Seize The Play!
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Seize The Play!
Taylor Cox: Breath Of The Wild & Being Free(lance)
As artists we should probably avoid the trap of hero worship – but what about becoming fans of the artists we find around us?
Today's episode is the first in the SPILLT Searchlight series where we introduce you to our favorite people in the industry that you should be a fan of too!
Taylor Cox's tale is one of constant improvement, a little struggle, and an unwavering dedication to his craft. We talk to him about his early industry days, the challenges he continues to face, and his never-ending pursuit of work that fulfills him.
Take a deep dive into the creative process of a passionate animator and the significance of role models in the industry. Taylor Cox's career journey is a testament to the joy of staying true to oneself and the rewards it reaps. He shares how his love for video games (especially KIRBY) in the work he collaborated with us on Adult Swim: Suck-It Smash.
Taylor also sheds light on how he bridges the skill gap, making his interactions with clients enjoyable and keeping his creative spark alive.
Taylor spills the tea on his dream assignment, how he would stir change in the industry, and his insightful thoughts on the hiring process for the new Zelda games.
Spoiler alert: you could be the next guest on the SPILLT Searchlight – email us at play@spillt.com and tell us why everyone should be your next biggest fan!
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• Twitter
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Until the next time, SEIZE THE PLAY!
I feel like right now I have started level two. It feels like you've seen everything and I have to get up every morning and do it again and, again and again. But the next 10 years are going to look very different.
Speaker 2:You've heard it before right Never meet your heroes. You know there's a danger to staying out to the stars worse being someone whose work you love but one of the biggest problems is that you actually miss out on the gems that might already be laying at your feet. Instead of worshiping heroes, I think it's better to find people to be fans of. We tend to trade our heroes like their baseball cards, we compare their work like stats and rankings and we don't even really think of them as people, just a goal. But one of the things that I love is finding someone in the industry to support as their first fan. Being a fan of someone in animation or motion design means that you root for them, you support them and you might be the one who's leading up, striking that friendship up in the first place, and that's exactly what we're doing here in the Spilt Searchlight series. Now, this isn't a spotlight of people we've already heard, who have been celebrated or had millions of interviews. This is where we root for people that we think you should get to know, maybe even hire. And someone I've always rooted for is Taylor Cox. I met him ages ago at MoGraph Mentor when he was really trying to push himself in the industry, and what I've always admired, if not actually even been a little bit jealous of, is his incredible dedication to pushing for the work he wants to do rather than the work that he gets assigned. Take a listen to this interview because it really shows you what a relationship over the years can feel like when you find someone that you admire, support them and see them grow in the direction they've always said they wanted to. And that's what we want to hear from you as well. Do you know someone out there that we should be supporting, that we should be shining our searchlight on? And I have been an incredible fan from the sidelines of you, taylor, and I think you've probably. If I look back at my list of people who have been in my open office hours, you probably are at the top of the list of people that I've sat down worked with Demo Reels over the years more than anybody else. I think I've seen two, three, four iterations of Demo Reel over those nine years since that class. Yeah, probably, so that sounds right. Yeah, I don't know if you still have your old Demo Reels up, but I'm always amazed by the progression Taylor makes year to year to year on his Demo Reels, and not just because it's really great work, but because I feel like they get closer and closer to the person that I've come to know, and I think that's incredibly rare.
Speaker 2:I want to take you back, taylor, because we have had this like long standing, like kind of cadence, and talking to each other. You mentioned MoGraph Mentor. I'd almost like to put you back into MoGraph Mentor era. Taylor Cox, what were your challenges back then? As somebody starting the industry, who pre everybody, having patrons and school emotion becoming an established standard? Mograph Mentor was this kind of like neat, weird idea that I don't think a lot of people understood right at the beginning, but you dove in as one of the first people who moved through it. Can you think back to that time, like what was in your head that you thought was a challenge that you needed to solve to move forward in your career?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, at that point I had been working in motion design for three, four years. I mean, I was not fresh, I had been doing this for a while.
