Charlie Custer

Over the past few months, I’ve made a few big career-related decisions. Rather than waiting until my yearly goals reckoning, I thought it might make sense to put down in words now what I’m doing, and perhaps more importantly why I’m doing it.

The shortest and most direct thing first: I’ve decided to pursue motion graphics and animation as a long-term career.

That flies in the face of my January goal to add a professional qualification that would move me towards “bigger leadership roles,” because I’ve increasingly realized that I don’t care about that sort of career advancement. My motives in setting that goal were more external (read: financial) than intrinsic, and I think that was misguided.

But rather than talking about why I ultimately don’t want to be in a boardroom, I’d like to try to explain why I do want to be doing motion graphics.

The first and easiest reason is that I enjoy doing it. Mograph work presents an interesting and perhaps unique mix of creative artistic challenges and technical challenges. In any given project I might be called upon to solve one problem in the manner of a painter, and another in the manner of a programmer. I find that interesting.

Mograph also scratches my biggest and deepest itch: the drive to create. It’s the reason I wrote poetry, and then rap albums, and then a China blog, and then made a feature-length documentary, and then wrote thousands of articles for Tech in Asia. Most of that work was crap, of course, but that’s almost irrelevant. I have some kind of deep-seated need to always be making something, and I can’t say why that is, but I can say that it’s not an itch likely to be scratched in my hypothetical once-future as a marketing executive. I can be driving, leading, guiding, but I also need to be creating stuff regularly or I’m going to be unhappy.

Of course, there are many ways to create. But motion graphics specifically aligns well with my personality and habits.:

• It allows for meaningful collaboration, but also for the possibility of doing entire projects alone. That’s good, because while I do like collaborating on projects, I prefer knowing that I can rely only on myself if I want, and I can undertake personal solo projects without needing to find or hire collaborators.
• It can happen mostly from home, whereas traditional video work obviously requires a lot of travel and gear-lugging to get to the places where you need shots. I do like traveling and meeting new people, but I’m introverted enough that I don’t like doing those things every day. I’m also a lot more efficient and effective when I’m setting my own schedule, at least in the context of how and when my work is distributed throughout the day.
• It allows me to do things that matter. Obviously, most of us aren’t lucky enough to have jobs that put food on the table while also constantly feeling like they’re addressing important issues with the world. Mograph probably isn’t different in that regard, but the skillset can be put to good use and my time “donated” to address basically any cause that I find worthwhile. My knowledge of China’s technology industry isn’t going to be of much use to a climate advocacy group, but my ability to create short, eye-catching, informative, and engaging videos will be.
• It tends to take the form of shorter-length (1-4 week) projects, where I can go from idea to completed creation and then move on to something cool and new in a relatively short period of time, but still have the satisfaction of being able to dive into it more deeply than I can when writing (for example) a single article for a website.

There are professional reasons I think it’s an ideal option for me, too:

• It’s a growing field, and motion/animation skills are relevant across a wide variety of industries. Most of the work is in marketing and branding, but there’s motion work to be found in video game design, UX/UI design and product prototyping, and more.
• It allows for virtually infinite professional growth, and there are numerous specialization branches I could ultimately head down.
• It’s possible to earn a very comfortable living doing motion design, even as a freelancer. I wouldn’t personally pursue any career solely for this reason, but it’s an important condition nevertheless, since I have a family to support.
• It seems relatively insulated from the rise of AI and automation. Obviously, there are already build-your-own-explainer-video type services, but clients with money are probably always going to want more customized work, and I don’t think AI is anywhere near being able to handle creating something from scratch while trying to factor in meaning, aesthetics, and marketing effectiveness all at the same time. I could be wrong, but I think if AI’s better at that kind of creative, subjective job than humans, it means AI’s already replaced pretty much every job anyway.

So, it’s the mograph life for me, or at least that’s the plan. In five years, I hope to be skilled enough to not hate my work, and I hope to have moved into project-based freelancing with enough available client work to be able to pick and choose what I’m doing (to some extent) and give myself time off more easily when I need some.

To that end, my plan for this year is mostly working on skills. I’m currently in School of Motion’s Animation Bootcamp, and plan to enroll in at least their Design Bootcamp and Cinema 4D Basecamp or Explainer Camp before the year ends. Next year, I plan to take additional SoM classes, and consider joining a Mograph Mentor class as well.