2018
PROMISEDLAND FESTIVAL
Read Time: 20 Minutes
About This Talk:
I first gave this talk at Promised Land Art Festival in Poland in 2018, as I was celebrating ten years of working as an artist in the entertainment industry.
To mark that milestone, I wanted to look back across the full decade: the early portfolio pieces, the first studio jobs, the freelance years, the failures, the breakthroughs, the mentors, the dry spells, the big projects, and the moments where I had to let go of one chapter before I knew what the next one would become.
This talk is a story about the leaps of faith that shaped my career, from choosing art over a traditional path, to leaving stable jobs, starting a studio, walking away from the industry, building KitBash3D, and learning to get comfortable with the fear that comes with growth.
I’ve made it available here in written form for anyone who wants to experience it. I hope it encourages you to trust your own path, embrace the unknown, and take the leap when you feel called toward something more.
Hey guys! I’m Maxx Burman. That’s a little taste of the newer work I’ve done. Throughout this talk, I’m gonna take a little trip down memory lane, and show a lot of old crappy work. This year is the 10th year since I started working in entertainment, and as I hit this milestone, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on my career thus far, looking at how much has changed since I was a bright eyed junior artists, excited to show up at a studio, and yet how much has stayed exactly the same.
10 years is a big monument for me. Growing up, my parents ran a makeup effects studio, and as artists would come in and out, my dad would always tell me: “you don’t really know what you’re doing until you’ve been doing it for 10 years”. Those words have been with me my entire life, and when I started matte painting, I was racing to hit this milestone, to finally go back to him and say “now… now I know what I’m doing”. It’s pretty ironic that at the 10 year mark of my career, I’m starting over… we’ll get to that though.
Leaps of Faith. That’s what this talk is all about. The pit in your stomach when you need to reach for something more, when you let go of the foundation you stand on, unknowing if you’ll land in a greater place or fall to your doom. Seems dramatic, but this is how it always feels for me. And 10 years of doing this, I still get that same feeling in my gut, that cocktail of hope and fear, mixed up with a dash of excitement. Now though, I have learned to love that feeling.
The first leap of faith I ever took was in 2008, when all of my friends were headed off to college and I chose to do art every day. I wanted to be working in visual effects. Up on the screen is my portfolio back then. Looking at the portfolios of students now, there’s no way a studio would have hired me today. It makes me laugh pretty hard looking back these pieces of shit.
6 months in to my pursuit of being a professional artist, I was taking night classes at Gnomon trying to learn 3d, and spending my days designing websites and logos for anyone who would pay for it. I was living at home, not yet able to support myself with rent, and trying to figure out how the hell to get a job at a studio. This is before communities like this existed, there were no guides, no youtube videos, no Instagram, nothing to help point the way, and no one to ask these questions to.
I happen to be reading an amazing book at the time, Rebel without a Crew, by Robert Rodriguez. The book ends with a message to all aspiring filmmakers saying “Don’t be an aspiring filmmaker, just be a filmmaker and go make films”. Such a simple idea, but it hit me at the perfect moment, and a light bulb went on. “I’m not an aspiring matte painter, I’m a matte painter”. I was already doing matte paintings weekly, and I started to tell people, I’m a matte painter. This is what I do.
Though I didn’t have the credits to back that up, I had a portfolio that confirmed it and the next week, I sat down at the computer, went to the phone book (yes, there was a website for the phone book back then) and dialed every visual effects company in Los Angeles. I told each one “I’m a matte painter, I’m looking to join a studio, I’ll work for free”. What do you think they said?
They said no. They said no a lot. Almost 200 times. I literally got through the entire phone book before a studio let me apply an internship. Zoic. With a Z. They were the only ones who even mentioned an internship. But I only needed 1 yes, and a couple weeks later, I started my first day as at the studio.
The lesson I took away from this whole chapter of my life, was to be brave, and be willing to create my own path, to always move forward towards the direction that I feel is right, regardless if no one else is headed that way. It hard to not follow the flock, it’s deceiving, and seems like that the best way forward. But I learned back then, how to take a leap of faith, and I would continue to do that over and over again.
Here’s some of the work I did at Zoic when I first started there. Shortly after I joined, Syd Dutton, a legendary oil and glass matte painter, joined the studio and took me under his wing. He spent a lot of time training me. He would give me art history lessons, foundation lessons, and most of all, he’d let me fail.
