enough to pull this off.
I was into music, so I ended up doing a lot of DJ work and
playing music at weddings and bars and stuff.
I was really into playing guitar and recording and home
recording, so I ended up recording my friend's bands
and helping out with a record label to record some of
their bands.
And through this magic thing, started doing things like
kids' birthday parties and dressing up like a clown and
some stupid stuff like that.
But somewhere around early, when I should have been in
college, basically, I graduated high school and I
kind of screwed off for a couple years.
I ended up in Vegas for no reason, living there, and
kind of had some odd jobs and this and that.
Didn't know what to do.
My parents wanted me to go to college, but I didn't know
what that thing was that I could go study for four years.
I didn't know what that was.
Until I saw this animation on late night TV, this weird
channel, I think they bought up public access time or
something, it's called Burley Bear.
And they showed all these art films and music videos and
just weird, this is like pre-YouTube stuff, the stuff
that would be on YouTube eventually.
They would show all this crap.
And one of the things that they played was this film by
MK12, so the logo flipped up.
It said, MK12 presents man of action.
And it showed five minutes of the coolest things I've ever
seen.
It was this short film.
And it wasn't filmed with a camera.
It wasn't like a video thing.
And it wasn't hand-drawn animation.
It was this new thing.
I didn't really know what it was called.
And it was like photo cutouts.
And they would jump around.
And there was 3D animation.
And there was type flying everywhere.
There were cards moving around.
And it was exactly everything I loved about a lot of things.
And at the end, it said, made by MK12.
So I wrote that down.
And it said, made with After Effects.
I wrote that down.
And I looked up what After Effects was.
And that was it for me.
That was the next five years of my life.
I got all the tapes, all the VHS tapes.
That dates me too.
All the VHS tapes I could find.
All the stuff online I could find to learn this thing.
I was obsessed.
I came here to Chicago to go to school to learn After Effects
and to learn motion graphics that I found out what it was called.
And ended up in a job that did this.
And moved around the city and learned a lot.
And ended up at Digital Kitchen, which actually used
to be right around here.
And to me, working at Digital Kitchen
was the best place in Chicago to do what I wanted to do.
I liked their work.
I liked the style of their work.
I liked their portfolio of work.
Was right in line with the kind of stuff that I was into.
And when I was working there, it's
when I realized that these last four or five years,
I should have been also studying something else.
And that something else was really, really evident
when I started looking at what I was making
and starting comparing it to the MK12s
and the Digital Kitchens of the world.
I knew every button of After Effects.
I studied it.
I learned it.
I read the manual.
I read the books.
I followed all the tutorials.
What I didn't learn was any design concepts.
None.
I didn't know.
I didn't know.
And I didn't care, frankly.
I didn't get into this to be a designer.
I didn't get into this to learn about typography.
I didn't get into all this stuff because I
needed to learn hierarchy.
I didn't care about that stuff.
I just wanted to make what was on TV.
And they said they used After Effects.
And now I knew After Effects.
Why was my shit so ugly?
And when I compared it, there's that ira-glass thing
where he says there's that gap between where you are
and where your heroes are.
And when you look at that gap, it could be discouraging.
And say, I'm going to compare my work to my heroes.
And when you do that, it could be really sucky,
especially when you're working in the same room with them.
But the best part about that was that I was in the same room
with them.
And they were willing to look at my stuff and go,
that's ugly, first of all.
And they were willing to say why it was ugly, not
how to fix it.
Because anybody could go, hey, change this typeface to this,
make this color here, do this.
And now it's beautiful.
Good job.
But that's just them designing through me.
They told me why it was ugly.
They told me, don't use 18 typefaces, idiot.
Don't use Comic Sans, dummy.
Don't use that lasso typeface.
You know, like, I didn't know these things.
You know, bright orange and bright green,
don't put those together.
Even though I guess today I'm screwing it up.
I'll learn.
But they were willing to share their knowledge
and tell me why.
And I think that's a good advice no matter
where you are in your career.
Is don't be the best one in the room.
Go be somewhere that you can learn from other people.
Go be somewhere where you can be a little humbled
by somebody else that's great.
Because for me, that was the best part.
And the fastest time, that was the quickest I've
learned anything in my life was this bootcamp of people
around me that were talented telling me why I sucked.
