Kevin Lau:

Rising tides rise all people. It's like you look around and you see, "Oh, Steven Spielberg, Coppola and Lucas." It's like, "Why do those, oh wait, they went to school together? Oh, wait. This is a Lucas directed Spielberg production." So keep good company and if you're a good person, when somebody gets into a studio, they'll recommend you and you'll get in. And then if you're doing the work, you'll just keep getting called. It's simple as that.

Chris Do:

Okay. My next guest I haven't spoken to in a number of years, we kind of go way back to the old school and a lot of you who are long time OG followers and fans of the show know that at one point in my life I used to make commercials and music videos for a living and I've left that world long behind. So it's always nice to welcome a familiar face and a familiar voice back to the show. So Kevin, for people who don't know who you are, can you introduce yourself, tell us a little story about who you are and what you do?

Kevin Lau:

Yeah, so it's good to see you, Chris. It's been many years. I guess the broad category is I am in the motion graphic space, work primarily in commercials, music videos like you were saying. Way back in the day if you know, got my start at a company called, Fuel long since gone, but one of the early OG motion graphic shops and then just worked my way through the industry and we worked at a lot of different places, know a lot of similar people. Yeah, so that's my brief history.

Chris Do:

And where are you at today?

Kevin Lau:

So I'm currently at a place called, Motion, which they've been around for about 35 years and they are traditionally known for being a theatrical advertising agency or trailer house. One of the interesting things about them is that they, during the pandemic when the movie stuff shut down, they saw that they had all their eggs in one basket. And so they really wanted to pivot and they would always had a foot in the graphics and design, and branding space. And so they hit me up and they want to expand on that and double down and get a little bit more presence in the design and branding space. So over there bolstering some of the stuff. It's like a startup with inside of the company and it's been a lot of fun. They've been really supportive.

And it's very interesting because what grew me over to them was I started looking around the landscape and I started to see that I am in commercial advertising, but then some of the biggest tech brands in the world are now content providers. And so I was looking at this company going, "I think there's a way into some new interesting stuff that they are actually trying to diversify out of." But I am looking at them going, "Well, content is now the product." And it's kind of an interesting thing where I think it's a really great space to be in and it's cool to get access to a lot of the big tech through advertising and entertainment.

Chris Do:

There's a lot for us to unpack. And so before we go to the future of the present, I want to revisit the past. I didn't know this and I probably should have known this, that you're there at the very beginning and Fuel is a name that's going to raise a lot of eyebrows and bring back an instant flashback of memories and nostalgia for those of us who were at the birthplace of Motion Design in Los Angeles. So Fuel was founded by Seth Epstein, right?

Kevin Lau:

Yes.

Chris Do:

And he was a guy playing around with desktop tools and Seth is somebody who started out as I guess a rival, contemporary and then later on just a peer. But take us back to those early days. What was it like to be at Fuel and what was your role and your capacity, and what was the general vibe back then?

Kevin Lau:

Well, I got in right as Fuel had sort of disbanded. So Fuel got its start in sort of the dot-com boom. And so they were part of Razorfish, they got acquired into this agency and they were right there and there was a couple different ones. I think you got your start at IF right? Is that where you were early on in your career?

Chris Do:

I was freelancing a little bit, yeah, something like that. It was RDA.

Kevin Lau:

RDA, yeah. But there were a couple of pinnacle places and Fuel was one of them. So early out of design school I got in as just designer ground level and right then it was sort of splintering from Fuel, and out of Fuel had spun Brand New School. And so that was the start of the style shop and just these really, really great places that were making desktop accessible groups of young people just breaking the rules and it was kind of no holds barred. It was just like, who could make the coolest thing? Who could outdo each other? And it was just taking the tools that were coming out with After Effects, taking early 3D applications and just twisting the knobs because we were rejecting some of the stuff that was happening in visual effects.

And actually back at the time, it was the late 90s, early 2000s and it was that era of postmodernism. So it was during the era of Raygun and it was like we're distressing fonts and we're shooting things practically and then running them through Xerox copiers, and just re-imagining how imagery was created and processed. And I think that was a really exciting time because there were established rules, but we were all just breaking the rules and sort of experimenting with these new tools that were coming out. And I think that's pretty analogous to how things are happening today where it's the advent of AI and some of these new tools that are being introduced to us and just new abilities to create in ways that we hadn't seen before.

Chris Do:

So many things just if our audience will indulge me for a little bit, I just want to set the stage for what it was like back then. So I might be a couple years older than you Kevin, because I was there in 1995 when Seth was just trying to figure out how to make a reel. This is pre-Razorfish interest and all that kind of stuff. And I had friends that were freelancing there working with Seth. And so it was like, "How do we figure this stuff out?" And this is the wild wild west back in those days because I think we're still on After Effects version 1.0 or something like that where many of the things that the youngsters today take for granted in terms of what they can do with the tools. And it was just a time for playing around and trying to figure things out.