Speaker 1:There's that iriglass quote that everyone loves to bring up about that kind of realization where your taste and your skill and the separation between the two it was around that time where I became more aware of the motion design community at large, seeing more of the studio, seeing what people were actually doing instead of kind of my little bubble of freelance work that I had been doing for a little bit, and realizing, oh gosh, I'm not nearly as good as I thought I was. My storytelling ability is not great, my technical animation ability is not great. I've been getting by on Andrew Kramer tutorials for four years now, and so it was that moment of realization the chasm between where I was and where I wanted to be much larger than I thought it was.
Speaker 2:Taylor, I'm going to throw this question out to you now because I think this is one of the hardest questions you can ask an artist. If you had to describe yourself in three words as an artist, how would you describe yourselves before people go rush off and take a look at your work while they're listening?
Speaker 1:So I'm going to say something that sounds incredibly hokey cheesy. I'm just going to own it. I'm sorry, but if we're going to put it on three words, just let's have fun.
Speaker 2:I like that. I like that I was going to say. If I had to pick one word, the word I would have used was joyful, because whenever I look at your work, I know what you can do, I know what your tools, your skill sets are, I know what your interests are, but I just feel like there's a sense of joy that radiates out of your demo reel or when you post personal work. That, I think, is something that is true to you as a person but also really rare to find from a demo reel. Like how do you ever do that?
Speaker 1:So, as far as for a demo reel, how do you do that Practically speaking? It's a lot of personal work and it's not just when I say those three words let's have fun, like if I'm pitching myself really as a freelancer wanting to work with somebody. I want that to kind of be the whole experience, like when we're just in a group, slap, chat, talking notes, talking the mundane. I want that to be a good experience for people. I try to liven it up If I try to have fun with that up to a certain point, because I realize that can get a little irritating if you take it too far. I take my job seriously but I don't take myself very seriously.
Speaker 2:I think that's a perfect reason to explain why, when we got this call from Adult Swim as soon as that idea was awarded to us and I was like, oh my gosh, samantha, I have to introduce you to you the first person I thought I was Taylor, because I would love to know what you thought of getting that phone call. Because the title of Samantha's piece for an adult swim was called Suck it Smash, which is hilarious and silly and a little bit weird. Essentially, it was supposed to be pure fun and the added wrinkle that was supposed to emulate like an 8-bit or 16-bit side-scrolling video game. And if the other thing you really need to know about Taylor is that half of what I think, what I see from his personal work, lives directly in that sweet spot. So it's that reason why I always tell people on your demo reels or when you show work or when you're on LinkedIn or on Twitter, showing people, your personality really does pay off and that idea of Taylor is fun.
Speaker 2:He has a huge amount of joy. He does video games. He's not afraid to get weird. Sometimes that, literally, was the checklist of who could we find that could do those four things. So I'd love to know what did you think when you got the call? That, yes, we might finally, for the first time ever, get to work together, but that it was a thing called Suck it Smash.
Speaker 1:I mean, it was just laughter, to be honest. And to add one more thing that was told to me when you pitched the project to me. He said Suck it. Smash is going to be inspired by old video games and whatnot. And then this idea that the character was inspired by, like Kirby, the old Nintendo character Kirby, which I love. How delightfully absurd that character is Like. There's like a whole deep lore about this little pink puffball that just devours everything it sees. So, like the whole package was just like this is perfect, this is hilarious.
Speaker 2:This is amazing. That's what I love about adult swimming. It's occasionally you get these calls from clients where they're like we don't have a ton of money and it's not a lot of time, but also we just want to see what you do. If we just said, go make something and pitch us and this couldn't be a more perfect distillation of what I know from Samantha in terms of, like the visual look, the theme of it. Again, it influenced by Kirby If they made a adult swim animated show, this would live in that kind of world but also just like a little bit disgusting, but in a cute way. Was there anything scary? Was there anything that you're like oh man, this is a challenge that I have to figure out some technical hurdles, or it's a creative opportunity to do something never done. What was your kind of motivation once you're like, okay, I've got the job, Now I got to go make this thing.
