About this episode…

mOTION DESIGNER & CREATIVE DIRECTOR AT SCHOOL OF MOTION KYLE HAMRICK

Kyle left agency life and started his self-employed journey working with friends as a collective. 8 years on though, he’d built his own name through hosting meet-ups and speaking at events to the point where it made sense to go solo.

From small meet-ups he ended up speaking on some of the biggest stages with the likes of Adobe as clients. Yet in 2020 decided to switch from being a freelancer to becoming a Creative Director in-house.

Now, full-time at School Of Motion, a fully remote company, he still has flexibility in his life. Kyle believes his years of working independently, general skill-set, and ability to get things done that comes from being freelance is actually making him a better employee.

Read the highlights in the next tab.

DON’T SHUT IDEAS DOWN

Kyle helped build his reputation speaking at events. When more experienced speakers at conferences suggested Kyle should be on bigger stages too, at first he wasn’t sure, but then he eventually emailed and made it happen…

“That's a good lesson. Like, be more confident in yourself and if someone says that you should be doing something, actually think about it and don't shut it down.”

Other FREELANCERS CAN BRING YOU WORK

From running his own meetup, to being part of other communities, Kyle found some work could come his way by knowing other freelancers…

“A lot of it was even semi-private Slack groups that I'm on and stuff where several of those folks are also freelancers and they would say, Hey, I have a project that I can't take, who else wants it? Or, Hey, I have a project that I need extra hands on. And so there were a lot of relationships just formed through that kind of organically -helping each other out and hiring each other on things.”

PAID SPEAKING IS NOT JUST ABOUT THE PAY CHEQUE

Speaking at conferences has made a big difference to Kyle, but each talk or workshop takes a lot of work to prepare and then attend. The value however isn’t just in being paid…

“If you're looking at it in terms of, you know, well I'm making X hundred dollars to speak at this thing, that amount of time is not gonna balance out. But if you think of it more long term or like, well I'm also going to this conference for free and I'm one of the speakers, so a lot of people are gonna come up and want to talk to you and sort of look up to you and it helps raise your profile - and then you might get invited to speak at other conferences that are bigger and pay more, which has happened and maybe ends up leading to things like what I'm doing now…”

YOU’RE WORKING TO LIVE

Kyle admits he has workaholic tendencies, so enjoys taking stuff on but he’s keen to remind himself…

“Don't overwork yourself. Remember that ultimately, all of this work you're doing is really just so that you can be happy and take vacations or enjoy time with your friends or whatever it is that you feel like you're living life to do, right? So remember to not overwork yourself to the point where you're not doing those things.”

FREELANCE SKILLS CAN BE VERY USEFUL AS AN EMPLOYEE

Kyle joined School of Motion full time in 2020. It wasn’t an easy decision to leave freelance life behind but he’s enjoying being an employee this time around and actually finding his generalist skill-set built up as a freelancer has been very helpful…

“Being able to just kind of handle a lot of different aspects of different things and be very independent. I think it's been a good fit for kind of what my all over the place skill set apparently is. All of that independence and just knowing how to see a thing that needs to happen and just make it happen.” 

More from KYLE HAMRICK

Kyle Hamrick’s site
Kyle on Twitter

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Kyle Webster on Being Freelance Podcast (2016)
Hayley Akins of Motion Hatch on Being Freelance Podcast (2019)

More from Steve Folland

Steve on Twitter

Steve on Instagram

Steve’s freelance site

Steve’s Being Freelance vlog

The Doing It For The Kids podcast

Transcript of the Being Freelance podcast with Steve Folland and Motion Designer & Creative Director at School Of Motion Kyle Hamrick:

Steve Folland:

How about we get started hearing how you got started being freelance?

Kyle Hamrick:

So I've been doing motion design and making videos for something like 16 or 17 years now. I started out working at a few different places here around Kansas City. There's a lot of ad agencies and production companies. I worked for a couple in a row that were not particularly well managed. And so the day came when I parted ways with one of them pretty abruptly, but I was feeling pretty confident that I'd be able to just kind of figure things out. And a couple of my colleagues there at the place were basically sort of on the same track and they all followed me within I think like a month or two. We'd kind of been planning to create sort of a little collective. And we ended up doing that.