And what was happening was there were a bunch of art school kids either in image making or traditional graphic design who got these tools and there were tremendous opportunities that ad agencies wanted to tap into these creative minds versus going with more traditional Henry or I forget what the other box was called, operators who knew the tools but didn't bring that level of creativity. And so it was a wonderful renaissance or a period of great discovery. The rules weren't even written. So you can't even say breaking the rules, we're just trying stuff and seeing what we can get away with. I look back very fondly during that time. And then of course the market matures, competition sets in, rules start formulating and then we're all just trying to figure it out. Now that's a long time ago if anybody's paying attention, 1995.

Kevin Lau:

Yeah, I think you're a couple years.

Chris Do:

Let's move forward a little bit.

Kevin Lau:

You're a couple years ahead of me, I think.

Chris Do:

Just a few years, right?

Kevin Lau:

Yeah, just a couple. I mean not many but yeah, After Effects used to be called, CoSA, and were no degrees in motion design. It was not a thing that you could go to school and have an instructor that had any sort of background in. So it was actually an interesting thing to come up through design school and be doing stuff in motion design and then later into web design and stuff like that using, FutureSplash which became Flash. And those types of tools when your instructors didn't have it. Again, I think that's kind of analogous to stuff that's probably happening now. So we're coming full circle to how things always reinvent themselves.

Chris Do:

So just for context, what people may not understand is the term motion design was not even invented in the time in which we're doing, it became an industry accepted term. And so we're all doing things that we were not trained to do because no instructor even knew what to do. So a lot of it was just through trial and error, and intervention and just bringing us to the moment in time in which we live in today, which is generative images through AI and what that's doing.

So we're all in the wild wild west again in terms of having this existential threat to our own creativity about concept art and style frames and all these kinds of things, that some young person could type in a few prompts can generate a pretty good-looking image. And in many cases, and I'd love to get your take on this, probably would take days to do and not even as good from a professional seasoned artist, because AI has already learned how to compose things, how to like things and how to create atmosphere. You just have to be really good at prompting. So I'm curious because you're still in the field, what is the general feeling of generative images? Is it embrace or do we hate it? What's going on?

Kevin Lau:

It is bouts of terror and then complete wonder and awe, And then realizing that it hasn't solved everything yet. So I mean there's a lot to unpack there, right? Because kind of going back to that original statement of how desktop was the first revolution, we've been using tools that for better or for worse have been AI for a long time. It just hasn't been called, AI. So for a long time there's been content aware fill and these other things in Photoshop where you can start to do predictive stuff. But if we look even further back in history, it's like when we got the camera it was saying that we could now recreate reality.

So painters before used to strive to be absolute realism, so Rembrandt and other things like that. So it wasn't until about the 1900s we started to get expressionism and all these other things that came out because we no longer had to do those tasks as sort of artisans. So we're kind of at that area now where we can take AI and use it as something as more of an accelerant to our daily frame making. We have seen with social media that the timeframes have just gotten compressed. So iterating, coming up with style frames, selling ideas through before you get into production. Those things I think AI can really help and benefit. In an editorial sense there's a way to do analysis of scene analysis. So you know how you can type in a prompt and you can say these sort of things but not these sort of things. Well, you can start to do that with movie clips.

So you can start to go through bins of clips and say, "Hey, give me all of the closeups." So now instead of what used to take hours and hours of just watching footage, you can now say, "Here's closeups and now I can do match cuts between these closeups." It's just creating things that we can now shortcut some of the grunt work and actually get into the creative work and really hopefully enhance that. I mean I think we are going to get to a point when we sort of reach that moment where the creative process can't keep up with the generative process, but we're not quite there yet. I think it's still trying to create those good ideas.

Chris Do:

Okay, there's a lot here. A couple years ago during one of the many Adobe sneak sessions that happens at Max, they showed off Adobe Sensei with Photoshop and using their version of AI and machine learning. And just to make it super simple for people to understand, if you go and take a bunch of pictures on your camera, one of the most difficult things to sort through the camera to find the right image. And what was interesting in that demo, pre all this talk about AI was somebody typed in, "Three-quarter profile female," and it went through all the hundreds and if not thousands of photos, found the right angle, found the right lighting and showed you options and it was just aiding you and the audience naturally oohed and aahed over this. And I'm thinking, "When is this going to happen? Because I need this tool yesterday."

And so now we fast-forward to today, you're saying within the editing space you could do this beyond just static frames. You could do this with video, you can ask it for certain things that I don't think is the job anyone is trying to fight to keep and this is how it can accelerate your creativity so that the human is driving and not doing unnecessary production work. But of course this is going to offset some labor somewhere, because somebody's job at some point was to do that. It could have been an intern, assistant editor or somebody. And so we're trying to weigh the benefits of AI versus the impact that it's going to have on jobs. So it sounds to me like you're very pro AI. Is that the case?