Speaker 1:I don't want to oversell it, but the word I think of coming out of that meeting was just harmony. Honest to goodness, I walked away from that meeting and almost every day that I was working on this project of like we're working together well, this all makes sense. There was a flow to it, and that's not something that I would take for granted, that's not something that happens all the time, but it just felt like all of the right pieces were in place as far as direction and who was working on it and who was steering it. It was pretty special, to be honest.
Speaker 2:I also was doing a station ID for adult swim called World War S'mores. My team was looking at the job that you and Samantha were doing and we kept on scratching our heads like how are they going so fast? We couldn't understand. It felt like in the course of two to three weeks from the moment like it got greenlit and you were on board. It went from being some kind of sketchy storyboard drawings that were thrown together in animatic to here's the character and how I think it can move to it's done. It didn't make any sense just because we were still kind of like getting some character models done and doing some rigging tests and we're like how in the world is this happening this way? How do you move so fast on this project, taylor? I don't know.
Speaker 1:I cannot give you an assesial like ABC. This is how it worked. It was clarity of direction. I mean, we just were able to hit the ground running. There was no sort of ambiguity about what we were trying to do. So, yeah, again, it just worked. Like I wish I had some wonderful eternal insight to like glean from all of that, which is sometimes things work, you know.
Speaker 2:Is there anything in the way that Samantha storyboarded or directed you that helped you cut some corners or avoid some kind of technical hurdles Like how did you guys figure that out? Because at least a couple of shots from what I remember should have had some headache moments.
Speaker 1:Well, so at the outset, Samantha had already done a little bit of prep work for both of them, like, oh, this is kind of how I want the character to be shaped, and a start on material whatever. And she was very humble about it. She's like, you know, this is just kind of a start and I get into that project. I'm like I don't actually need to do much more to this. Like you know, we can push the material a little bit more and we can push the rig a little bit more. But I was delighted and surprised by like this is all very workable, and so I didn't have any headaches there at the beginning of like, okay, I've got to reimagine this, or you know, this isn't up to snuff, so we need to start over. It just wasn't that way. She really, both in terms of her storyboarding and just that little bit of prep work she did with that character, got us so far down the road.
Speaker 2:Taylor, I love hearing that about Samantha because as a first time director, I'm sure there was a decent amount of trepidation of how do I take a job that I pitched, that I don't know how to animate or I don't know how to use cinema 4D, but I know it needs to be done. How do I move it forward? It sounds like the two of you's relationship worked so well that she could kind of drive the creative vision and collaborate with you and it seemed like she had full trust in terms of you taking on character animation. Can you tell me a little bit about, like, how you came to being comfortable doing character work? That's not something that you run into with motion designers a lot, much especially when you start talking about doing it in 3D.
Speaker 1:So I've done a little bit of 3D character animation, and almost all of it up to this point has been primarily personal stuff, just fun stuff that I wanted to do because I find myself much more inspired by characters than necessarily circles and squares and lines. You know, if you have any sort of storytelling in your heart, you've got to do something with characters, you've got to get someone else to do it, and so I would enjoy just putting together a little rigs for these silly, little, simple characters, like I remember. One of the first ones I did was this like fun Christmas tree project years and years ago.
Speaker 2:That was like one of the first demo reels you kind of showed me was that and I was like more of that. Please do more of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just spent a solid week learning how to create a little espresso rig for what I needed each and every single part of this tree to do and how to blast doing it, and for this project. That lent itself perfectly for what we were trying to do this glorified gumball that we were making that had to be gelatinous and expressive, and all these just fun sorts of things.
Speaker 2:So one of the things that I've always been friend, jealous of and impressed at the same time is that for me, I've always struggled investing in personal work because I always felt guilty that that was taken away from my professional work and because of that, anytime I would look to make a new demo reel, I never felt like it reflected who I wanted to be. So I would go like up a lot of people listening years without updating a demo reel. But when I started open office hours, one of the first people that came to talk to me was you and we've had this really great relationship or cadence of every year to 18 months. It felt like for a long run you would check back in and be like I got a new reel, tell me what do you think. And I was always like, almost like I had my hand in my fist like, curse, you again, taylor. You did it again.