And a couple of the clients followed us too, which pretty helpful. And so the four of us, and soon, three of us, just cuz one of them got a another job - ended up creating this little collective. And we did that for eight years. Although, like we never quite gelled. Like we worked on projects together, but it really mostly was functioning more as sort of an umbrella for us to all be freelancing and sometimes work on a thing together. So after, you know, some years of that, I eventually realised I probably just needed to be solo. I was kind of looking at the money that I was getting as Kyle versus sort of like what was coming into someone who was just coming to the company and not looking for me specifically, and realised that just being myself was probably the better play.

So I just sort of transitioned in the sense that I just started doing business under a different business name. Did that for a couple years officially solo. Made quite a bit more than I had been which was nice. And then June 2020, I ended up joining up with School of Motion who I'd kind of been working with previously just in a more sort of contractor capacity. And then I've been doing that for about two and a half years now. Still do some side work as well - I don't think the hustle mindset ever totally goes away.

Steve Folland:

This idea of working in a collective - if people's ears picked up and thought, how would that work?..

Kyle Hamrick:

So honestly, I think it did work well for a while. So I was primarily handling post production stuff. Mostly graphics because I was the only one who could do that. Graphics, motion design, whatever you wanna call it. And then my partners did more of the shooting and editing and producing. So there were quite a few times where we worked on projects together because it needed all those skills. But then there were times where we didn't, and personally I was finding there was a lot of times when I kind of became the bottleneck because every project needed some of what I could do and I could only do so many of them.

And if I was getting specialised projects that only needed what I could do and didn't require any of my partners skills, as it was kind of becoming more and more of those types of projects, I didn't really have time and it wasn't really worth my attention to be doing like just a title card or something for a video that they shot. And so we were having to hire someone else to create these little things that would've been easy for me to do if I had the time, yada yada yada. But I will say it was really beneficial to be able to share, you know, insurance and we bought some gear together that we all were able to kind of share and have access to. So it had a lot of benefits as well. Just I think when it got to the point that it didn't make sense anymore, I think we had all kind of arrived at similar conclusions there.

Steve Folland:

Did you all work together in the same place?

Kyle Hamrick:

No, we all just worked out of our houses. And I still do. I've had a home office that I've been using full time since 2010. I was pretty prepared when the pandemic came.

Steve Folland:

So how did it work when clients would approach you - dividing up the work? Or how the pay would work?

Kyle Hamrick:

Yeah, that's a great question. And a thing that we always kind of worked to figure out too, to a degree. I think it kind of depended on what the project was as to who was the appropriate one to kind of run with it. If someone came to me and was asking about a video shoot for example, I'd typically just hand that off because it's not a thing I was really dealing with. And in terms of paying ourselves, we basically just kept track of our hours and when a project got paid, we would pay ourselves out like that. So we were very much freelancers, you know, just with sort of a company as a face.

Steve Folland:

Looking back on it, what did you learn from that experience?

Kyle Hamrick:

I mean I definitely enjoyed it... we were just a couple of friends working together. I definitely enjoyed a lot of that experience. I do kind of wish that we had been able to have a space together. I think that would've helped with the cohesion, although that would've been an extra expense that never seemed necessary. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, to a certain extent I don't think there's anything that anyone did super wrong and we kicked them out or it wasn't anything like that. It just, you know, after a certain amount of time, I feel like our careers were going in just slightly different enough forks. The benefits of sharing insurance and stuff, were not ending up being equal to the trouble of trying to do accounting for three different people's projects when you didn't even know what the project was and it tjust kind of became a little bit more administrative stuff that was a little more of a pain in the butt than it needed to be.

Steve Folland:

Did you have a company name?

Kyle Hamrick:

Yes, absolutely. So we were The Feral Few, which was a super cool name, right? We had a cool logo and stuff...

Steve Folland:

How did people know you as 'Kyle' to hire you?

Kyle Hamrick:

Yeah, that's a very fair question, which kind of leads into how I was getting work, honestly, like mostly just through referrals and repeat business. But also I'd been doing presentations at conferences for several years. I forget when I started, I'm gonna say, let's say eight years now. So I've been presenting at conferences about After Effects, which is the motion graphics software that I specialise in, for quite a few years now. So I have some notoriety from that. I have a few popular YouTube tutorials and things like that, so there's a little bit of traction on my name just from that kind of stuff.