My favorite story with him, I was working on a painting for a show called Fringe. It was a really tough perspective painting, and I didn’t know anything about perspective. The camera was looking down at a 5 way intersection, and we had to replace all the storefronts, and destroy a building. The painting looked like shit. The night before it was due, I was freaking out, nothing was working. I went to Syd and told him “I don’t know what to do here, the more I work on it, the worse it looks, its due tomorrow, we’re screwed, what do I do?!?!?”
Syd looked at me, and said very calmly “when you get to this point, just start drinking”, he pulled out a bottle of vodka from his desk, and 2 glasses. We took a shot, he asked “feel better?”. “No! The painting is still fucked!”, so he poured another shot.
His point, in retrospect, was that sometimes things are gonna be bad, and you just gotta get through it. It’s not life and death, you do the best you can. The painting went out the next day, looking horrible, and no one spoke or thought of it again. Sometimes you’ll fail, then you’ll get over it and keep moving. This was a particularly important lesson that I didn’t really learn that night, but it was a good precursor to what happened next.
I had been at Zoic for a year and a half, and at that point I had really found a groove with them. Syd was doing most of the film work, I was handling most of the television work. I had done 30 shows with them, and it was time to ask for a raise. I sat down with the EP of the studio, and pleaded my case, and they said no.
I thought about it for a while, and decided it was time to take another Leap of Faith, and go freelance. I had a new portfolio that I felt really good about, and a bunch of credits under my belt, I was ready to do this. That said, when I put in my 2 weeks notice, I felt almost immediate regret. I was terrified. I remember so vividly, walking out of the studio on my last day, wishing someone would stop me. I drove off with no clue what I was going to do next. (not the last time I would have that feeling)
The next week I started sending emails to studios with my new website, and polished demo reel. I was feeling really good about the paintings I had done. I thought I’d have a job lined up immediately, but I didn’t know the freelance landscape. I didn’t know that the end of spring is when pilot season ends, and tv is done until the fall. I didn’t have connection in commercial studios. This was the first time I learned what a dry spell was and I went 4 months without work. I was begging for jobs.
I spent every day of those 4 months training. Teaching myself Zbrush, 3d, new painting techniques, anything that would get my work noticed by a studio. At the end of the summer, I couldn’t pay rent for the month, and my roommates brother put a call in to a studio, and got me a 1 week job as a 3d generalist doing a chile’s commercial. It paid just enough to cover the rent.
That small job was the lifesaver I needed, it bought me just a little more time, and at the end of the month I got 2 job offers. Some remote freelance work for Playstation, and a Staff Matte Painter job from Stargate. I said yes to both, all I wanted was work. I would spend the next year working 10 hours a day at Stargate, and coming home for another 6 hours for Playstation. The hourly rate was $25 / hour.
This was a really hard leap of faith. I always tell people getting the first job is hard, but getting the second job is harder. The first job, you’re going in as a blank canvas, for a studio to underpay, and train. The second job, you’ve already been molded a bit, and you’re more expensive.
This leap of faith humbled me. It made me appreciate every job that comes my way, and never take it for granted. I feel blessed that I learned this so early on. I know a lot of artists who don’t experience this until much later in their career, and can’t live in a crappy korea town apartment, living off of mystery meat, with no other responsibilities.
Here’s some of the work I did with Stargate.
They were great with me. I found a second mentor, Cedric Tomacruz. He trained me in a very different way than Syd, he was very technically proficient, and he would work through me. Standing behind me as I did a painting, saying “warm up the shadows, too much green in the highlights”. He did this for a year, and by the end of that year, he had trained my eye, and given me the techniques to do perfect perspective, and color match effortlessly.
I got to work on some fun shows there. Walking Dead was a big highlight, Curb your enthusiasm, Parks and Recreation. But after a year, my eyes were really set on working in film. I was training for it, trying to get good enough to work for a company like Digital Domain or Sony.
After a year of working 2 jobs non stop, I had saved up some money, and was trying to figure out how to get to film. Stargate was great, they provided stability for me, but everyone there was staff. I wasn’t meeting new artists, and I wasn’t getting any closer to the studios I wanted to work at. I realized that the longer I stayed there, the harder it would be to make the jump to film. I hadn’t forgotten the pain of my dry spell the year earlier, but I needed to go freelance. And I had only had a relationship with one other studio.
