On Saturday, April 30th, The Interactive & Immersive HQ hosted its first in-person community meetup in Los Angeles, California. It was a public and free event where people in the interactive and immersive field could come hang out with other like-minded folks. Over 60 people RSVPed for the event, including some TouchDesigner patrons: Jarrett Smith…
Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned interactive developer, festivals that focus around new media, art and technology can be a great place to catch up on the latest technology, learn cool new skills and techniques, and most importantly, network with people in the industry! In this post, we’ll take a look at some of…
We had a great conversation in The HQ PRO today about the top skills you can put in your toolkit to help you get work and to jumpstart your career. While I had many practical ideas and suggestions, one of the skills I actually thought was most important was the skill of “finishing.” In this…
If you’ve decided to be a freelance artist or developer, you might be wondering to yourself if it’s worth setting up an LLC or corporation. What are the pros? What are the cons? You’ve probably heard lots of people talking about but maybe it seems like a lot of work? In this post, I’ll describe…
We have two live group sessions in The HQ PRO every month which are a lot of fun. In our last group session, we had some great business topics we discussed all around managing clients, dealing with projects that could change scope, billing cycles, and more. I thought our discussions were so fruitful that I’ve…
A big choice that artists and developers have to make at some point in your life is whether you should get a job at an existing company or if you should be a freelancer/studio owner. This can be a challenging question and I’ve given lots of our HQ PRO members the following breakdowns to help…
A tricky topic that most people don’t want to talk about: rates. It can be a personal and touchy topic for even high-end and veteran developers, as if they were going to be judged based on it. The byproduct of this is that rates often go undiscussed by pros in public, leading to newer folks…
Here’s the harsh truth about reality: If you don’t take care of yourself, no one else will. That’s just how it is at the end of the day. Everyone is busy and everyone has their own set of things to deal with. In the grand scheme of our careers, we may never think about taking…
This probably sounds obvious to many people, “Of course you should have a video reel!” But the reality is the video reels I’ve seen in my time suffer from a mixed bag of problems such as: And that’s just the stuff I thought of off the top of my head. So in this post I’m…
Hot topics on hot topics! Discipline. One of the most important attributes to being successful in competitive industries yet I never hear anyone come up to me and tell me it’s one of their best skills. Nobody ever talks about boring old discipline. It’s arguably one of my top skills next to being patient. And…