Today’s guest, Chris Oatley, and Marc discuss the many kinds of “click” moments that happen in a creative career. Illustrated through his personal experiences and professional journey, Chris and Marc share frameworks for pivoting and depending careers toward more fulfilling and aligned paths. By addressing common barriers and outlining actionable steps, this discussion aims to empower listeners to make meaningful changes in their professional lives​.

—

Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Click Moments And Transformation Strategies With Chris Oatley

I am very excited to welcome our next guest, Chris Oatley. He has been a friend of mine since before COVID. We got to see each other in person before everything went weird. Chris has been helping artists develop careers in animation games and illustration since 2008. He’s the Founder of the Magic Box Academy. He’s been in-house and out-of-house visual development for Disney, DreamWorks, and Sony. He runs a show called You’re a Better Artist Than You Think. Something I love from one of your websites is that you help artists make a switch from aspiring to experienced. Welcome, Chris.

Thank you. Good to be here.

Did I miss anything about your intro about your accolades?

Fantastic dancer.

I’m not sure I can confirm that.

 

 

Great at dad jokes.

I can confirm that.

Verified and unverified.

I’ve known you for some number of years because you’re an educator among other things, and an intensely creative person. In the conversation that we had before the call, you told me that you’ve wanted to be in visual development since you were  five years old. Tell us a little bit about that.

Also, visual storytelling, for sure. I was inspired by Jim Henson, as many of us were early in life, and I would create these elaborate. Some of them were original scripts, you could call them starring various Jim Henson characters for my kindergarten class when I was very small and everything Muppets. I was a Muppets completionist. I still am. There’s Herman, even hanging right next to Eddie Bitter there.

I feel like there’s a certain kinship that you share with Kermit in a good way.

I can talk about that all day long. The Muppets, and certainly Kermit as a person, were very influential early on. I also drew all the time, and though, certainly, Jim Henson drew as well as a great cartoonist, and there is drawing involved with that world of puppetry and everything on it. Being an actual illustrator and character designer, at least aspiring, I started to feel like animation was a better fit. That was in the early ‘90s when I was a teenager.

That coincided with the Disney Renaissance Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. I had a transformative experience while watching Beauty and the Beast as a thirteen-year-old kid. Pretty much from that point on, I wanted to work in animation. Then, I had my eye on the prize in that regard and started learning everything I possibly could.

That was the ‘90s, right?

I think Beauty and the Beast was ‘90. I want to say ‘92. Maybe a little earlier than that. I was thirteen.

Wasn’t there something about the way that they did the animation that found those different at the time? I’m trying to remember.

It’s hand-drawn, the movie. They didn’t have to use actual multiplane camera by that point, but in the vein of the multiplane camera, there were some beautiful multiplane shots in that movie. There was a little bit of rotoscoped CG, that was a thing that had started to happen. I seem to recall that there’s a cart that Belle is driving with a horse. I haven’t seen it in a long time. That might even be computer generated. There were a few innovations and very subtle use of some pretty significant innovations in that movie. I believe it was the first animated feature to ever be nominated for best picture, if I remember correctly. I think that’s a thing.

I’ll have my fact checking team work on that.

Please do.

It was around the same time, wasn’t it, Aladdin? I remember very distinctly seeing the opening scenes in Aladdin where he falls into the cave. That whole thing. I remember watching that and going, “That’s computer generated. That’s interesting.”

The magic carpet in Aladdin was computer generated. Even the Beast. It’s an infinitely better movie than Aladdin, but Aladdin had more liberal use of the emerging technology.

It’s interesting that you came awake to this career dream of yours during a time when Disney was transforming itself in terms of what it was doing, which is the topic of this.

Bullying And Resilience

I was in the theater throughout most of my young childhood, from about fourth grade until I went to high school. I was severely bullied like bad, traumatic stuff. I was a sensitive kid, so that made me a target, along with what they referred to as Coke bottle glasses. It was a big thing. My lack of fashion sense and all kinds of things. As a very young teenager, I had this shell around my heart. You’d have to ask my parents, but I don’t think I was a particularly defensive person, but it was a defense. If that makes any sense at all. I didn’t show, or I tried not to show, any vulnerability whatsoever. I’m in the theater, and you get to the emotional climax of the movie, which is almost the end of the movie. The beast effectively dies.

Spoiler.

How old is the movie?

It’s forty year old.

Something like that. Spoiler alert from three decades ago, going on four. Belle throws herself over his lifeless body, and she whispers, “I love you,” then his animation starts. I was watching this happening. What was so hard to explain is that I’m sitting there in the theater, as many people were moved profoundly by Glen King’s animation, the score, and the payoff. The emotional payoff that credit goes to the many storytellers who crafted that movie, Howard Eshman.