Steve Folland:

So you'd started creating your own content on YouTube?

Kyle Hamrick:

Not my own so much as I actually was doing a few things for School of Motion before I was ever on staff.

Steve Folland:

And how did that come about?

Kyle Hamrick:

So what School of Motion offers are like intense courses on motion design in different specialties and a lot of those courses have teaching assistants that will critique the work - you turn in assignments and then someone critiques them so that you can get better. And for three or four years prior to coming on staff, I was one of those teaching assistants as well. So I was handling critiquing assignments for a lot of these different courses that School Motion offered and just kind of knew a few of the people that were on staff at the time and I think, you know, through some of my conference presentations and stuff, they were like, you should probably make some content for us. And so I did.

Steve Folland:

Ah, cool. In that case, how did you go about getting on that conference stage? <laugh>

Kyle Hamrick:

Well, that was a complete accident too. So... the end lesson that people will take away from this is that I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing and never have, right? So I'd been running an Adobe user group, an in-person meetup for probably 11 years at this point about all things video. So I had kind of cut my teeth on presenting as part of running those. And so I attended a couple of these conferences and I don't know how necessarily, but I kind of ended up hanging out with a lot of the other presenters and people that were kind of names in my industry and a few of them were like, you should probably be presenting at these too. And I was like, nah. And then I thought about it a little while, I was like, okay, well I'll send an email and see what happens. And then I started doing them a lot. So that's a good lesson. Like, be more confident in yourself and if someone says that you should be doing something, actually think about it and don't shut it down.

Steve Folland:

So those Adobe meetups you mentioned, were those like local in person events?

Kyle Hamrick:

Yep. And we're still doing them.

Steve Folland:

Are they affiliated to Adobe or was it just what you came up with?

Kyle Hamrick:

Yeah, they are - Adobe actually sponsors these... I don't know how many of these groups there still are around the country, especially after the last couple of years (of pandemic). But we are an officially recognised Adobe group. So we mostly talk about Adobe related stuff, but you know, often how you can be, be better in your video business or be more creative or whatever with the tools that they provide.

Steve Folland:

So it sounds like you started doing that while you were still in the collective?

Kyle Hamrick:

Absolutely.

Steve Folland:

It goes to show that whole building your reputation I guess, and that then explains the word of mouth and all the bits start to piece together, don't they?

Kyle Hamrick:

Yeah. And I mean none of it was intentional at the time, but definitely, you know, in retrospect you can see all of these things as building blocks to getting to where, where I am now.

Steve Folland:

So your solo clients, were a lot of them local or could they be from anywhere?

Kyle Hamrick:

Some of both. Around the time that I was doing mostly solo stuff, I was kind of finding that I had kind of priced myself out of a lot of local work, which I was okay with cuz I had more national clients that were, you know, coming in just fine or like I said, some of those communities that I had access to. A lot of it was even semi-private Slack groups that I'm on and stuff where several of those folks are also freelancers and they would say, Hey, I have a project that I can't take, who else wants it? Or, Hey, I have a project that I need extra hands on. And so there were a lot of relationships just formed through that kind of organically -helping each other out and hiring each other on things.

Steve Folland:

So you felt okay being able to turn projects down eventually?

Kyle Hamrick:

I was never as good at turning things down as I would recommend people. should be <laugh>. It's easier said than done for sure, but particularly in retrospect, that's the thing I would probably try to do more - say no more often though I got better at it <laugh>, never probably quite as good as I should.

Steve Folland:

How were you with the business side?

Kyle Hamrick:

Again, like in retrospect, good and bad. I was doing fine in terms of the income I was making. There are probably things that I should have turned down and been more intentional about spending that time on my portfolio or being more intentional about my client outreach or things like that because honestly I was quite passive in most of my work, which, you know... on the one hand, it's nice you could be kind of loosey goosey and take things when you wanna take things and not when you don't, but it also means that when opportunities do come up you are more inclined to just jump on them because you feel like you have to and you have that kind of hunger. So again, it's something that I got better at definitely as I went along. But being able to be a little more intentional about things and like reach out to clients that you want to be working with specifically instead of just kind of taking whatever happens to fall in your lap is definitely a thing that if I were to go back into it, I would try to be a lot more intentional about now.