And it was awesome.
I learned so much.
So I slowly got better.
I still, you know, I basically have cheats now.
I only use two typefaces ever, basically.
But sitting at Digital Kitchen, we
got to work on some really cool stuff.
I got to work on movie title sequences and TV shows stuff
and stuff for the Super Bowl, stuff my mom would actually
see.
This was cool.
Like, I made it, right?
And meanwhile, I was still doing all this other stuff.
And this is where it starts to shift from the traditional
career path of graduating and then going to work in the
typical thing.
So your guidance counselor at college or whatever would say,
you can go freelance.
You can go work at a bigger agency-type place.
Or you can go work for a smaller, boutiquey place,
like Digital Kitchen or somebody more specialized.
And those were kind of the three options.
Those were kind of the three things that everybody went
and did after college.
And right around that time is when I started realizing there
were other ways to play around with all this stuff.
Because honestly, my favorite part about all this was
playing with After Effects.
And then I got into 3D, and then playing around
with Cinema 4D.
I mean, those were the most fun days I've had was learning
what all these tools can do and how to make beautiful stuff.
Because that's why I got into this.
I saw the MK12 thing.
I said, I want to make that.
And I'm still struggling to get there.
That's been the whole thing.
But I didn't get into this to make work for clients,
necessarily.
They just happen to be paying.
So right around that time, a few things
happened that lined up to allow me to think about things
a little bit differently.
And I think this comes up a lot in a lot of people's careers,
is I got to where I wanted to go.
I am working at a place where I thought I wanted to work.
And I'm still not 100% happy.
Some of the things aren't great.
Maybe it's the clients, maybe it's the people you work with,
maybe it's not being you being the best in the room
and not having anybody to learn.
You feel like you're stagnant, you're going sideways.
And a few things happened.
So the first thing that happened was this website popped up
that I didn't know existed.
It was called iStockPhoto.
And it's just a stock photography thing.
But somehow, that was the first one I saw.
And what they said was, hey, upload photos.
If we approve them, we're going to put them in our store.
And if anybody buys it, if anybody searches for your photo
and they find value in what you uploaded, they could buy it
and we'll give you a percentage, basically.
We'll give you a couple of dimes.
And that was interesting to me.
I could do work now and maybe get paid later.
That didn't dawn on me as a career option ever.
And iStock was this really weird way
to try it without too much risk.
And the cool part was, I had photos.
I started a photo blog in 2004, Forish, where
I posted a photo a day.
So I had my camera around me all the time.
I took photos of everything and great photos, mostly crappy
photos.
I posted the good ones.
One a day, I found my favorite one.
I posted it.
But what I had was this hard drive, absolutely full, of
other photos that I didn't necessarily want to put on my
blog, but I thought might be useful to somebody.
The typical stuff you shoot when you start being a
photographer, you're building, building, building,
sunset, water, cab, driving by.
Shadow in the grass.
So I made it a project.
I said, I'm going to go through all my photos and I'm
going to look for stuff that might be valuable to other
people.
Some of it was textures of bricks and grass and all
this stuff.
So I just started kind of putting those aside, processing
them, cleaning them up, uploading to the site.
I must add 20 of them.
And I checked back a few days later and there was like five
bucks in the account.
And it took a weekend.
And then a week later, there was five bucks.
And I thought, well, that's cool.
I did work here and didn't necessarily get paid, but now
I have five bucks.
And what's really cool is, theoretically, if I don't do
anything for another week, there might be five more
dollars in there.
In other words, I don't have to trade an hour for an
hour's pay.
I could trade an hour for potentially unlimited pay on
the future.
And it was just a really small subtle difference to think
about it that way.
But that changed the way I thought about my creative
work, in that I can go do stuff I already did, I already
like doing, going and walking out, shooting photos, and
potentially share those with other people.
And if there's value in that photo, I could potentially
get paid on that photo or that work later.
And what I didn't realize is that's what businesses do.
That's what most entrepreneur kind of things.
But those weren't words in my head.
I just wanted to make pretty stuff on TV.
So when I started turning into adding video, it blew up for
me.
I was done.
I was like, I'm my own client now.
I'm going to think about all these cool things I can animate
and learn.