There were all these things leading up to that, culminating in that moment emotionally, but I’m watching this. I’m just fighting back the tears. It’s almost physical that I can feel that shell I described around my heart cracking. I’m trying to hold back the tears and not cry because I was there with my mom and brother. I didn’t want either of them to see me cry, but I’m super self -aware in this moment.

I’m aware of that feeling, then at the same time, I know how animation works at that age. I’m aware that these are drawings making me feel this way. I’m aware of both things, like the analytical and the emotional, simultaneously. Holding back to tears and going like, “24 frames per second.” I broke, and I’m weeping as the music swellings and everything. I remember thinking, “I want to be able to do that for people. I want to be able to create those kinds of experiences for people.”

I remember we left. This was a frequent thing. We would go see an animated movie or a movie with a lot of cool visual effects or whatever it was. In other words, movies that have associated art books. My mom would always take us across the street to the bookstore, then we would look at and/or procure the art book associated with the movie.

That’s a nice position.

It was amazing. My parents were super supportive of my art in every way. We went and got the Beauty and the Beast book. I remember that movie came out very close to Christmas, and it was going to be a Christmas present, but my mom didn’t want me to have to go without it for that long because you could tell how inspired I was. I took the book with me, and I remember that night and the following week I’d come over to school. I would copy the Glen Keen drawings one to one. I do that. On December 23rd or something, they said, “Bring us your book.” They went and they wrapped it up so I could still unwrap it at Christmas. They wrote this beautiful inscription in it, which I will keep to myself.

Do you still have the book?

Yes.

Was that the first book that you’ve copied in that way?

No, I copied all kinds of things. A lot of Ninja Turtles, GI Joe, and all that ‘80s stuff that a lot of us were into but then you have Don Bluth, Disney.

My first was and to this day, I still recommend this book is How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way.

That’s right there, too.

I copy that thing back to front. It sounds like transformative experience in this movie theater, and you had the support. One of the things I like to talk about on the show is trying to figure out what ingredients were there for you. You had the support, the support of family, this tradition and the interest. Not for nothing, a lot of artists can probably relate. Ninja Turtles were like my first, “I can draw stuff. Let me copy these guys,” and getting into art that way.

Getting into art in part because I wasn’t cool. I wasn’t being invited to all the whatever other kids were doing. I don’t even know, but I’m sure they were doing things. They just weren’t doing it with me. Drawing, in many ways, was a refuge. I don’t want to make it sound like an ‘80s movie plot, but art was a thing that I was interested in. I’ll say this last thing, then I have another question for you.

When I was looking at our therapy program before I got into coaching, I did a bunch of reading and books on that, but art is a form of nonverbal communication. It’s so interesting. Whether you’re creating illustrations, commercial stuff, or abstract, fine art, or higher, whatever you’re doing, you’re creating this visual stuff. It’s a way for a lot of us, whether we realize it or not, to process whatever’s going on around us in a way.

 

Art is a form of nonverbal communication. Whether creating illustrations, commercial art, or fine art, it’s a way to process whatever is going on around us.

 

Something is so amazing about visual art as communication. This would be apart from visual storytelling. You put a narrative in there, then it adds all of these other dimensions. Even just visual art, it takes something like Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko. It’s not even something that’s objective in terms of content. That’s the point, the visual art can communicate the abstract. Not just abstract as an abstract art, but the abstract. Abstract feelings and concepts and moods. That’s amazing.

What baffles me even more is that it can do that successfully and accurately. You think about Mark Rothko, and there are people who write off Mark Rothko, unfortunately, and shut themselves off to that experience. The people who get it, get it in very similar ways. We all have our unique experiences and different experiences, but there’s a very similar experience, a very unified Rothko experience. He managed to pick colors, textures, and edges and scale that communicate consistently. Very much of the cliché around non-representational art like that. It’s totally open to interpretation, and it is. Also, isn’t it interesting that so many people have the same or very similar interpretations.

On the flip side, even just from your story, maybe it’s interesting to think that non-representational art would have a consistent reaction from the viewer and the audience and at the same time here, here you are in a movie theater having an experience that probably not everyone in the theater had, even though it was representational and narrative.

People respond to that moment in the same way, like the people that are feeling empathy for the beast and understanding will end for Belle for that matter. We all are on the same page. That’s one of the reasons that movie is so powerful. Everybody’s on the same page, but certainly, my experience was not unique, but I do think it was profound.

There was a level of intensity there that probably wasn’t the case for a lot of people. Not recently, but in relatively recent history, we had the same thing with Toy Story 3. Everybody was telling the exact same story about that ending of that movie. Newspaper headlines in different cities were all saying the same thing, “My dad cried.” Anyway, it’s more pronounced for certain people.