Steve Folland:

And did you have a style you were known for or a niche that you worked in? Like what was Kyle known for?

Kyle Hamrick:

I think what I'm known for is getting stuff done

Steve Folland:

<laugh>.

Kyle Hamrick:

I tend to be a generalist. I do specialise in more technical aspects of the motion design stuff that I do, which is a little harder to explain sometimes - there's some coding aspects and some sort of nerdy technical structural stuff that you can do and that might be like building templates for other people to use or it might be building a rig that you could then give to another animator so that they could do their project more easily. Still actively today, I build templatey type projects for clients specifically so that they can do things quickly and at scale. That's a fairly specialised skill that not a lot of people have. So it's a good thing to kind of capitalise on and it's kind of like a creative puzzle troubleshooting sort of thing, which I enjoy.

Steve Folland:

So, creating templates and things, did that also mean perhaps you were tempted to create your own products?

Kyle Hamrick:

Uh, yes. Tempted. And my desk was and is full of all these little post-it notes of things that I think would make good products if I ever spend the time to actually get them ready. I have a handful of things that are for sale and an ever growing list of things that I should probably make sellable.

Steve Folland:

What was your experience of creating the things which you did put for sale?

Kyle Hamrick:

So it's interesting, I have directly for sale, a couple of things that are a few little sort of presets for After Effects and I have one of them on sale for I think $2 and one for free. And it's been an interesting experiment, cuz I think I've made more on the free one <laugh> from people who choose to donate.

Steve Folland:

Oh, I see...

Kyle Hamrick:

Yeah, <laugh>. And I have a handful of other things that are available and I have some silly t-shirts and stuff like that, but none of those are really intended to be money making ventures so much as like, you know, a thing that I wanted to be able to provide to the community or a thing that I just thought was fun to have exist or whatever. But I do have a very long list of sellable templates and stuff and actually over the holiday break, I may finally be buckling down and getting those ready cuz I don't know, it's silly that I haven't.

Steve Folland:

So you've sat there and thought about it - what might hold you back? Is it just simply the fact that working on a project is more interesting or going to the beach is more interesting or...?

Kyle Hamrick:

I mean more going to the beach. Yeah. Or it's just a matter of time and choosing to focus on doing those. And you know, when I was freelancing it was honestly a matter of, well someone's, you know, dropping several thousand dollars in my lap to do something now or I could spend the time on this thing that might make money like slowly and long term. Which, you know, you could debate about which one of those is the wiser choice, but in the moment it's usually easier to choose the more immediate money.

Steve Folland:

Was School of Motion your first sort of teaching thing?

Kyle Hamrick:

Well, uh, no. So around the time that I started doing the meetup group, I also absolutely fell into teaching locally. I was sort of doing like two day boot camps on a couple different pieces of Adobe software and I did do a little bit of teaching at a college here. You know, all of this obviously again, another sort of brick in that foundation of leading to the conference presentations and stuff, which has led to a lot of what I'm doing now in tutorials and live streaming for School Of Motion and teaching courses or helping someone else teaching courses. I don't have any formal education training, but apparently I'm okay at talking, telling people how to do stuff.

Steve Folland:

So you've got your client work, your products, you are teaching, you are speaking. Is that all of them?

Kyle Hamrick:

Well, I've also been creating some projects for Adobe directly <laugh>, like some of the new features that they launched this year at one of their big conferences, I created all of the demo projects that they used to demo those features. So I mean, a lot of this is relationships that have been formed through some of these conferences and through other things like that and through my presentations and stuff I guess.

Steve Folland:

So I introduced you as well as a one of the creative directors of School of Motion. How did you end up like working there full time?

Kyle Hamrick:

You know, I had always kind of enjoyed working with them. I had learned a lot from doing the teaching assistant work on these courses on critiquing other people's work and I saw that they were looking for, uh, it was a different role, but I was sort of like, huh, I don't know, I was just sort of curious. I mean this was June 2020, so things were just still kind of weird <laugh>. Right. And honestly in retrospect, freelance motion design absolutely blew up right then. And I probably could have made significantly more money by staying freelance because no one could shoot video for quite a while. And so anything animated was doing well, but they had some other position open and it didn't feel like it was quite right for me. But I was still actively working with them on some of these other things, so we talked and, and it was like, well, that that probably isn't right for you. And I was like, yeah, I didn't think so either, but you know, now we're having a conversation and we'll kind of see what makes sense here and, and something made sense.

