Today we’d like to introduce you to Akshay Tiwari.
Hi Akshay, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Art found me at a young age, and I have been drawing ever since I can remember. But through early school, I also developed a healthy aptitude for math and became the kid in the first row sketching on every book’s last page. From graphite on paper as a child to data-bending with pixels now, my journey through art and design has been through a lot of phases. Back in India, as I was gradually exposed to the application of art in design, I found myself pursuing ‘Experimental Media Arts’ as a major. It was a playground of opportunities to combine art and math in unconventional ways. But as all experiments go, it led to the question of ‘how do I apply this?’- which is where Savannah became my next home in the form of SCAD’s Motion Media program. I met a lot of amazing professors fellow designers and found all the right ingredients to contextualize my skills into the world of motion design. Crafting a few good projects that were showcased across events brought me the opportunity to become a full-time designer at The Mill. I work on various commercial projects for film, TV, and advertising to deliver work mostly spanning across the different aspects of 3D design. It feels rewarding and extremely fortunate to say that art has still been the constant. It has always been a vessel to explore my curiosities and a means to present questions to the world around me. The technical aspects are just lenses into the near future of art and its relevance.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Interesting obstacles make for interesting journeys. Coming from India and being serious about design there are a lot of external forces already at play against you compounded with a lack of exposure. So, it definitely takes a lot of trust to care and nurture an artistic mind. My parents were extremely supportive throughout this journey. Also, I don’t think any young artist had a smooth few years through this pandemic. It is the stage where all of us seek an over-the-shoulder mentoring to further our craft. As the pandemic robbed me of this opportunity, I had to make adjustments to take more ownership of my learning and capitalize on the quiet to focus on my inner dialog. It might sound extremely spiritual but being a designer is part sport part profession, which makes focusing on your mindset extremely important to develop great taste that guides your skills in a more authentic way. The pandemic was followed by quite a few unfortunate economic and technological incidents, making the industry a bit more of a pressure cooker. Things are looking up slowly now, and we still strive to craft the best pixels out there, so I’m still hopeful for a beautiful tomorrow!
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I enjoy design in all shapes and forms, but designing in 3D is where I am in my element. I specialize in procedural design as an approach, which means instead of designing a single object by moving polygons, I design recipes that design objects. This is done through code, visual scripting, and just figuring out every element within a moving image as a puzzle that can be built piece by piece. Commercially, I apply this approach by being extremely conceptual in the beginning stages of a project that opens up a lot of doorways to abstraction through design. I try to figure out the heart of the client’s creative brief and showcase it in the best light possible through experimental design delivered through careful art direction. This way, my feet are firmly planted in the narrative and technical aspects of every project. These projects range from being advertising campaigns for Google Pixel to title sequences for Netflix series. In my personal projects, the approach is similar, but the client is me, and I’m answering my own curiosities. Some of these projects like titles for NODE festival and a Moon Knight fan film I directed, have won awards in festivals like Promax North America, Applied Arts, Motion Awards, and many more. During my first year at the Mill, I had the chance to pitch, design, and animate the titles for the Netflix horror anthology – Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. It was an incredible ride that made opportunity meet preparation to eventually get nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award this year in the ‘Main Title Design’ category! It has already won a gold at the Australian Effects & Animation Fest and AICP award, which I’m extremely proud of.
But the moments I’m most proud of have to be the smaller moments in the process where you exactly get what you envision in your mind’s eye. When the craft justifies the vision, that moment is special to me as a digital artist and brings me the most pride when I can experience those or manifest them. Digital has always had the impression of having infinite options and one magic button, but there isn’t any – so it makes the design decisions just that much more special. There’s a universe hiding between those cold ones and zeros, and behind every great piece of work are a thousand pieces of play!
Are there any books, apps, podcasts, or blogs that help you do your best?
If you are an artist, creative momentum is everything, so a few tools that can help you ricochet between ideas and also deep dive when needed are useful. One app that is a good second brain is ‘Notion’ where I organize a lot of project ideas, quick notes, and such. Deep dives or dissecting ideas are best done through mind maps for me- so XMind is something I usually go with. If you like curating your visual libraries, a good AI-assisted tool I have been using is MyMind that lets you organize images with smart tagging. One book that I always recommend is ‘Understanding Comics’ by Scott McCloud. It functions for more than comics and can be applied broadly to understanding design.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://akshaytiwari.design/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/9_to_phi/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshaytiwaridesign/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/9toPhi