Career Beginnings

Let me fast forward because one of the reasons that I invited you onto this show is that I know a little bit about that. I didn’t know all this, but I knew that this was a dream of yours that you achieved. You’re working in-house at Disney and working for these other studios. You were there for years and you chose to leave. I’m going to guess a significant moment of transformation in your life when you chose to leave that behind to start your art school.

You’re in hindsight.

I know you mentioned that before the call. Tell us what gave you the confidence to say, “I can leave.”

This is the thing. I’m not that much of an early adopter, as they say. I don’t identify that way. I don’t know, but I’ve always been into music. I got interested in recording music on four-track tape recorders in high school with my high school band. I play guitar, and now I play a little bit of keyboards. That was always a thing that I was into and interested in and paying attention to. When I graduated from art school, my undergrad program.

Where was that?

The Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio. I graduated from there and was trying to make it as a freelance illustrator at first. That’s a whole other story, which I’m happy to tell. It is a long story, but I also tell it on my show, “You’re a Better Artist than You Think.” There’s a lot of these stories that I go into.

We’ll link to that and all the other places to find you as well.

Thank you. Anyway, I graduated from art school. I was trying to make it as a freelance illustrator, and that’s not easy. I was working retail at the Guitar Center, and I got to know Pro Audio Gear. I didn’t know anything about Pro Audio Gear apart from my limited experience recording on four-track tape recorders in high school. Other than that, I didn’t know anything about recording. A friend of a friend was the former manager of the Guitar Center that I worked at.

He thought that I had potential or whatever. He made a call, and the guy that was my manager, a fantastic manager named Jamie, the friend of the friend knew had hired Jamie to become the general manager at the time. Jamie voted my favor. He called in this favor and said, “Hire this kid.” I went in and I said, “I know guitars. I want to work in the guitar department.” They said, “We don’t have any openings in guitars now.” I was like, “What should I do then?” They said, “We have an opening in Pro Audio.” I said, “What’s Pro Audio?”

They said, “You’re hired.”

They said, “You’ll figure it out.” They put me in there, and I’m so fortunate that I had some brilliant co-workers that took good care of me and helped me out. All of them, except for one that I have tried to find. I don’t know where he is, but everybody else from that department, I’m still friends with to this day. Anyway, again, transformative experience. I did not expect that to be so pivotal, but this isn’t even an answer to your question.

To reflect on that, though. No, it’s not quite an answer to my question.

I’ll get to it.

It’s interesting because a lot of people might have taken that experience and said, “I can do guitars,” and they say, “We don’t have guitars,” and they would have said, “I guess I fail.” Coming from my coaching brand, I’m like the way that you chose to look at. The goal wasn’t necessarily to work in guitars. The goal was to have an income to save your art life. The question that I love to always ask when I’m working with people is like, how else might you do that? That’s what you ask. It’s like, “What else is there? There’s this. I don’t know how to do that.” They seem to be pretty game, and suddenly, there’s an opportunity that led you to, I think you’re about to tell us.

 

Achieving your dreams is about more than just reaching the goal; it’s about exploring new paths when things don’t go as planned.

 

The point is, I acquired all of this audio recording knowledge that I wasn’t putting to use. Then, around 2015 or 2016, loss came out. There’s Muppets and Pearl Jam, then there’s loss. Those are like my three favorite things on planet Earth in terms fandom. I’m missing my Brian Froud skeksis down there. It fell off the wall. That’s why there’s a hole there, which is too bad. I’m trying to transform this conversation into a geek out about my favorite things.

Do you want me to get some of my Muppet puppets? I can do that.

That’d be great. You have some up there. I’m going to do the remainder of the interview as a puppet. I’m not going to answer any more questions unless you talk to animals.

You were saying that and I would steer us back, you mentioned 2015. I also know that you were working at Disney, and you left what around 2012?

I’m sorry. It wasn’t 2015. It was 2005. I added a decade.

There we go. In 2005, now you have all this pro audio knowledge.

Loss comes out. The first season, I don’t think they did it, but the second year, the showrunners of the show Loss started a podcast. They would do an episode where they would answer fan questions and play out various what-if scenarios. Sometimes they were read herrings about where the show would go, and other times, they were actual clues.

It was this amazing thing to be able to interact with people who made this TV show, interacting with them in real time. That’s this incredible thing then there were all these other shows that fans started that were people like me that love the show. They essentially recorded their water cooler talk. It was great. There were tons of Loss shows.