The next leap was a leap backwards. I needed to be at a studio with a rotating door of artists that were jumping around to different studios.
I needed to go back to Zoic.
I had learned a lot from my last failure to go freelance. I had savings, I waited until end of summer. I saw a window of opportunity that I had to take. I had been the matte painting lead for a show called PanAm, we had done the pilot at Stargate, but they were taking the show to Zoic. I called up the producer who was handling it, and let them know I had been working on the show for the last couple months, and wanted to continue with it. They brought me on as a freelance matte painting lead, and I got to hire another matte painter to work with me, so I brought Cedric with me.
At the beginning of 2012, 10 artists from Zoic left to go work at Sony Imageworks. They put in the word, and I got a call to join them. It was my first animated film, Hotel Transylvania. I worked with a bunch of friends from Zoic, and we started bouncing around to studios together, helping each other get jobs as we made our way through the industry.
Coming from Sony Imageworks, I had the credibility to jump to bigger studios. After I left sony, I was getting job offers every other week, and I was jumping around from MPC, to the Mill, to Mirada, to Look Effects (now Psyop), and Blur. I was working a lot, and doing really fun projects.
I wasn’t just working for the studios I always admired, I felt like I was pushing my work each time, and getting really good. The ultimate confirmation came the day I got a call from Digital Domain. Digital Domain was the most fun I’ve ever had. I was there with all of my close friends, we had all hit this milestone together. I was on Iron Man 3 with a lot of them, others were working on Oblivion and Enders Game, and we all felt like rockstars.
The takeaway here is that sometimes you need to take a step back to move forward. Had I not gone back to Zoic, reconnected with a group of peers with the same ambitions as me, I would have never been propelled to the level of studios I wanted to work with.
Halfway through Iron Man 3, digital domain went bankrupt. So did every other major vfx studio in LA. It was a brutal year, and a lot of us knew this might be our last time ever in this amazing studio. As films wrapped, people started wrapping for the last time at DD venice.
I held on to every moment there, it was a very special place. As a beautiful end to my run there, I was asked to be a part of a small team, on a tiny indie movie, that would be the last project under that roof. It was a film called HER, directed by Spike Jonze. I was asked to create an optimistic future Los Angeles, those paintings were my love letter to LA before I headed up to Vancouver.
I was forced to be in Vancouver, this wasn’t by choice. All the major film studios in LA closed, and I had to say goodbye to most of my friends and family. Most of my friends never came back to LA. I tried to make the best of the situation and work on a film that would be fun. I spent 6 months in the arctic north doing Godzilla. When the film wrapped, they offered me a 3 film deal, I would get to work on Guardians of the Galaxy, but I’d have to do 50 shades of grey and Night at the Museum 2 first.
And this is where the next leap of faith started. When I finally said “fuck film”. I had accomplished what I set out to accomplish in film. I had gotten my name in the list of the thousands artists, and I had traded 6 months of being with friends and family for it. It was a sacrifice I wasn’t willing to make anymore.
I moved back to LA, knowing there weren’t a lot of studios to work for. I wanted to control my own destiny, to work with the people I wanted to work with, and not run the risk of having to chase projects around the globe. I wanted freedom more than anything, and I thought the answer to this was to start my own studio. So I did. Leading up to launch, I took a lot of freelance in order to build the space, and fill it with desks and computers. Here’s some of the work I did at that time.
For the first 6 months of Skyward, I just picked up matte painting outsource work, before finally bringing on an EP as a partner, and a compositing supervisor as our first hire. There is nothing quite like the fear of overhead. We needed to make a certain amount of money each month to pay artists, cover rent, pay software licenses. It was the hardest 2 years of my life and is still one of the scariest things I’ve ever done. At no point in the 2 years of running Skyward did I ever feel comfortable, but I also learned more in that time than all the years before it combined. Here’s some of the work from Skyward.
At no point in the 2 years of running Skyward did I ever feel comfortable, but I also learned more in that time than all the years before it combined. Here’s some of the work from Skyward.
I was able to see the industry from many different perspective, get experience running teams in a way I hadn’t before, and deal with clients, good and bad, so much closer than I did while working at studios. We had some great projects come through, Game of Thrones, League of Legends, Nike, TMobile, and a lot of work that we just needed to do to cover overhead.
We did 30 projects, and were halfway through building a new office when my business partner decided he didn’t want to run a studio anymore. We closed the studio in 2016 and I joined Elastic as an Art Director, with the promise of infinite creativity, and they would handle the business. This leap of faith could be considered a failure if I hadn’t learned so much, and saw how much I had left to learn.
