When you mentioned comic books, are there any particular comic books that inspired you in terms of how you do your work?

I think back to that now and it's a weird thing because when I was growing up, it was a huge inspiration. My parents divorced when I was young, and I would stay with my dad on the weekends and he would take me to the comic book store almost every Saturday. That was my thing when I was a kid, and consciously I know that had a huge impact on me ultimately becoming an artist. But at the same time, I don't follow that stuff anymore and tend not to think I'm inspired by it in my own work. I think it was just something that was a formative experience, like with most kids you like superheroes and such. You're just drawn to that sort of stuff. And I definitely was a kid who likes to think I was like Batman for Halloween, like seven years straight or something. I really have a deep respect for that field and the artists who make that stuff. I think just as I got a little older and developed my visual art and artistic tastes, I moved in other directions. But you know, I think without that, who knows if I would be where I am now.

Do you remember what the process was like doing your very first music video?

 It was very challenging. This was for a band called Psychic Temple. The song was called “Lightning” and it was a really great song. It was a great first music video to make, but when you make a music video, you kind of have to learn how to work backward. It’s because rather than just animating something like a short film and then finding music for it, you're taking the music first, letting that form the idea, then working from the song, and when you've never done that before, there's a lot of learning curves. How to animate is such a tedious, laborious process that it's really hard to get the hang of something and then get it to sync. We have a song that can be three, four or five minutes long. So there were a lot of struggles with that one. Yeah, a lot of trial and error. You really have to learn how to break it down, in my experience, like, “Okay, this is going to be the first 30 seconds,” and then you jot different lyrics down if you have ideas for those parts, so it’s super challenging which is how I would describe it. It was hard and it was a big learning curve, but I've gotten better at it after doing so many.