There’s a documentary coming out about that phenomenon. It’s being made now. That’s how I learned about podcasting. At the same time, the Mac software bundle that came with the default Mac operating system included GarageBand in both Apple Music, which was called iTunes at the time. GarageBand had a podcasting presence in iTunes. You had to still download them from another website, but then you could put podcasts onto your iPod by loading them into iTunes.

I remember. In fact, I still try to do that and I keep looking for iTunes. They’re like, “No.”

I do it all the time. I was talking to somebody and I said iTunes instead of Apple Music.

I know you started a show and that’s part of the story. When did you start that?

I have all this audio information. I have some audio gear. I learned about this thing called podcasting. GarageBand is telling me, “You can make a podcast here.” I’m going, “What’s a podcast?” I found this podcast that was about how to podcast, and I started listening to it, and going like, “I could do this.” I already had an idea because as I was learning the animation industry through my job at Disney, which started in 2006-2007. I freelanced in 2006, then they hired me in-house in 2007.

I started constantly feeling this frustration of, “Why didn’t anybody tell me this?” There was so much about the industry, and there still is, which is weird, but it’s still the case. There’s so much that students and aspiring professionals need to know, and the information is out there. It’s just hard to find. I want to make the show that I wish I’d had, even though when I was in college.

I remember hearing about your show. I told you before the call. I remember listening to it. My first impression was like, “This guy’s recording in his car. What’s happening?” I remember listening to this one episode where you’re like, “Hold on a second, I got a turn signal.” I’m like, “What’s happening?” At the same time, it hit a nerve. I think you and I are cut from a similar cloth in this regard, but you got into this industry. It was a dream. We’ve covered this. This is an absolute dream for you, and you got there.

Maybe there’s a little bit of the shine that comes off. Instead of grumping around, you turned it into some creative project. There’s something there. We’re trying to come up with a recipe for how to find creative opportunities and turn them into successful projects? Familial support certainly helps.

Also, there’s a way that you’re choosing to look at everywhere that you land as, “What is interesting about this?” It’s just another tool like working in the pro audio section of the store. It wasn’t a setback. It was like, “Here’s another thing. Maybe this is interesting for my life,” and you did. You turned it into this show. Eventually, after having the successful show, you ended up leaving Disney, but it wasn’t overnight.

 

Transform setbacks into stepping stones. It’s all about how you choose to see and utilize every opportunity that comes your way.

 

Yes, it’s 2012 that I left. The show I did for about four years then we were talking earlier about how I did not want to become a teacher. I wanted to teach, but in ways that didn’t involve it being a career, not because I don’t love teaching. I’ve always loved teaching and feel like I’ve always had positive results. Not always. Everybody makes mistakes, but I’ve experienced positive results from my teaching in general from the beginning and gotten positive feedback. I was a TA when I was in graduate school, and I had great reviews from my students.

In a way, the show was a way of you teaching.

I was having this conversation with my mom when I was in graduate school, and I’m talking about my frustrations with some projects. I don’t remember what it was. Maybe it was Maya, like how difficult Maya is as a software program because we have these render issues with our short film. Who knows? I was griping about something to my mom, and my mom said, “Christopher, you’re a good teacher. You can always teach instead of pursuing this animation thing.”

Now is probably as good a time as any to tell. I don’t think you’ve said what your parents do.

They’re both teachers. They’re retired now, but they’re amazing teachers. Public schools and beloved teacher. Something I often say is that on my dad’s birthday every year, we could not leave the house to go celebrate. We had to stay in the house on my dad’s birthday because he had to stay by the phone, which was a tethered phone. There were no cell phones. We had to stay by the phone at the house and the phone would ring off the hook all day long from all of his former students calling him to wish him a happy birthday and talk about how much of a difference he’d made in their lives.

He would catch up with them and be on the phone for literally an hour with each person all day long. Come dinner time or whatever, it would switch into cake and dinner. That just gives you an idea. People love my mom, too. They’re both great teachers. It’s weird because I take my parents’ advice. I listened to my parents. To this day, I want their opinions on things and I want their advice on things. I talk to them about my lessons. I run outlines by them all the time. For some reason at that moment, it felt like, “No, Mom, I’m not going to do this.”

Part of it was because I was so emotionally invested. I had this sunk cost thing going on with the narrative of working in animation, but then also in my professional experiences teaching, I had often been frustrated with how frequently I encountered teachers that seemed to be invested in things other than the well-being of their students.

You said something earlier, and I won’t out you on where that was, but something that struck me that you said and tell me if this is correct. You said, “When it came to teaching, you believe that if you treat people like artists, they will act like artists.” I know there’s a lot of blowback especially in the art industry, about people treating the art student as a consumer.

Don’t even get me started

We don’t have the time to get you started, but next episode on that one.