Speaker 2:But it's been so exciting for me, almost like someone who is a fan of a band you see in a bar that you're like man, I love these people. I could see them on a stage in front of an arena. I want to follow them for the rest of their career and support them. I've always felt that way about you and I was thinking about that partially because I'm a fan of you, but another part is like I'm fascinated and always wondered how do you find the termination and confidence to? I think over the years I've seen at least three or four major demo reel that releases from you where it feels like you're leveling up 10X every time. How do you, how do you do that?
Speaker 1:I don't want to use such a negative word for it, but I don't think there's any other way to put it. It really is frustration. It's not that I necessarily have a lot of time to be pouring into these personal projects and cranking a new reel out, because I don't, but you do client work for a solid year and 90% of it, as we all know, is like I don't necessarily want to show this to other people or this isn't me, and I hit a threshold, seemingly every 12 to 18 months, where I'm like I need to make some stuff. That's me or otherwise. I can't do this much longer. My soul is starting, it's starting to run dry, and so that frustration kind of kind of turns into a little rocket booster and I'll have two to three months where I'm just pouring over new projects, new ideas, learning things that I wanted to learn but I haven't had time to do. I think that's primarily it. I mean, I guess I'm happy I've been able to channel it into something positive, but it has been a sense of frustration that's driven that.
Speaker 2:That's great insight. I appreciate the honesty for that, because it's not a cool thing to say a negative emotion is something you use for fuel. I feel like in our industry everybody always tries to present it as like be your best artist and be true to your inner self. But a lot of times it's either frustration or fear, falling behind or not knowing where you fit amongst your peers, or maybe having a big long-term goal that you want to achieve by the time you retire that you feel like you're not taking a single step towards. This might be me channeling my own feelings a little too much.
Speaker 1:I mean to get maybe even a little too deep on this. I don't think most of us set out to do corporate client work with our art all the time, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that. That's what puts food on the table, et cetera. But you hit these points from like I can't do another text blast. I can't do another lower third. I can't do another text line or video. None of that is true. I'm happy to do all that, but you feel that way sometimes and you just you've got to unleash some of that pent up. I got to do what I feel true about what I feel I've always wanted to do.
Speaker 2:So yeah, I appreciate it. I've always resented the fact that this phrase is what you use, like I've got to make a living, because I think it's really difficult, especially in motion design, where you're really close to doing what you want to do but it always feels like you're a half a step away from like. I think you and I are very similar we both love character animation, we both love video games, we both have jobs where you probably get close to what we thought it would have been like to do those things, but it's still not exactly. And I feel like there's a very big difference with making a living with your art and living as an artist. But those two words are so closely related that you just kind of just let them just kind of mesh into each other when they could be further from two separate things that you have to kind of balance and reconcile or just come to terms with the compromise.
Speaker 1:Yeah, compromise and balance are big parts of it, and you have to come to terms with that.
Speaker 2:I mean the words you're using. You know like fun you said the beginning adventure, what we call play. Those are the things that get us through the hard times or the times where you don't know what's going to happen. Right, I love the fact that you basically just gave everybody permission to go and play some video games.
Speaker 1:Go, have fun, play right what this has looked like in my life. My wife, about six months ago, bought an old pop-up camper for a thousand bucks on Facebook Marketplace and spent months restoring it and refurbishing it and putting it back together, just so we could go camping more. And just the amount of energy and creativity that she put in that project and what that has meant for our lives and how much it's expanded our horizons. That sort of energy recharges me, much more so than spending four weeks on the box.