Kevin Lau:

I'm cautiously optimistic. I think a lot of people, and we've been sort of analyzing this and trying to say that there's something precious about the human experience and all these things like that. But at a large point, do we all just become an algorithm and will it be able to connect the dots? And we're not there yet, but if you look at how a toddler learns and when it first starts to speak words and then it really starts to accelerate and it's learning, we're kind of at the curve of the hockey stick right now. And so I think the future's not written with AI, so I don't want to be a doomsday-ist, but I also don't want to be so bullish on it that I don't look at how we can be ahead of that curve, or incorporate in ways that can be beneficial to us and start to just, I don't know. I haven't fully, I think we'd be a little hubris to say that we know the outcome of where this is, but I think right now I'm excited by what it is offering and how we can start to incorporate that.

Chris Do:

And since I don't have many opportunities to talk to people from my former life, I'm going to ask you to do something that may be impossible to do, but I'd just love to get your feedback, finger on the pulse, if you will. If you look at the larger industry of all the players that still do what we do or did, what is the general sentiment if we were to take 100% of the motion design industry and to try to figure out a percentage of that pie, how many people are bullish versus bearish? Can you give me a sense of what the atmosphere is like out in the creative space?

Kevin Lau:

I think that people by and large are excited by it. And a lot of the people that I have had conversations with, and again, it's a small test case because your sphere is as big as who you hang out with, but when we had that discussion about where the industry came from, a lot of us were those tinkerers and a lot of us were those ones that wanted to experiment. And so once you start to understand how generative AI actually works and how it is deconstructing an image to reconstruct an image. And how it filters down and adds noise and then removes noise, which is a longer discussion about that. But in essence it's creating something out of noise and it says, "Hey, does this look like what I knew something to be?" And it just runs cycles over and over and over again.

So once you understand that that process, you demystify the magic of what it is, you realize that it is actually just a mathematical process that is an inference engine or really asking an if a then statement a million or a billion times in a very short succession of time. So back to the original question, I think right now we're all very curious. And I think right now we're trying to sort of see how we can use it in a way that doesn't just feel derivative, because I think we're starting to see how AI art kind of has a certain gloss to it, kind of has a certain composition to it, kind of has a certain way that it's rendering. And all that's going to change, but it is a thing where we want to not be derivative and we strive as artists to have originality to us.

Chris Do:

So it seems to me like you're saying that the majority is positive sentiment with some caution and still trying to figure out how to do work that's new and different. Yeah?Is that about right?

Kevin Lau:

Yeah, I think there's some cautious optimism.

Chris Do:

Yes. Okay. So then here's my theory that I'm going to put out there and I'd love to get your take on this. From the world in which we come from, we've been able to earn a good living working at a very high level on super sexy, fun projects making probably more money than we're supposed to make, basically painting and drawing things. So we've had a good life and I think the larger population of artists out there in the world that haven't had a taste of the good life working as a professional are way more threatened. I think they have the exact opposite sentiment, which is AI's pure evil, it's stealing images. What about the rights of the artists? And probably because they don't fully understand how AI works, but they didn't have job opportunities. They barely are able to make ends meet. And so I'd like to get your take on the theory because the people I know who are professionals, who are creative, who know how to direct and lead teams and put things together, they're not as threatened by AI as the people who have yet to make their living doing it.

Kevin Lau:

I think I would agree with that sentiment. I think sort of the low hanging fruit that AI is going to be really good at replacing is that stock photography level of things. I have a local website and I just need to say that I'm a cafe, and here's the menu and here's a cool signage or a coffee cup with some coffee beans on it. And that's not what we strive to do at the higher level, but we had to do that to get to the higher level. And going back to that thing about, hey, was sitting through hours and hours and hours of footage getting rid of a job that somebody necessarily wanted?

Probably not, but is that job something that taught somebody what it means to have a good eye, because they had to sit through hours and hours and hours of bad footage to know what the good footage was? So much you have to train an AI about input, output of images. We have to train humans about input, output of images. You need to have enough input in your brain to be able to have that decision-making process of taste or outcome. And so if we start to remove that and it's just a push button, my fear is that some of the newer generation are not going to be trained on the same sort of fundamentals that we may have been trained on.

Chris Do:

I'm glad you brought up the word taste, because I've commented before that I think given that if AI can make anything, it could generate any kind of image, it could actually produce videos from nothing now. It can write poetry, it could write books, it could generate songs and establish so many different people. I think one of the biggest skills that you're going to need to have is a broad understanding of art, music, literature, history with a heavy dose of do you understand what good music sounds like? Do you know what a good poem sounds like?

Because if it can make anything, then it's discernment between those things. I just happened to be watching a clip yesterday where it showed for Pharrell Williams working with Justin Timberlake post NSYNC when he was working on his first solo album called, Justified. And Pharrell turns to the camera and says, "This is going to be hot. This guy's got really good taste. He's willing to push and try different genres and he's so open." It's interesting because a super old video, but it brings these themes together. What do you think to prepare for The future of the design and creative business that schools need to do in terms of preparing them for an industry that's going to be aided by AI? How do we best prepare our new, young, fresh minds to be viable in the marketplace?