It’s terrible. In regard to the situation where I was talking to my mom, I had been in an environment where there were a couple of other teachers when we had similar students. I had some of the students that they had. I was working on a lesson. I was preparing for class and I overheard them talking. They were complaining about their students and they mentioned a couple of names. I heard my students’ names then my ears perked up. I was like, “Mmm,” and I got all mama bear.

Inside, I kept it cool, but I listened to them complaining. They’re using this mocking tone. “They’re so helpless and you won’t believe what this one said.” I remember I’m seething with rage inside and yet trying to stay calm. I got up and I walked over. I said, “If you treat them like artists, they will act like artists,” and I walked out. That was what was on my mind when my mom was saying, “You can always teach.” I was like, “I cannot deal with that 40-50 hours a week. I cannot work with people like that.” Little did I know, because there was no such thing as online courses yet. I didn’t know that I would be able to create my own school and establish my own culture where that never happens. I could never imagine that.

You did that. Especially in a time where that didn’t exist. Your parents sound like they were wonderful. They sound like they are wonderful people and were great teachers. You also had these examples of  when you were in the trenches in this world like it’s not a world. A bit of a leading question, but at the end of your time at Disney, what got you to say, “I’m going to lean into this?” If you’re working as a visual development artist, it’s a bit unusual to walk away from something like that.

For most people, that’s the beginning of the story. It’s not that you walked away. I know you continue to work in the field, but to step away from an in-house job like that to start your own thing. We think about online courses. At a time, it doesn’t sometimes. It’s thousands of dollars a dozen, but still, they’re everywhere but they weren’t in 2012.

Disenchantment With Corporate Life

Leaving Disney, there were several things. I had become disenchanted with the corporate that was depressing and overwhelming. I heard promises from the very highest of high authorities. Maybe I’ll say that. That 2D animation, for example, was here to stay and all these 2D animation people. Even though there weren’t projects happening or it wasn’t looking good for 2D animation. They were like, “They’re saying it’s here to stay.” They don’t take precautions. They don’t start pivoting because they’re like, “They’re saying it’s here to stay,” but then it wasn’t here to stay.

All of a sudden, the majority of the 2D animation division gets laid off. I was not affected but worked in CG. I did visual development in CG, so I wasn’t in on a 2D feature, but it still hurts by proxy. I was on their behalf hurt and offended by that. To make matters worse, I can’t remember what the figure was, but it was I think the following March, Bob Iger announced or they announced what his bonus was, his CEO bonus. It was a bajillion dollars. I was like, “How many of those 2D artists that got laid off last fall could have remained employed and for how long?” All of them could have been employees.

Something you’re pointing to, we talked about this again before the call. I work with people on transforming their lives. I work with a lot of creatives. Whether it’s their career. Oftentimes, the career in personal life, it’s all in a mix. It’s the whole life balance. There’s something called the formula for change that was invented in the ‘60s then refined in the ‘80s and ‘90s for business but it applies. That is, if you’re in a situation like that and what I’ve been hinting at is that there’s a lot of resistance.

There’s comfort, paycheck, and health insurance. There’s all these things that keep us in situations that we’re frustrated, uncomfortable, and we don’t like. It could be a personal situation or a work situation, but that’s this idea of that’s the resistance to change to moving your life in a direction that’s better for you or more aligned with what you want to be doing, or who you want to be. The formula for change and the thing that you’re talking about is discomfort. That’s an ingredient and there’s three ingredients.

The first ingredient is discomfort. The second ingredient is vision. It sounds like there’s a bit of a vision coalescing around teaching. The podcasting that you’re doing is giving you a taste of that. You have a background and your parents are teaching. You know what it’s like to do this. You’ve been teaching. The third ingredient is a list of or a sense of some first steps. Not all the steps. We don’t always start projects knowing how they’re going to go. That’s not that interesting in my opinion, but that’s a whole other episode. If we know what the first steps are and we know where we want it to go, that’s the vision and we’re not happy where we are. That is a formula for change. As long as we have that formula for change, it can be greater than the resistance, which is things like comfort and paychecks.

 

 

The discomfort. There was that. I remember a friend of mine that I worked with at Disney, also named Chris. We were wandering around one day and they had left one of the story rooms open. One of the rooms where they had been laying out future plans. There was nobody explicitly said that we weren’t allowed to go in there, but it was this vibe. You felt like, “We’re not allowed to go in there,” but somebody had just left the door standing wide open and nobody was in there.