And it was also the perfect learning tool to learn Cinema
4D, which was what I was really into at the time, as well
as After Effects, was this new 3D animation tool that I
wanted to just learn and play with.
So what I would do on the weekends is say, I'm going
to make this logo spin around, or I'm going to make the
world rotate in 3D, and that's going to be my stock thing
that I upload this weekend.
And I would sit and learn Cinema 4D enough to figure out
how to make a world rotate, and make it, and then do it,
and then upload it, and see what happens.
So that was going on.
At the same time, this Greyscale Gorilla site, which
was my photo blog, I added a secondary blog to it, where I
started talking about how I took photos.
I talked about how I did After Effects stuff.
I talked about my job.
I talked about how work is at Digital Kitchen and all that
kind of stuff.
That was growing in importance to me.
I loved talking to other people on it.
I was doing tutorials for After Effects and all this stuff.
So that was a little segment of it.
And I also, the iPhone came out, and significantly, the
App Store came out.
And that's when I looked at all these photography apps and
said, I want to make that.
I mean, I've been trying to emulate film through Photoshop
for two years.
Ever since I started getting into photography and playing
with film, I was like, I know I can make this work.
I know I can make a filter in Photoshop that makes it look
more like film, because it's so beautiful.
So I had the filter.
It was ready to go.
When the iPhone came out, and I looked at it, and I saw all
these kind of crappy photo apps popping up, I said, I want
my filter in an app.
How do I do that?
So I hired a developer, and it wasn't too much money.
I said, I'm going to try this.
This is like the first time.
I'm not just trading time for potential pay later.
I was actually putting money down and saying, I'm going to
put money down that we are going to build this.
And same with the app store, you could build it once.
And potentially, if there's value, people can buy that
over time, and you don't have to trade that hour for an
hour's pay, or a day for a day's pay, or a project for a
project's pay.
And so that happened.
And then the key that turned the whole thing was, at the
same time, around 2004 or 2005, all these other companies
and people started talking about the transition from
client work to making stuff for themselves, all in Chicago.
So I was guys like Jim Kudall, Kudall Partners, who talked
at Creative Mornings, Jason Freed, 37 Signals, and even
Jake from Threadless.
They all stood up here and said, we had that transition
from more client work, traditional, and moving into
work that we wanted to do for ourself.
And that was the key that turned it.
Because what I saw was, if they could do that, then I
could do that.
I'm really a subscriber.
This is a little cheesy, but I'm super subscribed to the idea
that what one man can do, another can do.
If they can do that and transition out of client work
because they weren't 100% happy, and they thought they
could have more control and have more fun doing it their
way, I thought I could do this.
So all four of these things lined up in a way that made me
look at my career, I guess, or my path on this.
And I decided that I needed to make a change.
I wanted to spend more and more time on the projects that I
liked, and less and less time on some of the projects I
didn't like doing at my job.
Now, I was 80% happy there.
I got to work with great people.
I got to work and learn a lot.
But those little things about clients and all the little
stuff I didn't like, I thought I could take a chance.
So I did.
I left Digital Kitchen in 2009 with the idea that I wasn't
going to take any client work for a year.
And if it all blew up in my face, I knew that I could
either crawl back to DK and ask for my job back, or if they
wouldn't have me, maybe somebody else in the city.
But the risk at that point was just trying it.
It was a year.
And again, if everything blew up, I knew as long as my arm
didn't get cut off in the process, I could go use my
Wacom pen and make stuff for other people.
So I did.
I left.
And in the last three years, Grayscale Grilla has gone
from a community of Cinema 4D artists and After Effects
artists, to now a business where I make software and
plugins for those people to use in their work.
The iPhone Banana Camera Company, which is the iPhone
business, we've worked on that and made upgrades to the
current ones.
We're working on a new application.
And that's a blast to play with.
And now I get to work with all my friends that are doing
creative work in an office up the road here.
And I get to learn from them.
It's this whole process of not being the best in the room
and growing through that.
So I wanted to tell one more story, a couple minutes, maybe.
And it's kind of a silly story.
But I think it ties in all this.
I, last year, I got really into pinball.
Pinball machines, ding, ding, ding, ding.
And I always played them when I was younger.
But somehow, last year, I got the bug.