Here’s some of the work I did with Elastic while I was there.
With the promise of creativity, I started to let loose with design, pushing myself into new areas and styles. And I did work there that I’m very proud of, but I knew after the first couple months there, this wasn’t where I was going to stay. I couldn’t go back to being an employee, I had tasted freedom.
After working 100 hour weeks for the last 2 years, a 40 hour/week staff job felt like retirement. I used that time to do a couple things. I started making a video game, and that was my escape from the work I was doing every day. And I started reading every book and taking every online class I could on Business, then eventually branding, and marketing. I had seen that Visual Effects was a broken business model, and I was trying to figure out a better way to do it.
It all culminated in a leap of faith I was forced to take, when the EP of the studio called me into her office to let me know that my job was not to be creative. If you’ve heard my last talk, it was all about this, so I won’t go too far into it, but this sealed the deal for me, and I left that day. Not just this studio, but mentally and emotionally, I left the industry.
I had moved around so many different studios and areas, and job titles, and projects, and never found what I was looking for. I had accomplished everything I had set out to do, and had never found appreciation or creative fulfillment. Behind me is some of the work I did after that. I just needed to do some paintings for myself, to create the work that I knew I could do, but no one had let me. This series is called Disconnect, and it really is how I felt about going into that studio every day.
Besides Disconnect, I kept working on my game, and teaching classes. I started taking on freelance work from home to fund my own projects, committed to this idea of creating without permission. Here’s some of the work I did between 2016 and 2017.
In the Spring of 2017, I reconnected with an old friend who happened to be at a crossroads as well. We were both approaching 10 years in the film industry, both of us dissatisfied by what we had experienced, looking for something more. If any of you guys are fans of Kitbash3d, Im talking about Banks Boutte.
At the time, I was talking to a couple publishers about releasing Sleep Tight, the game I had been working on. I showed banks and we both decided we could publish it ourselves. We Are Fuzzy was born. I continued to paint, he continued to act, and we started putting more and more time into building Fuzzy, the publishing company.
We walked into E3 that year, with our game in hand, ready to release it in september, and we made it 5 steps before we both got notifications on our phone that a mario game and a pokemon game were coming out the week before and after we planned on releasing sleep tight. We turned around and walked straight out.
Sitting in a cafe across the street, I explained to him another idea I had, for a website called Kitbash3d. Hopefully you guys all know kitbash3d. If you don’t, you should! Here’s some of the kits we’ve created in the last year.
10 years after my first matte painting job, I accepted my last freelance matte painting job in January. It’s June now, and I haven’t done a painting in 5 months. Just saying this terrifies me, thinking “what if this all fails, what if i need to go back to matte painting because everything falls apart”. But now I recognize that as a feeling I’ve had many times in the past, and a feeling that will never go away. This is something that is not to be removed, but something to get comfortable with if you’re the person who’s going to continue to grow, and transition, looking for the new challenge, and making your own path.
The ego in me wants to create some awesome work, put my name on it, and say “look at what I can do”, but that suppressed by the feeling I get of contribution. As creative director of KitBash3d, I’m committed to enabling and inspiring other artists, to create their worlds. I get to watch all of this beautiful work behind me, get created by artists all over the world, every day, using the assets we’re building for them.
And as creative director of Sleep Tight, I’m fulfilling a childhood dream. I’m releasing a game with Nintendo, and creating it with one of my oldest childhood dreams. Creating something that makes people laugh and have fun, and feel like a kid again. And as creative director of Fuzzy, I get to look at what we’re doing, and where we’re going, and know that we’re building a company that appreciates what people do, that provides creative fulfillment for our team, and that creates without permission.
I don’t know where this leap of faith is going, or how its going to unfold, but I know that I need to take it, and that fear has been with me for 10 years, and now I embrace it.
You’ve let me indulge for a long time, and I hope you’ve gotten a couple lessons here, but the main thing I went to get across to you, is every time you’re presented with the opportunity to jump into the unknown, to forge your own path, and to push yourself to that next level, take it. You need to take it. Even if you fail, you will come out the other side with knowledge and experience that will propel you to the next opportunity. Get comfortable with the pit in your stomach, be true to yourself and know that your path is unique and wholly your own. And go for it.
Thank you.