Kevin Lau:

That's a heavy question. I mean, it is something that I have been trying to unpack for a long time, because I think that in order to have taste, it's one of those things where it's an intangible thing. Some people are born with it, some people intuitively do it, some people grind and they just look at more things. AI is real good at synthesizing and creating something that's come before. I think the interesting thing about that term of taste is pivoting when everybody has been going down this path and then it's saying, "Here's something that you haven't seen." And so we get those trends when we go from modernism to postmodernism, it's where everything was super clean and then it's like pendulum swing, we go super crusty.

And then the web comes out and then we have to make fonts and everything readable on a screen, but then we get better screens. So actually now we're starting to see a return back to more heritage logo design because our resolutions got better and our phone screens are easier to see. But it's being able to see and predict those things that I think is where a human right now still has the edge, right? Because it's being able to say that we're numb and getting that overload and saying, "Okay, even though we've seen that and everybody's doing this trend, let's try and buck that trend or let's go against the grain." To a large part, artists are contrarians and we do stuff just because somebody else did the opposite.

So I'm going to do the opposite just to prove that I'm different. And I think a lot of times those things help take off. So I do think that there are people that do have a higher intuition, and I think back to that Pharrell statement, it's like you look at people like Pharrell or Justin Timberlake or Rick Rubin, and they definitely are people that synthesize stuff larger than just a narrow segment and they're able to take stuff that is influenced by a number of different things and see how they connect and sort of create something that is new or innovative, or better than some other parts.

Chris Do:

I think it was in his book. Alan Trott writes about, One Plus One Equals Three, where he said, "The problem with creative people isn't that they don't know enough, they just know too much about one thing. They need to be able to pull from more disparate sources." So getting back to my original question to see if you have insight on this. If I'm a professor or if I'm the department chair of a program of design in one of these prominent schools, what is it that I have to introduce into the curriculum that gives a person fighting chance? If we take away the variable of saying that taste is innate, because if it's innate then there's nothing we can do. But if taste is something that we can be taught, how do we have to change the program or adjust so that we're going to be okay for the next 10, 20, 30 years?

Kevin Lau:

Well, I mean I think that's one thing too about starting to become more of a manager and art director, and creative director too is trying to figure out how to foster that out of other people. So whether you're an educator or a higher up, I'm trying to decode that as a curriculum assignment, because the thing is you really want to create an environment where people can sort of experiment and synthesize, and play with things in order to come up with something new. I don't know. It's that thing. It's like if we could say, "How do you teach taste?" I think a lot more people would innately have that. I think it is doing the work and failing, and then knowing intuitively it's like you touch the stove, it's hot, then I don't touch it again. So I did that thing, it was bad or ill received, I'm not going to do it again.

So I think the system is set up already for that in the idea of doing the work, doing the crits, getting the consensus. I think there are ways now with an expanded audience and with the internet is to see if there's a wider net that we could throw these projects to. If there's ways that we can get more of not necessarily designed by committee, but the idea of a broader swash in our feedback loops, that might be something that's interesting to think about creating a curriculum that gets a wider swash in the critique phase. But yeah, I mean, if there was a silver bullet for taste, I think I would've tried to do that a long time ago myself.

Stewart S.:

Time for a quick break, but we'll be right back. Welcome back to our conversation.

Chris Do:

I think for a period of time I did not have good taste at all in many different things. And as an educator, as a person who's removed from the service space, I have to believe that this stuff can be taught, everything. It's just that we don't understand things well enough. And I'll give you an example and people are going to probably shriek at this. Two of my favorite colors used to be purple and teal. Let's not even go into it. I'm just going to put that out there. And I had pretty poor taste and I'll tell you why. I grew up in the valley in Silicon Valley as a first generation immigrant. I wasn't exposed to art, architecture, photography, fine art, none of that stuff. And so I'm just a kid with valley taste.

And then I go to art center and I start to get exposed to the legends, the people who are written in the history books, and I start to understand things from a different perspective and with increased exposure, I start to learn things. I take a nature materials class and they teach you how to fabricate a desk unit. So now you have an appreciation for craftsmanship, because it's so hard to get a perfect edge. And then what I try to do with my own children is when we go out into the world, I expose them to things and I say, "Look at how this is construct. This is quality, this is not quality." And we keep going through that. "That's good design, that's bad design." And so they start to train themselves. So I think in order for us to survive in this space into the future we have to have really great history teachers who make this stuff come a lot.