And I started learning about them.
And this happens all the time with other things in my life.
I'm into something.
And then I realize, wait, a man made this.
Everything around you, the projector and the screen and
the computer, people were involved with this.
I have this realization.
I need to get the tattoo on me.
Everything around us is made by people that are interested
in making that thing.
So when I found out that actual men made pinball machines,
that was it.
I needed to know all my favorite designers of pinball
machines.
There's different styles of machines.
There's different rulesets based on who made it.
There's different games based on what companies made it.
There's the history of the designers coming through.
There's rock star designer pinball machine guys.
Can you believe that?
So I was hooked, right?
So I started collecting games.
We have eight of them now at the office.
We would have more if we had more room.
I started talking about this publicly, like being all nerdy
about it.
You're like, did you know people make pinball machines?
And writing that and sharing this on Twitter.
I'd post my high score in a local bar and say, somebody
come beat it, suckers.
And then what happened was I got a phone call.
I've got a phone call from a guy that said, hey, I think
we want your help.
We're building a pinball machine.
We're a brand new pinball machine company.
And we're building our first pinball machine, and we want
you to help.
And I go, holy crap.
How can I help?
I don't know anything about pinball machines.
And they said, well, we have the first pinball machine with a
TV in the back of it.
It's not the little red dots anymore.
We want a full TV, HDTV in the back glass that plays full
res animation during the game.
And we heard that you're into animation, you're into
After Effects and 3D and all the stuff which we need.
And we also heard you're really nerdy into pinball.
And I said, heck yeah, I will help.
That was my first freelance or client since I've left.
And I had to say yes.
And so I worked on it.
And the owner of the company was really proud of his first
game, and it's coming out soon.
And he was so proud of everybody that helped on it that he
had everybody sign their name, and he put it on the game.
So now I went from getting into pinball to having my name on
a pinball machine in a year.
And I say that not to brag, although I think it's really
cool.
But I say that because being loud and passionate and showing
other people what you are really into can never hurt.
I've never, I've always benefited from showing my
passion, too much of it.
Being loud about what I like, what I don't like, and also
offering help.
When people make the phone call and you get that call, say
yes, answer it and say, I can help.
How can I help?
And I think that there's, I hear people talk about being in
a creative space where they got into it for one reason, but
now they're working in a space that's kind of related to
why they got into this in the first place, but not quite.
Maybe you really liked making posters and screen printing,
and now you're doing website stuff.
Still talk about that, screen printing.
Still go do that stuff.
Let people know that this is still your passion, even
though you're kind of sideways into it.
This is also a little cheesy, but I really believe that
everything benefits by you guys doing exactly what
makes you happy.
The world, the community, your friendships, and you all
benefit by you doing what makes you happy, for a couple
reasons.
If you are in a job that doesn't make you happy, get the
hell out and let somebody else do it that does make it
happy for them.
And the second thing is you will make better stuff.
Everything around us that's made by humans, made by people,
by men, is made by creative people that are interested
and solve a problem.
And I think that that is the best thing you could do, is
go be happy.
Good luck with that.
Thanks for having me, guys.
Nick, that was an awesome story.
So I have a couple of questions for you before we flip to the
audience.
Well, maybe three.
First, orange and green.
Have you heard of Trump's look?
Yeah.
No, I need help, guys.
I mean, green, orange, it's bad.
And I like to think about it this way, and I think that
you have this sense of, you just love learning things.
More than even making things and making polish things, you
just love learning after effects.
You spent half a decade learning after effects, and
then another four years learning C4D.
But then now, a lot of people know you as a teacher and you
teach everything, you know, so tell us a little bit about
this joy you get from helping people, from just learning a
bunch of stuff to now telling the whole world everything you
know.
Like why switch to that?
Yeah, you know, I think that, obviously, you know,
I think that obviously learning stuff is really fun.
You get into that new project or that new thing you're into
and you start learning all this stuff
and you get to this plateau of where you can't maybe
necessarily learn more about the actual software
but then you have, for me at least,
I have this another level I can use with that knowledge
which is show other people.
And so if I can get to a level where I'm comfortable
with my skills or enough to do it,
I can actually have more fun by showing other people.