We were wandering around like, “Let’s mosey on over to that room and see what’s going on.” We start looking in and we see all this concept art for upcoming projects. There was this timeline on the wall. I remember I saw my name on the timeline. If I remember correctly, it was the next ten years of the schedule for the studio and every project that I was going to be working on for the next ten years. The irony is that I’m also frustrated with the suddenness of how your career can get cut short suddenly via layoffs. Simultaneous with that, I’m also going, “Here’s what ten years looks like,” and that felt scary. It was both of those things showing me that, “Neither multiversal reality is what I want.”

I don’t want to be laid off and I don’t want to stay.

I don’t want to be here in ten years. I don’t want to be working on that project that’s ten years from now. I don’t want to be working on that movie.

That’s a transformative thought, and I keep bringing it back to this idea. I’ve heard that. I have somebody that I met with who runs a creative shop, I’ll say that. It’s a physical store. I remember talking to her in our session. Something she said is almost like exactly what you’re saying. It’s like, “I have everything that I thought I always needed. Everything’s good. My life is good, and I eat food. We have a house, and everything’s fine.” I don’t think I want to wake up in 30 years saying, “This is what I did for the last 30 years.” I’m wondering, was there a sense for you that there was more, not to make it too woo-woo but a deeper purpose that you wanted to go after other than being in this frustrating job?

There was one major thing that relates to that, and it has to do with the Wizard of Oz. When I told a friend of mine, my friend Adam. I told him over the phone. He was back in Ohio, and I was talking to him about how I was going to quit. He was shocked by that. He was like, “There’s all these people that are out here at my alma mater trying to get where you are, and here you are talking about quitting.”

I was like, “Here’s the thing about animation that I’ve learned.” This is true for about anything. That’s why the Wizard of Oz is so resonant as a story. It’s a very universal thing. I said, “You try so hard to get out here. You take this path, the Yellow Brick Road.” It has all this twist and turns, obstacles, and scary moments. You meet all these interesting characters along the way that you team up with. Sometimes for a long time and other times, it’s a temporary thing. You develop these relationships and you get your people. Your group of people that you unify with and you arrive.

You go and you finally have your chance to meet the Wizard. You go inside the Emerald City, then you’re inside. It’s like, “It’s so beautiful in here. It’s so amazing. Look at all the art deco complexity. That Emerald Green is so beautiful.” Even though it’s just a lens over my eyes. You go up to the wizard, “He’s so powerful. Look at all the magic smoke and all these things happening.” You realize, “It’s a man behind a curtain pulling levers.” It’s just an old man and he’s a nice old man. He’s good at creating the illusion, but it is just an illusion. The magic, the Disney magic is in the theater.

The Disney magic is for the audience. It is safe to say that you do experience that tingle behind the scenes. I do think there are magical moments that you can feel and experience. Certainly, the people you get to work with are awesome. It’s nice to be making $2,000 a week and have a 401(k) and all that. That’s also nice, but it’s still a job. It’s a good job, generally speaking. It’s far more preferable than running your own business for a lot of folks, but it is still a job. That was the thing that I realized the Wizard of Oz dynamic.

I’ll spoil a little bit of this, but you told me that in 2011, you were at the CTNX Conference. You had this experience where you had people coming up and asking you questions. When are you going to do something. It got you to take a first step, which was doing something on the side.

What’s the formula again? The first one.

Discomfort, vision, then steps.

Starting Online Courses

We did discomfort. We’ve done vision. Also, in the vision, there was that idea of, “I want to create the thing that I wish I’d had when I was in art school.” Steps was one I had to realize. I had to learn about the technology. The technology emerged right around that same time, 2011 and 2012, where you could take online courses.

That’s when Rebecca started smart school about 2011.

That was all very aligned, but then you and I didn’t meet until several years later.

It was years later.

Through the site formerly known as Twitter. We don’t even need to go there.

Not all transformations are good. We can say that.

That was nice.

I like to bring it back.

Online courses became a thing. I think I was aware of that through podcasting. I had heard just the beginnings of this idea of online courses. At the time, there was a lot of the expensive eBook. That was a big thing. You essentially download a PDF, but it’s expensive.

I don’t remember if Zoom probably was around. We were using GoTo Meeting. What I find so interesting about talking with people about this moment. It’s not a moment. It’s a culmination of all of these things. Your experience in the theater when you were a kid. Your experience being the child of your parents and who they were, and understanding that teaching is not a thing that you do as a fallback. It’s an honorable and a skillful profession.

There’s an art to it as much as anything. Going through that, getting the pro audio experience, and the visual development experience. Now you have all of these tools and suddenly, there’s an opportunity. There weren’t a lot of people doing it at the time. Now courses, you throw a rock and there’s ten online courses who want you to sign up. At the time, that wasn’t super a thing, but you’d also been running this show. You knew what it was to build an audience.