Because we need to know where things come from so that we can be precise in our prompt engineering or saying, "I think it's a little bit of a Matisse, but in the early works with a little bit of data is approached. Put those two together and do it this way so that we have those reference points, otherwise the machine is leading artists." I think we need to be heavy into rhetoric. So we know how to speak, we know how to think critically, we know how to make an argument for things, and we need to, I think, enroll in critical dialogue and analysis so that when we look at a painting or we listen to piece of music, we can break down the layers to understand the subcomponents so we know how they're arranged and why they work together so that we can do similar things or at least direct a machine to do that. At least that was what I would throw out there.

Kevin Lau:

Yeah. I think knowing what came before is a huge part of that. So that sort of breadcrumb of saying, "Do you understand the history of entomology of where these words or where these phrases or styles came from?" I think is a huge thing. But to your own point though, it's like if you're saying purple and teal, I mean we just went through a vapor wave whole aesthetic where purple and teal, and fuchsia are the ways that you construct it. So maybe it's more back to the construction, the quality and the craftsmanship as opposed to, things come and go and taste and trends ebb and flow. But I think it's still being identified, the craftsmanship, the quality and when those things are appropriate or what they're hearkening back to or why does this feel fun? Why does this feel like a sports graphic and why does this feel, what are the tropes and what is the genre that you're playing in? And then once you understand that, that's when you become a visual communicator because you're able to take those things and amplify those signals.

Chris Do:

Well, I'm trying to say this objectively, even looking at my own taste level back then I'm saying, I'm not trying to beat myself up here, but it was pretty bad, Kevin. There's no saving any of that taste. And we both know that in the hands of someone who understands design and materials and composition, that there's no such thing as bad colors or bad color combinations, even bad typeface. It's really about how to use them. But here's the thing, I remember there's 80s design and it's just really bad, but then there was this period in the 2000s when, Brand New School or Superfad or whoever else was out there, were able to take those retro references, make them contemporary, make them good again. So it wasn't just mimicking the past, but applying modern design concepts to make it viable and to fix some of the things that made it cheesy and bad. And that's I think part of the creative process, at least how I feel about it. What do you think?

Kevin Lau:

Yeah. No, I can definitely agree with that. We see these trends that happen and the 20-year hypothesis of like, "Hey, that's what I grew up with and I sort of remember it as a kid, but then now I become a tastemaker and I sort of interject that back into the world." So it's like that's how we get an 80s revival followed by a 90s revival. And when I was in high school it was like a 70s revival, but you take that and you sort of synthesize and you again, it's like what are the modern tools? How do we composite now? We can do these things better, we can do them cleaner. So yeah, I think every generation is a remix and we're always building and adding on what came before us. So I do think a good history lesson is important. I think having humility and also understanding what those trends even meant.

So if you use constructionists looks or brutalist, or things that were coming out of a certain era or war torn, you understand what those communications are and that's how you get a Barbara Kruger. You start to see how those things sort of enforce and reinforce the message. Milton Glaser, those kinds of people kind of grew from those aesthetics to get their message across. So if you're working with a brand, you can sort of say, "Well, is this trendy or is this poignant, or is this on brand?" And take something from the past and reappropriate it for something new and that's kind the fun part of it.

Chris Do:

Before we move on to the next thing I want to talk to you about, maybe this is the final AI question here, which is, I'd love for you to look into your crystal ball and say, "Okay, where are we as the design industry in the motion space, in the theatrical branding or trailer space and where we use these AI tools?" Midjourney's been amazing. I've been on it I think since V1 and now we're seeing it V5 and just the amount of quality in a very short amount of time it's able to improve, been fascinating. Now this runway where we can take prompts and turn them into video clips. Some of its horrible, but it is getting better by the minute, which is pretty incredible. And so where are you going to be in 10 years with AI tools and what is the industry going to look like?

Kevin Lau:

I think like we were talking about earlier, I mean I think it's something that allows us to try and look at the history. So this leads into that conversation that we're just having is understanding the history of where things came from and understanding that we're just on a time continuum of progression. So if you understand the terms of physical production, it's like leading and kerning. So leading literally used to be physical pieces of lead they put in between type blocks to make the spaces bigger. A lot of people don't know that, but that was when we went to regular type setting and the computer we didn't have to have leading, but that's a carryover from that terminology. I think we've seen things where we get into non-linear video editing and we started to see flash frames. You wouldn't used to be able to make flash frames if you were single splicing film together, but when that became something that you could do with this new tool, we started to do it and we started to see steady cam, like the oner. We could do a one shot, we could follow through.

It's following the character all the way through the environment. So we just have to look at it as a building block and now we're starting to see runway where it's like, I don't need to have a production studio, I just need to have the good idea. I can act it out. I can say we're in space, I can remove the background. So again, it really does come back to content. It really does come back to the idea and it puts the onus really on, you still have to have the genesis of why or what. That's the how. The how is, you put a prompt in there, but it's like why? Why did you put the prompt in there and what was the reason and what did you want to communicate? So visual communication is still at the end of the day about saying, "Here's something that has a point of view and here is a reason for somebody to sit through it and watch it."