The other thing about teaching that I like
is that it's not necessarily that I'm some guru
that has been doing this for 10 years
and now I get to tell you.
It's like in a lot of cases with our tutorials
and what we do, I will learn a really cool technique
that day that we've been working on for a week
and then put the tutorial out tomorrow.
So it's like, here's what I learned yesterday
and if it helps you guys even better.
So for me, sharing and training and all that stuff
has been half an excuse for me to remember it
because I watch my own tutorials sometimes.
But more a way to share what I know
and I've gotten more out of sharing what I know
than holding onto it for sure.
Cool.
And another thing that differs with you
and with a lot of designers when they make the switches,
you go from doing service-based work,
working for clients, now your own products
and now you figured out how to make residual income.
What is that like?
How did you figure that out?
When did the label click and what kind of advice do you have
for these aspiring designers who also want
to make residual income?
You know, for me, it was all the stories are out there.
I am a product of all those stories from 37 Signals
in Kudall and I'm a student of theirs
whether they know it or not.
This knowledge of switching from more traditional,
client-based, full-time work to basically making stuff
for yourself, all that knowledge is out there.
So for me, it wasn't a magic light bulb moment.
It was learning from all these people
that were willing to share that story with me
and then following that advice and trying it.
Something like iStock Photo was kind of a no risk thing.
It was some time to try and I tried it
and traction was there.
So, and you hear this said by all these other people
that say this, you don't have to do a big jump
to try these things.
You could try this right now in your current situation.
How about questions from the audience?
Do it.
Anyone?
Yeah.
I love your presentation and I think this is different
because the opportunity is you seem to be really
moving my clothes as I was with my wife at the app
and you seem to be doing that where you don't think about
what if, oh my God, this is my network,
like do it and see what'll happen.
I love these and I'm the next year
and now I'm not just using clients.
What's the worst to have?
I'm gonna say that all the time.
In my life, the thing that really,
one of the things I loved about your presentation
is that you had no professional person.
I loved that you were a visual person
and you didn't use any clients.
And I'm curious, a year and a half ago I decided
that I wanted to be a professional speaker
and I'm not a professional speaker at all.
I was like I'm gonna throw it on my website
and see what's gonna happen in a month
and I'm speaking at that.
And so I'm curious, I'm trying to go to all
the presentations just so I can see.
Getting advice from people and see what works
and what doesn't work and I love that you can use any
clients and I'm wondering what's your thought process
in doing what you do and creating a presentation.
And can you repeat the question for everybody?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I repeat the question for the audio.
I think the question, I hope I get it right,
is talking about this stuff, being interested
in sharing your ideas on a stage.
How do you get better at that, maybe?
If you notice, something that makes me happy
is talking a lot.
So when I used to go to portfolio shows and stuff
when I worked at Digital Kitchen, we'd go look at new work
and we'd always leave and sit at lunch and talk about
all the things the students could have done better
to get hired, basically.
And the first speaking gig I did was basically
on that subject, like go to a school and say,
hey, you're about, you know, you're just starting,
you're graduating and what makes you stand out
when you graduate from this art school or whatever?
And so for me, I naturally had too many opinions
about stuff and speaking, I still get, you know,
I get all nervous and, you know, anxious about stuff,
but for me, as far as not having slides up there,
slides kind of lock me into this really linear way
of talking that kind of is less sporadic
and maybe makes more sense at the end,
but it's way less energy.
And I have more fun when there's not slides
and I think that everybody else does too,
because I don't, I can just go off on tangents
and hopefully it makes sense at the end.
Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't,
but I think the energy is much higher without slides.
Slides are, I mean, the worst of slides
are just like reading them, you know, like,
and then you wanna do this.
Next slide, and then you wanna do this.
So for me, you know, having a couple of notes,
knowing maybe in general what you wanna say
is the way to approach that.
It seems like a lot of your success
is just from signing and creating words,
doing it in a big block.
Do you ever have time when you have writer's block
essentially and how do you deal with that?
Yeah, the question is, have I ever run into a place
where I kind of get writer's block
or don't know what to make next?
I do all the time.
I do not, it's not a steady stream of stuff.
There is high energy times,
and there's times where it's just like,
I don't know, I don't know what to do.
One thing I thrive on is setting a deadline.