Steve Folland:

So how did it feel? Instead of saying no to a few projects, I'm gonna start saying no to basically pretty much everything cuz I'm gonna go and work somewhere. Like all this stuff that you've built up... it must be a hard decision.

Kyle Hamrick:

It was. It was a very hard decision except I think there were a couple of crucial things about this exact specific scenario that made it work. School of Motion's a fully remote company. So nothing about my day to day really needed to change in that aspect. And really what they were basically hiring me to do was all the stuff that I was currently doing around the client work. I had already been doing live streams with other people and kind of making tutorial content and building motion design communities or however you wanna try to describe it. Like, a lot of these things I'd already kind of been doing, so I just wouldn't need to hustle for client work anymore. But I would also still be getting my face out there a lot and having a much bigger audience and platform to do it with. So it seemed like a pretty mutually beneficial arrangement there. And I feel like it has been.

Steve Folland:

How are you finding the experience?

Kyle Hamrick:

It's good. I have definitely worked on a lot of different things here at School of Motion, which I like. And I think that's the thing that I excel at. I said earlier I was a generalist and I think I tend to just get stuff done and that's a thing that was kind of needed. It's still a relatively small company and kind of scrappy. So being able to just kind of handle a lot of different aspects of different things and be very independent and, you know, largely handle creating my own tutorials and then just kind of hand it off at the end for someone else to do a little bit of polish for example, or just kind of jump in on a variety of different things. I think it's been a good fit for kind of what my all over the place skill set apparently is. <laugh>.

Steve Folland:

Do you feel like your experience of freelancing then...

Kyle Hamrick:

Was a huge part of being successful here in my role? Yeah.

Steve Folland:

Interesting.

Kyle Hamrick:

All of that independence and like, just knowing how to see a thing that needs to happen and just make it happen and like figure out, okay, well there's a significant amount of logistics involved in actually getting that thing done, so let's stop for a second, figure out what those are. Okay. We got 'em. So I have sort of a producer brain too because I was functioning as my own producer for like, you know, 12 years or 10 years or something. Mm-hmm.

Steve Folland:

But you do still do freelance projects on the side sometimes, right?

Kyle Hamrick:

A bit, yeah. It's mostly been things like conference presentations and doing some of this work for Adobe. But I take a handful of other projects as well when the stars align properly. I will say that having a full-time salary makes it real easy to turn down something that you're like, yeah, that doesn't sound very exciting. <laugh> where, you know, in the old days, that may be something where you're like, yeah, it's not exciting, but it'd be easy and a nice paycheck, so why not? But it's real easy to just be like, yeah, that's not really for me or I'm booked. Sorry.

Steve Folland:

Yeah, because do you still get like a lot of people coming to you with work?

Kyle Hamrick:

It's less now than it was, you know, a year or two ago, but it's still enough. I will often refer those to my friends, or post them on some of those groups that I'm part of. Cuz you know, I'm friends with a lot of folks that are freelancers and many of them would be well-suited to these particular projects. I will say one thing that I always struggle with a little bit is when some random client sends me an email asking for a thing that they need, it's hard for me to not feel like I still need to solve their problem to at least some degree <laugh>, by say connecting them or something. But I've definitely learned to pull back on that at least a little bit and the amount of effort that I can put into answering that, you know, I'll do a little bit, but that's probably what's appropriate most of the time.

Steve Folland:

Just to rewind a bit into the time when you were freelance - how did you find coping like with work life balance then?

Kyle Hamrick:

Yeah, again, that was one of those things that I think I very much learned as I went. So at the beginning, probably not great, but it was very nice being able to be flexible about things because we had our first child during that time and we were lucky enough to have one of our parents that could come over quite often and be with him, but I was also able to take random days and be a dad when this came up. But, you know, it was tricky sometimes too cuz you don't always have as much flexibility as you might like. And I probably overworked myself more than I should have cuz I probably wasn't charging as much as I should have been and you know, yada yada yada. It's all interconnected, right? So I think that's something that I got much better at. And again, if I were to ever go back out into the freelance world, I feel like both the lessons I had learned from that and the lessons that I've learned by being full-time again and the ease of saying no right now, <laugh>, you know, I think I would do better at at keeping things balanced.