The tool is just how it's done and I think design is more fundamental. It's more about solving the problem of why are we doing these things? So trying to close the loop on that. I think in five years time we'll look back at this and it is a faster progression, because we're at the elbow of the hockey stick, but I do think that it will become part of the tool set and it will just be like, "Hey, we still have to brainstorm. We still have to get in a room, we still have to bounce ideas off each other. We still have to synthesize a brief. We still have to know what the market is and then we go back and we start to execute." The unfortunate thing is we're just in a world that wants these things faster and this is just enabling us to do things faster. So it's going to butt up real hard against just our cognitive ability to iterate and hypothesize and sort of create that first question, but I think it will help us execute a lot faster.

Chris Do:

Maybe I'm just a futurist or a fan of science fiction because I think in five years I may have a slightly different take on this where you'll just talk to it, to the machine, you'll say, "Read the brief that the client sent over," and it is done. And so what are the potential two target markets that would benefit to achieve this goal based on this? What is the through line that has to be communicated? What art styles make the most sense? If I wanted to take a contrarian approach to this, what is something that's radical, it still makes sense contextually relevant to this? Generate 35 ideas, write 14 scripts and then analyze those scripts and those ideas based on these goals and metrics. And you're just doing this by yourself. You might be lying in bed. You might be hooked up to a neural link and you don't even have to use your mouth to say these things, Kevin. Do you think I'm far off there? Because I want to put this out there in case in five years we're like, "Oh my god, that is exactly what has happened."

Kevin Lau:

I don't think you're far off. I think maybe the timeline might be a little expanded, but yeah, definitely that is the path that we're going down. Because a lot of those things are just analytics. So it's saying if there's a large enough dataset, what do we do to be Liquid Death to Evian? So it's like what's the bob to the weave? And so hey, the space is crowded here, but the product is the same thing. We just need to brand the product in a different category and here are the category that is underserved. So let's go to here. We know that they've got X number of dollars and we know. So I think to a large extent, some of that is very true what you just said.

Chris Do:

And so here's the irony, because I was reading about the, I think this is in Marty Neumeier's book, one of the many branding books that it used to be that people who controlled factories, that was the barrier to entry. So if you didn't have access to money, to resources to be able to build stuff, then you would lose and then eventually became about intellectual property. If you have the brand, and now it's just not even about that anymore. So as we kind of advance where anybody can make anything in the world of imagination, it might come back to, well, can you manufacture it? Can you produce it? Can you sell that idea through the client? Because anybody can make anything.

So now a question of who can make it tangible and get it to market like Liquid Death, maybe there's a thousand kids sitting out there like, "I had that idea." "Well, you didn't make it." So there's a person who put a lot of treasure at risk and relationships to be able to bring that to market and made the correct decisions and partnered up with the right humans to be able to get this to the point in which it's worth I think $700 million or something like that, which is where I think we might be going back. As far as I know right now, AI still is not making it. It's still not spending its own money, because it has no money.

Kevin Lau:

Yeah. It does not have capital. So I mean that is a large part of what I've been thinking about too is sort of how people are going to return back to experiences. When you dematerialize everything to the point where it can be infinitely repeated or reproduced. We're starting to see a lot of Gen Alpha, Gen X or Millennials, and Gen Zers that they hold vacations and experiences over these digital things. They want to go experience, they want to be out, they want to have these... Luxury goods are doing a lot better now because you can have these very tangible things that you can enjoy. So I do think there's going to be a return back to sort of the physical aspects and properties of consumerism to a certain extent.

And what experiences can you create or curate too? That's one thing that I've been thinking about, and we've been seeing a lot more advertising dollars go to experiential. Less stuff going into TVC and a lot more going into what's playing on the monitors at Coachella or what is going on at SoFi Stadium before the concert or the concert itself. Look at Taylor Swift. She's creating an experience and I think the estimates I saw were six to 7 billion for that tour, and it's unstoppable, and that's something that you can't recreate. That's something that you physically, tangibly have to be at.

Chris Do:

Yeah, okay. You've been in the industry and unlike me, I've left and done other things. You've been in industry for close to three decades now. I'd love for you to just look back on where you started, the highs and the lows in between and where you're at. And highlight maybe a couple key life lessons for creatives or someone who wants to have a long-term sustainable career. What are some of the highlights or things that you can share with us?

Kevin Lau:

Yeah. I mean, it's been a long career and one of the things is you just wake up and you realize that you've been doing this for a long time. And I think that's something that as you get older, we all relate to. I think right now, one of the things that I'm sort of coming to loggerheads with and just sort of recognizing is just not forgetting who I am or what I stand for or what journeys I've been on. So that's a very vague answer, but in the sense of you get into this and you start doing the work and you just go through the motions at a certain point. And then you feel like there's not a routine to it, but certain shortcuts that you start to take and you start to put things in buckets. And that does a disservice to some of the things of why you got in here. Again, the conversation that we had about the experimentation and wanting to dive into Midjourney, wanting to dive into these things and not looking them as threats, but almost more as opportunities.