I've always, like when I had the photo blog
where there's like one photo a day,
I knew that by the end of the day
I needed to post a photo.
So that got my brain going
and that got me carrying my camera everywhere.
It also got me like really stressing out
about taking a good photo.
And so short deadlines for me help a lot.
So now we do a lot of software,
we do a lot of development,
we do a lot of little projects.
Nothing's longer than a week or two
because I think long projects tend to like,
you kind of screw around for two weeks.
Like if you have a month you screw around for two weeks
and then you work for two weeks.
So I just shorten it and just be like,
we're just gonna work for two weeks.
Basically, either put out what is done
at the end of two weeks
or decide that it's not worth it and then move on.
So that's been our internal at the company
kind of the way that we work.
And I think deadlines cure writer's block, frankly.
Next question.
Do you do any time work at all
or do you just focus on your projects
that you come up with if that's the case?
How do you come up with those like,
are you just working on the ideas that you know
you wanna work on
or are you constantly like, okay,
we gotta come up with new things and just keep growing?
Yeah.
So the question is, do I do any client work?
And if not, what do I do all day, basically?
Other than the pinball machine,
I haven't done any freelance or client work
since I left in 2009.
But as far as what we do, yeah,
projects for us are sometimes
based on that original idea
of looking at something that we really like
and we wanna know how it's made.
So that's been a lot of what we do now
at Grayscale Guerrilla.
We'll find a commercial or an effect
or some sort of interesting cool new thing
that we wanna know how to do.
And we'll sit for a week and try to dissect it
and try to like backwards engineer
how they did that cool logo effect with the explosion
and then the little letters come in
and then it all comes together at the end.
We'll go like, that was cool.
Let's build that.
So we'll spend all week making that
and then we'll put out a tutorial
to show some of the techniques
that we've learned through that week, basically.
That's been our internal project kind of system.
The other thing that we do is
we try to do a lot of work and help our friends
when they need a logo animation
or when they need a little help with Cinema 4D
or After Effects or whatever.
We kind of try to help out
and then kind of help show what we helped out with.
So some of the things on the blog are like,
hey, we helped do this with this artist.
This is what he had a problem with.
We kind of sat down and played with it
and then now all of you guys are here to learn from it.
So any project now that we take doesn't give us money
but it allows us to create training
and learning from that experience
and instantly get it out there.
So, and as far as the other stuff,
like the plug-ins and all that stuff.
So we develop plug-ins and software for Cinema 4D.
That's where a lot of time goes as well.
Last question.
So when you made the jump from being full-time,
like how did you deal with that
overwhelming anxiety about money?
So the question is when I jumped from out of full-time
into my own thing,
how did I not stress out about money?
And the way I did it was it wasn't just
I decided to just jump out.
I didn't just go, I'm not 100% happy, I'm leaving.
What I did was start to try those little projects
and things like iStock where money was starting to come in.
So I could look at my account and say,
now I have not just 10, 20 photos,
but now I have 100 photos and 50 animations
that are in the system and people seem to like them
and buy some of them.
And I could look at that and say,
that's definitely not my salary,
but I had some sort of cushion.
I also had a timeline.
So if I jumped and it all went to hell,
I had a timeline to go back.
And I wasn't burning a bridge.
I was just like leaving for a little bit.
So if everything really went south,
I could go get a paycheck again, you know what I mean?
So that was helpful.
So having a little bit of a safety cushion
to know that I could try this for a year,
and then knowing that you can go back was for me.
I mean, I really don't subscribe to the whole like,
quit your job now and go figure it out thing.
So like try those little projects,
Kickstarter is huge for this now.
I mean, to try out a project and see what you can do
with an idea and some friends, you know?
And then if that turns into something,
it's a good transition.
Cool, Nick, so how can we get a hold of you
and follow up with all the things you
and the Grayscale Gorilla crew are doing?
Oh boy, well, you can go to grayscalegorilla.com,
but you can follow me on the Twitters or yell at me
or tell me my t-shirt sucked at Nick Vegas on the Twitters.
And then you can go to my, oh, my pinball blog.
You can learn all about pinball at quickmulti-ball,
quickmulti-ball.com, but yeah, hit me up.
Twitter is probably the best bet.
Thanks, Nick.
Thanks, guys.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