I was doing the show, and I got a booth at CTNX in 2011. I believe it was 2011 that this happened. I shared a booth with my friend, another artist named Jason Pruitt. It was just a half booth, and I got there a little late on Friday because I had to work, then I ended up leaving work early at Disney. I came over to the convention and I went over to my booth.

I wasn’t selling anything. I was just there to meet people. I didn’t have anything to set up. I had like a banner for a webcomic that I made twelve pages of. I was there at the convention, and from the moment I arrived through the closing down on Sunday night, there was only one hour that entire time where there was a lull at my booth. It was on Sunday afternoon, early in the day.

Other than that, it was nonstop. There was a line of people at my booth the entire weekend without any break. People were coming up, asking for portfolio reviews and thanking me for the show. Sharing inside jokey kinds of things from the show or sharing their lives, and we would talk and connect. There was this refrain over and over again that people were saying. This is the archetype of it or the template, but it was basically, “I always struggled with blank concept until I heard you explain it.” That wasn’t verbatim what people were saying, but that was the template.

I think back to some of the best teachers I’ve had, and sometimes, it’s a matter of you being old enough or mature enough to finally hear something that people have been telling you. It’s frustrating, as a parent, I can tell you that when my kids are like, “Oh, I just learned this cool thing.” I’m like, “I’ve been telling you that.”

As I said, that’s part of the skill of teaching, being able to take a concept or an idea or even a vocational skill and communicate that in such a way that it makes sense to somebody. You’re getting incredible feedback at this conference, it sounds like. A line of people saying, “Who is this from the show?” I’m guessing the way that you’re explaining this stuff is landing with me. I’m curious, was that the first time that you’d interacted in person with the show audience?

Yes.

That’s the transformative moment right there.

I had done some school visits. I love doing school visits. If you are at a brick-and-mortar school and you would like me to come to your school, I would love to come to your school. I love doing that. I might have met a couple of people here or there, and people would email me. I was active with my email at that time. I would email with people a lot. I had some interaction, but there was something about how highly concentrated it was at CTNX that weekend.

I remember walking my dog after the convention. It was maybe the day after or a couple days after. It was a bright sunny day in Burbank, and I remember walking and feeling like this decision has been made for me. Not like I didn’t have agency. I felt like I had agency in the decision. I’m thinking about it now. I don’t think there’s ever been a time before when I’ve made decisions before about my career where I felt confident. I usually feel confident when I make a decision. If I don’t feel confident, I don’t go there usually but it’s the only time at least that I can think of where it ever felt like, “This is the thing to do.”

This was the only time that you felt that.

I’ve been driven. I’m a pretty determined person. I had to be driven and determined to get to Disney, and I’ve had my eye on the prize about things all throughout my entire career, but this was a different feeling, like something had come to me. I wasn’t pursuing it. It was like the path was revealed in a way.

We can get as woo-woo as you want on here.

I’m not a very woo-woo person. In spite of myself, that’s still how it is.

We can talk about that. I questioned that assertion. This path, this magical yellow brick road was revealed to you. Still, again, talking about the ingredients, it wasn’t like, “Quit now and go figure it out.” You spent the next year, and you told me before, but tell the folks reading. What was your first step?

I had been listening to a show by my business mentor, Jason Van Orden. He had an online course at the time. Now, he does coaching like you do, but he had a course of a big whatever subscribe. It’s a fairly reasonable fee. You do the coaching calls or whatever on Saturdays. That situation. The lessons are pre-recorded. He had a program that I went through. I would listen to those lessons and take notes.

I remember, at Disney, I had my reference for whatever it was I was working on then, underneath my reference was my notebook. I didn’t have to be surreptitious about it. People knew I was taking business courses. I needed to be able to see all my stuff. I would lift up my reference, take notes, and sit my reference back down so I could see it. I did that for a year in the fall of 2012. That was August of 2012.

It was not quite a year, but almost a year later, I launched my first course, Painting Drama. That would literally be me sending an email with an attachment to download and an audio, like a voice message that I recorded and told people about the course, what we were going to do, and what we’re going to learn. That course, Painting Drama, which we’re going to teach again this fall. We’re going to be offering that so you can sign up for my email list at HowToBecomeAProfessionalArtist.com if you’re interested in that.

That was the first time we did Painting Drama. I needed, I don’t remember the number that I needed to feel like, “I can justify doing this course.” I even said that in the message. I was like, “I’m trying this thing. I’ll do the course if I can get a blank number of people to enroll 25.” Somewhere around there. I got double the number of applications that I needed. More than double the number of applications. I got so many applications that I was able to do two offerings of course, two sessions.