And I think that's one thing is to just keep that curiosity. And it's hard to do because when this does become a job, and most of us, we are very passionate about this and we get into it because it was a hobby and we were doing this in school and we were doodling, and then it becomes a job. And then 20 years later you've just been doing that and you lose yourself in the identity of what the work is. So that's one thing that I think is really to just really stay curious and don't lose sight of yourself and why you started to do this in the first place.

Chris Do:

Well, you've been around long enough and seen enough of the inner workings of multiple companies. Even long before I left the industry, I saw people burn out, and I'm sure you've seen your share of people burning out for a number of different reasons. What did they do wrong or what could they have done differently to prevent that state of they're no longer interested in doing this thing anymore that gave them so much joy at the beginning?

Kevin Lau:

One of the things that's hard not to do is take this thing personally. I think when we're creating stuff, I have always tried to separate the idea of being an artist for hire versus being an artist. So I chose the path of designer, and that's work for hire. I'm not a fine artist. I do stuff on the side, I'll do these other things. That's for me. But when I go to work, I do have to solve a problem for a client. And that's the hard part to bridge. And I think the good ones treat it like it is a personal project and that they're great because they do that, but I think they leave a little bit too much of the flesh on the table every time.

And so I think it's really trying to, not disassociate from it, but at least being objective on the wins and letting yourself enjoy the wins and letting yourself enjoy those things and shed some of the losses and shed some of the negative feedback or the things that weren't necessarily right from a creative standpoint. But if you take a step back and you realize that it's a 6 billion brand and they can't be as daring because if they have one bad quarter that could be 25,000 people's jobs and all these things, you just have to take a bigger step and a bigger perspective of it and just treat it a little less personal. But that's not to say don't try, but I think it's to try and figure out the level of when you can leave it at work.

Chris Do:

Yeah. That's a very tricky line or tightrope to walk to inject yourself where it's necessary to care deeply about the work, but yet not so much so that you lose yourself in the work and when the idea is not approved or the clients want to make changes, you feel mortally wounded because they didn't love that thing that you were so passionate about. It's really tricky because I've seen both ends of that spectrum where people literally show up, it's a job, "This is the time in which I need to leave, and it doesn't matter what you say, I'm out."

So they're never emotionally involved. And then we have also seen people who take the work home, work until two in the morning because their identity is tied to this work and they can't separate themselves. One person will never reach the pinnacle. One person will probably burn out way too quickly. It reminds me of that line from Blade Runner that, "The candle that burns twice as bright, burns twice as fast." And you have to be able to modulate that and to have periods in which you can create passionately, but then detach and not very many people can do that.

Kevin Lau:

No, and it is a tightrope. And I think there's something for the aging creative as well too, where I remember being young in this industry and I look very fondly at it, and I look very fondly to the next generation of people that are coming up because they haven't gone and gone through it, and they are challenging me and pushing me to do things or look at things in a new way. And I think in a lot of ways we've had that discussion about taste. And I think part of my job now is much less about beating the pavement and physically making stuff, but guiding that taste level and being able to not be young and in the club and seeing what's happening at the 22-year-old level. But when they bring that to me, I can go, "Okay. How's that work in a different component?" Or, "This is what's happening in a cultural movement."

Or, "Oh, I didn't realize that this piece of tech plugs into that sort of component of society." And not feeling like you're aging out, but feeling like you're able to use your superpowers of experience and taste to sort of synthesize and process and take some of that stuff that the newer generation is. Because you honestly don't see a lot of people in this industry that are post fifties still batting around because it is a real hard thing to unplug at the end of the day and not take all those things personally. But I think there's a huge talent in getting to that next level, being able to be more objective about the work.

Chris Do:

Motion design industry. If I'm a new graduate, should I get into it?

Kevin Lau:

I think so. I think the motion design industry is super fun and I think there's a lot of opportunities and things move and everything needs motion.

Chris Do:

Okay. Motion design industry, the good old days were better or the new days are going to be better?

Kevin Lau:

That's a hard one. Everyone always says, ever since I've got into this business, "Oh, you should have got in this when I got into it." So I think there's a lot of things that are changing with ad tech and the downward pressure. I look fondly at those old days, but that's when I was young. So maybe it's just that I was young and I look back on when I made all those friendships in early days, putting in the time.

Chris Do:

Do you see yourself doing this until you retire? One because you want to and because the market will support it, or this is a young person's game and I'm an anomaly in this space?

Kevin Lau:

Like I said, I think I've sort of graduated my career. I've started to try and bounce into that level of where like you, you were an educator, you started The Futur, The Futur's awesome. You're spreading your message to more and more people being able to get a broader reach. I think on a smaller level, that's where I position myself within companies where I can come in, I can help put together teams, I can help guide teams. So I think the longevity for me is still being on the box and doing things and making designs, but also wanting that longevity and being able to stay relevant through bigger establishments and a larger force of people working with me and together.