Speaker 2:I feel like we have to reclaim the term artist in the industry. Right, there's a lot of people like to say I'm not an artist, I'm a designer, or I'm a technician, or some people might say bricklayer. But if you're spending any time doing this work, I think there is a certain amount of personal responsibility that you do have to say I am an artist. Part of it is learning, part of it is application, but the other part of it is creating moments to be bored or moments to hear things in quiet. That, if all you've been doing is sitting on the box just doing the stuff that you know you have to do for clients, you don't have anything cool in your head. You need to have that. What would your dream assignment be as an artist working in motion design?
Speaker 1:I am going to ZIG, where I thought I was going to. Zag, I would love right now to work with Guillermo del Toro.
Speaker 2:Yes, great, I love it. Tell me why, because I don't want to presume. What would the reason be for that?
Speaker 1:I mean just all the things about him in general. I feel like that speaks for himself, for itself. But I feel like he right now is kind of our cavalry leader in animation and I would love to be part of that passion and that energy and also he just seems like such a lovely person, he also swears better than anyone you'll ever meet.
Speaker 2:The few weeks I had working with him. I've been chasing those four weeks ever since they happened. What's the next step for you as an artist, Taylor?
Speaker 1:I read this wonderful interview with the director of the new Zelda games and he talked about his hiring process for these insanely innovative, groundbreaking games, particularly Breath of the Wild and the newly released Tears of the King, two games that just blew away people's expectations for what you could do in a video game. And so he was asked about okay, how did you put together a team for this game? And he said well, obviously we needed great engineers and great artists, great programmers, things like that. But almost what was more important to me was I wanted to know what they were doing with the rest of their time. We weren't looking for gamers. We weren't looking for video gamers.
Speaker 1:Obviously you needed to be familiar with it to do the job, but we were looking for do you do boating? Do you do hiking? Do you do woodworking? What are you doing with your spare time? That is, recharging your mind and your creativity. And you have to put together that sort of team in order to get a breath of the wild and a tears of the kingdom, where just the imagination on display and the creativity and the resourcefulness and like all this sort of stuff that into these games blows my mind. You just ask yourself constantly how did they do this? Because these weren't just gamers sitting at a computer making a game. These were people with lives and people that do actual adventuring. So I have been thinking more about my creativity and my career in terms of how much adventure am I putting into my life?
Speaker 2:You did a great job kind of putting all of us as listeners into your head back when you started MoGraph Mentor earlier in your career and I look forward to right now today, sitting in this room as an artist that's been working in motion design for a long time. It's had a good career, that people know who you are, that you have a recognizable kind of style or voice, Like I can tell when something's at Ailer Cox Peace. Same question. But today, what do you feel are your biggest challenges as a motion designer working in the industry at this spot in your career right now?
Speaker 1:Since we keep bringing up video games. I feel like right now I have started level two. We've gone through level one, we've done the whole thing Again. I've been doing this for 10 years. It feels like you've seen everything and I have to get up every morning and do it again and again, and again. But level two is different. It's like I'm looking to okay, am I going to do this for 10 more years? And so the next 10 years are going to look very different from those first 10 years.
Speaker 1:And so it's coming to groups, both with what these challenges are going to be artificial intelligence or the changing industry from a studio model, economic model we're in a big period of transition and we don't know where that's going and then also life stages. I have a nine-year-old and a seven-year-old and they're going into middle school soon. I've got to balance all these new parenting emotions all at the same time. So I feel like I'm starting over all over again, in a sense, where I'm getting up every morning and doing the same thing, yet I'm getting up every morning and facing totally new challenges. I realize this is a cop-out. To say that my biggest challenge is the challenges. I love it, that's great, but there's that sense of unknown, that it's familiar territory, but it's very much not.
Speaker 2:I mean it's a weird thing to be through, because there's not a lot of people we can look at that have gone through what we're going through in this industry, because it's still so young, it's still so nascent. I'm a big fan of Bruce Springsteen and he said he's had these multiple moments in his life where it's like there's a good run, where every single day everything is new and life gives you a new challenge, a new person, a new reaction, a new tool, a new goal, and then slowly, over time, you wake up one day and it's just more of the same. It's just more of the same and there's never anything new. You can do one of two things you can either try to recapture that or you can settle into it, knowing that it's not one arc, it's a series of waves, and that's the only wisdom I can think of that. I've been searching for people who have been through this as creative careers. Right, if you could close your eyes, what would be the one thing you would change for yourself about the industry?