That bought me two and a half months of survival. At the time, that seemed like enough and it ended up being. Now, I would not do that. I do not advise my students to take a leap when you only have two and a half months of runway, but that’s what I did then I launched my next course. I offered Painting Drama again at the beginning of the following year, and then I launched a self-guided course. We’re still doing guided mentorships now through the Magic Box. The rest is history there.

I’ll say again, we’ll link to all of these things so people can find you and subscribe to your mailing list and everything. We’re probably closing in on the end here, but one of the things that I appreciate about who you are and the way you show up in the world is that with all of these things that you’re doing. I get the sense that they’re coming just as you did. Back to even like pro audio and doing your show. It feels like it’s coming from a place of service, which again, getting back to the teaching. It’s one of the things that makes a great teacher. It’s that desire, that calling, and the willingness to spend the time to build the skill to serve. It’s coming from that place of service.

Teaching Philosophy

My mom says, “A good teacher is not the sage on the stage, but the guide on the side.” You mentioned how there’s so many courses out there, and I’m like, “A lot of them are this sage on the stage thing.” It’s not going to be a transformative experience. What it’s going to be is a buzz from going and watching famous artists be awesome. That was something from the very beginning.

We would say we saw that happening quickly when I was starting the school. At the time, it was called the Oatley Academy. We’re pivoting to the Magic Box Academy because I do want to retire someday. Hopefully, not for another three decades or so. There is a time down the road where I don’t want to continue to be called the Oatley Academy if Oatley is not there. It needs to be more democratized than that. We’re pivoting to Magic Box Academy.

That said, when we were starting out, that started almost immediately. There were these rock star things where it’s like you’re paying all this money to go watch somebody be amazing and give vague advice. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that movie, Mystery Men. The character, the Sphinx. It’s like that’s the way so many of these stages on the stage. That was Wes Studi. He’s amazing. He’s great. He’s in heat.

I’ll look up at his face and I’ll know exactly what it is.

Not to interrupt you, but to complete that thought there. There was a lot of this like sphinx-y stuff. He was saying these vague things because everyone else agrees that that person’s amazing, we go, “Oh, yes.” We blame ourselves. We go, “I don’t understand what they’re saying. I must be the one that’s wrong. I must be the one that’s broken because they’re so amazing and I’m not.” I think that’s not good. It’s not healthy. It’s unhealthy.

One can have an experience where they feel, and I mean this in a good way. Sometimes, we can feel alone and that’s not a good feeling. Other times, we can feel alone, and it’s good that we feel alone. We like that feeling in a way that it’s intimate and it’s personal, like the experience I had in Beauty and the Beast. Certainly, that transformative experience is not collaborative between me and Glenn Keen directly or me and Howard Ashman directly or all the other brilliant artists that worked on them.

It is collaborative. The experience was created collaboratively because they had to make an effort and I had to show up and be willing. At least somewhat willing. There was some small part of me that was willing to go their rights and just to underscore what you were saying there earlier. That’s why we do mentorships at our school because it’s not sage on the stage. It’s guide on the side.

I’m putting that on my social media when this episode comes out. I’m thinking through every transformative moment and I’ve been through plenty. I graduated in computer science. I left to go to art school. I went to tech, video games, illustration, fine art, then creative coaching. There’s not a single one of those, even the transition from illustration to fine art, where I was sitting nerding out over resin.

I can name a few people who were supportive and who I could talk to and say, “Is this crazy?” Get their support. That’s brilliant. I’m going to edit this whole thing. It’s going to be a two-minute episode. I’m just going to do this last three minutes. You’re going to read it and you’re like, “I thought we talked for an hour.” It was this great thing.

You said five words.

Chris, I want to thank you so much for spending the time with us. What I’ll probably do is put out a highlights reel first, then the whole thing because there’s a lot here. I appreciate you sharing so much about so many of the moments in your life that were transformative to keep using that word, but changes and places where you took risks and places where you found support.

It’s important for people to hear these stories. I would love it if people hear these stories and start to notice in their own lives where maybe these things exist for themselves and how they might lean on those supports and use those supports in those collaborations to discover an ever deeper and truer path for their lives. Thank you so much.

Thank you. You’re one of my favorite people to talk to.

 

Important Links

• Magic Box Academy
• Disney
• DreamWorks
• Sony
• You’re a Better Artist Than You Think
• How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way
• Guitar Center
• Maya
• Bob Iger – Twitter
• GoTo Meeting
• Jason Van Orden
• How To Become A Professional Artist

 

About Chris Oatley

Helping Artists develop careers in animation, games & illustration since 2008 :: Founder of The Magic Box Academy :: VisDev for Disney/ DreamWorks/ Sony