Chris Do:

You can only answer this one if you've seen it. So if you haven't, we'll skip this question. Secret Invasion used AI generated Midjourney looking art. Did you like it? Did you hate it? What are your thoughts?

Kevin Lau:

I don't think I've seen that.

Chris Do:

Okay.

Kevin Lau:

We can skip.

Chris Do:

The artists were very upset at it. I'm like, "Whoa, this is a very interesting aesthetic." You can see the strange brush marks. It's like Midjourney V2, and I think it has own aesthetic, as you say. Sometimes the tools shape the way things look, and there's an aesthetic that I'm going to, this is shocking to say, look back with nostalgic eyes. I'm like, "That was pretty cool." Now they're on V5. It looks very different.

Kevin Lau:

I mean, not to go off on a tangent, but that's an interesting thing because it's like, we look at these things when we're talking about things becoming tools. Early drum kits and samples came out and they were garbage, but now people call out an 808 as a specific period in time. An 808 drum hit is an 808, which is a synthesized version of a drum hit, but it was for the 80s. And now you have all these new things that want to make an 808 sound. So that's going to be AI Midjourney version one. That's going to be version two, and that's going to be version three. It's going to have its own aesthetic and flavor.

Chris Do:

Okay. I saved the hardest rapid fire question for last. I'm a new graduate. What are three things I can do to get my career on track if I want to be in the motion design space, can you rattle them off? What are the three things I need to do to be able to get my career on track in the motion design space?

Kevin Lau:

First, just put in the work. You got to do the work, be easy to work with. I think the people that are the most collaborative are the ones that stick around. You can be a hotshot, but if you don't work well in a team, I think you're not going to get the callbacks. I mean, it's one of those things where I choose the people that work collaboratively. And then I think again, just build your network, meet more people, work with friends. I think this is all stuff that's been said before, but I think rising tides rise all people. You look around and you see, "Oh, Steven Spielberg, Coppola and Lucas." It's like, "Why do those, oh wait, they went to school together? Oh wait, this is a Lucas directed Spielberg production." So just keep good company, and if you're a good person, when somebody gets into a studio, they'll recommend you and you'll get in. And then if you're doing the work, you'll just keep getting called. It's simple as that.

Chris Do:

You make a compelling argument for why schools still matter. Because despite whether or not you can afford it, whether you're getting the value of what you pay, there's something to be said about the network of the people, the friends, your classmates. We shouldn't even call it network, the friends, the relationships that you build, the classmates, because I know for a fact I would not be here today because I can pinpoint key relationships that I built that opened doors for me that I didn't even know. It would be impossible to predict back then, but I'm grateful for it. So as much as we may hem and haw at the rising cost of private art school education and how it's totally out of control, there will be those relationships that you make that will be something that you'll hold on for the rest of your life, I think. Is your experience any different?

Kevin Lau:

I mean, it was interesting. I was a little bit after you and I was in the dot-com bubble, so things were just exploding and work was everywhere. But I do think that schools are good proving ground in the sense that you are surrounded by people that want to be there, and so they're there for the right reasons and those are the people that you want to surround yourself with. Can you find that externally without school? Maybe, but you know that if you are in that school, you're getting the inputs and you're getting the community and you're getting the atmosphere and relationships that will bridge way past when you graduate. There'll be somebody that five years after you graduate, you'll reconnect with, and they're now doing this thing in a different industry, and it's going to be like, "Oh, hey, you were always a great designer. Do you want to do something for me?" And that's how your network just grows.

Chris Do:

So whether in life or in work, if I may sum up one thing that if you get nothing else from our conversation today, be a good person. Don't be a jerk, because as my former business coach would say, "You're not good enough to have an attitude, so let's just put it there." Kevin, it was fun catching up with you. I think the last time we ran into each other was at a bar or something like that. It's been too long. I hope to bump into you again somewhere in the mean streets of Santa Monica on the west side sometime in the near future. Thanks for being our guest today.

Kevin Lau:

Absolutely. Thanks for having me, and it was great catching up and continued success, my friend. My name is Kevin Lau and you are listening to, The Futur.

Stewart S.:

Thanks for joining us. If you haven't already, subscribe to our show on your favorite podcasting app and get a new insightful episode from us every week. The Futur Podcast is hosted by Chris Doe and produced by me, Stewart Schuster. Thank you to Anthony Barrow for editing and mixing this episode. And thank you to Adam Sanborn for our intro music. If you enjoyed this episode, then do us a favor by reviewing and rating our show on Apple Podcasts. It will help us grow the show and make future episodes that much better. Have a question for Chris or me? Head over to thefutur.com/heychris, and ask away. We read every submission and we just might answer yours in a later episode. If you'd like to support the show and invest in yourself while you're at it, visit the Futur.com. You'll find video courses, digital products, and a bunch of helpful resources about design and creative business. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next time.

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