FSD: I run across a lot of creative people who haven’t had any actual formal training in their field. Do you think your time at Northeastern Illinois University kind of set you apart from your peers?
Nem: (Laughs) Well, its funny you mention that. To tell you the truth, I went to Northeastern for like a week. I only put that on my resume for it to look good basically. I’m starting to get more comfortable with telling people that I didn’t graduate from college. I used to work at a few advertising agencies like Leo Burnett, Tribal DDB, and Critical Mass. It was just like, these places are professional ad agencies and all these people have master degrees in all these different areas, so I would kind of lie about my education. I mean, I guess it’s not really lying because I did go to school for this but not for long. I just think I’m a bit more comfortable now with telling people that I just didn’t go to college.
FSD: Wow. So you literally just jumped fresh out of high school and started doing work in the field?
Nem: Exactly. Literally right out of high school my first job was working at Leo Burnett. Well, I had job at Menard’s for a little while but ended up quitting that and started just doing my own thing. My old website that I created had ended up getting a bunch of awards and that ended up landing me a job in advertising for like eight months.
FSD: You think you’ve learned more from experience as opposed to a formal education?
Nem: That’s tough to say. I’ve worked at a bunch of companies doing all sorts of stuff from flash animation to web development and everything in between. Experience taught me a lot about how to work in the business and stuff like that.
FSD: Out of the different areas you’ve worked in including animation, web development, pre and post production, and design what’s your favorite aspect?
Nem: Out of everything I’d say animation is my favorite. I don’t like being restricted so I try to learn as much as I can. Take the Nobody video for instance. We shot it three months ago and I had this really ambitious idea of doing this 3-D world concept like Tron and having the car (DeLoreon) be in this space world. So me and my DP (Director of Photography) Nick Castle shot the video on a Red Epic camera, but after we shot the video I was stuck for a little bit. I had no idea how I was going to do this video basically. So for like the last three months I’ve basically just been learning from the ground up on how to make this video happen. I learned how to do some 3-D and partial effects and these sorts of things all in After Effects. So in the last three months just because of this video I now know how to do this stuff.
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This was dope man! And Nem, it was Borders on State Street not Starbucks.
Also Thank you for that shout out homie we will get to do some more very amazing projects shortly!!