Speaker 1:I've been thinking about this and I still am struggling with my answer.
Speaker 2:Would you change a choice you made? Would you change something about the way the industry is structured?
Speaker 1:I mean, the first thing that comes to mind are a lot of practical things like It'd be nice if we had a union in healthcare and things like that. That's the kind of conversations that happen surrounding my job in my household regularly is the sort of stability elements. But we all know what we signed up for when we decided to do this those of us that decided to go freelance. The word stability keeps coming to mind. But it's not just a matter of like. It's not just, oh, I wish I had X amount of things per month. I wish I had this covered or this covered or this covered. The most difficult thing that I've had to navigate in the last 10 years that I wish I could change is that feeling of volatility. You do get used to it to a certain extent. You learn to plan for it.
Speaker 1:You learn that you know if you have really good season doesn't necessarily mean that you can go on a cruise next weekend, like it's. You've got to pace yourself and be measured in your approach. So it would do me a lot of good as I was as I am getting older if the volatility would go down a little bit. I also wish that there came with that more opportunities for us, as artists, to explore our voices and to explore narrative content, to kind of find ourselves every once in a while again with the kind of scarcity mindset that we often have to live under. We don't allow ourselves those opportunities, we don't pursue those opportunities, or we're just so burnt out that when we do get a free moment, we can't make it happen. So, in my magic wand waving, we would all have the energy and opportunity to kind of rediscover the things that made us love this to begin with and explore where those possibilities can take us beyond just 15 second. You know Instagram ads. Does that answer your question?
Speaker 2:I mean people won't see the video, but I've been shaking my head the entire time, I think the moment you said yes, I got into this entire industry from a completely different industry because I love character based storytelling. That's cliche. Does that sound like cartoons? I love cartoons and video games and I was hoping there'd be a way into a career and a life filled with that that didn't have as much gatekeeping and absolute atrocious work life balance that I've witnessed from other people ahead of me.
Speaker 2:I thought motion design looks like you can get the best of both worlds. You get a taste of that and maybe, if you work hard enough, you could specialize that and you get a bit of notoriety for that in a field that doesn't exclusively do that. But that struggle of when you get the time, finally that's open. You get a weekend to storyboard an idea or write something, or you get a free night where you're not trying to finish to a deadline or answer calls or look for work or handle the things your family needs of you to even have the valuable reserves to give it the energy you thought you would have when you got started, the energy that it deserves to fuel you for what you do. I think that's what a lot of people listen to will be not in their heads to as well.
Speaker 1:I don't want to paint the picture either that the reality of what we do is somehow unfulfilling, which is not the case either. I mean, we get to do really cool stuff and get paid to do it, and that's a fantastic privilege. But at the same time as I go on long walks outside and let my mind wander and start getting all high on the clouds, you can't deny that craving for something more, for something true to connect with people and yourself on a level that's beyond just selling a product, and I think a lot of us feel that pretty deep to our core. So if motion design could really embrace and expand somehow, and it's hey, we make great commercials, but we don't have to just make great commercials.
Speaker 2:That's it. That's the first Spilt Searchlight episode. We love Taylor and we love it. If you take a look at his work, go over to his website at Taylorcoxstudio, follow him on Instagram and hit him up on Twitter. He's always posting new things and he's done work for places like Marvel and Microsoft and an endless array of personal projects. Now, if you have someone you think we should be a fan of, send us an email over at play at spiltcom. Let us know if there's a new artist or if you're the artist that we should be putting on the next searchlight. Well, that's it for us now, as always. Thank you so much for listening. We really hope you're enjoying these and seeing the range of things that inspire us and get us just excited about motion design and animation, and hopefully you'll be a bigger part of the conversation. Thanks so much for listening and until next time, seize the play.