Steve Folland:

What did it end up looking like for you? A work day, a work week?

Kyle Hamrick:

I mean, I will say that most of the time I was able to keep things pretty much within what I would consider normal business hours. And if I wasn't doing that it was by choice. You know, there were plenty of times where I might spend a couple hours in an evening or over the weekend or something to kind of crunch on something if it was needed. But most of the time that also meant that I might, you know, take half of the next week and not be working. So I don't know, I suspect I probably have some workaholic tendencies as well, so I didn't necessarily mind some of those. But I also, you know, especially now that I have a little more structured schedule, it's, it's still pretty flexible, but I do like that predictability and I would probably be firmer about things with clients. But again, you know, sort of the nature of being freelance is that you can take two projects at once if that's what happens to fall into your lap and bust your butt for a couple weeks and then ideally take it easy for a little bit.

Steve Folland:

Yeah. If I can just ask you a little bit more about the whole conference thing or the speaking thing. Because it sounds like it was important in your reputation into where you are today. You start speaking at small meetups and then there's this point where maybe you're gonna start to get onto bigger stages. How did you cope with, I guess knowing what to charge if it got to the point when you were gonna charge for a talk or planning your time, like how long it takes to do a talk - all the prep that goes before it or after it, how that might disrupt your work because it's not as simple as just standing on a stage for 20 minutes or however long.

Kyle Hamrick:

Yeah, it's a tremendous amount of work to prepare for those. And in terms of pricing it myself, that's not something that I had to do. For better or for worse, I sort of got offered some positions and they had a set amount of money and I thought that was fine. I will say in a lot of those cases, it's probably something where if you're, if you're looking at it in terms of, you know, well I'm making x hundred dollars to speak at this thing, that amount of time is not gonna balance out. But if you think of it more long term or like, well I'm also going to this conference for free and I'm one of the speakers, so a lot of people are gonna come up and, you know, want to talk to you and sort of look up to you and it helps raise your profile and then you might get invited to speak at other conferences that are bigger and pay more, which has happened and, you know, maybe ends up leading to things like what I'm doing now.

So I'm very glad that I did that part of it, but you're right that it is an absolutely tremendous amount of work to prepare for those kinds of things. And some of them, you know, you might be doing three or four different presentations over the course of a couple days and that's a lot to prepare for. It's just a thing that you kind of build and then you talk through it. I guess the best way to say what I end up doing is I use After Effects, my motion graphic software and I almost make what I would consider like interactive PowerPoints, where I can sort of make a point about something and then do it in the software and then sort of move on to the next thing so it helps keep me on track. So building all of that takes quite a while, but yeah, I don't know...

You practise it and you also kind of get a knack, you know, when you've done it a couple times, you have an idea of how much time you can fill. You learn to be flexible and sort of know which things you can cut, you know, in the heat of the moment if you are going along or things you can add a little bit if you are running up a little bit short cuz you were super anxious and you talked too fast, which definitely never happens <laugh>. It's absolutely terrifying doing that stuff by the way. It never stops being scary. You just sort of learn how to deal with that.

Steve Folland:

If you could tell your younger self one thing about being freelance, what would that be?

Kyle Hamrick:

Hmm. So this is advice for me and of course for anyone who's listening: be more confident in your work and what it's worth and make time for yourself. And obviously the first one helps enable the second.

Steve Folland:

In what way do you mean make time for yourself?

Kyle Hamrick:

Don't overwork yourself. Remember that ultimately, all of this work you're doing is really just so that you can be happy and, I don't know, take vacations or enjoy time with your friends or whatever it is that you feel like you're living life to do, right? So remember to not overwork yourself to the point where you're not doing those things. Don't take a project right before you go on vacation or allow a project to spill over to when you're on vacation. You know, I had one time where I had offloaded a thing, but we were on a road trip and I was literally typing emails on my laptop from the passenger seat because it's just kind of how it worked out, right? Like... don't do that <laugh>.