Before Your Interview

Portfolio + Characters

1. Before we talk about your portfolio, take us inside your world. You have a collection of characters that feel like they each have their own personality and history. If you had to introduce one set of characters to someone who has never seen your work before, how would you describe who they are and what makes them interesting?

2. Pick five of your favorite characters from your portfolio. For each one, tell us the story behind them—where did the idea come from, what were you trying to capture, and what makes that character special to you?

3. Do your characters usually begin with a visual idea—a face, a shape, a gesture—or do they begin with a personality or story that you then have to figure out how to draw?

4. Have you ever created a character that surprised you? Maybe it started as one idea, but as you drew it, the character developed a completely different personality or story.

5. If one of your characters could walk off the page and sit next to you during this interview, which one would you choose—and what would they say about you as an artist?

6. Your drawings have a very hand-crafted quality. What are you looking for when you draw a character that makes you think, “Yes, that’s them”?

7. How much of yourself ends up inside your characters? Are there pieces of your own personality, experiences, humor, or observations hidden in them?

Creative Process

8. Take us back to the moment when you get an idea. What does that first spark actually look like for you? Is it a sketch on a piece of paper, something you see in real life, a feeling, a funny interaction, or something completely different?

9. What is something ordinary in everyday life that you find yourself watching as an animator—someone’s walk, the way they hold their coffee, a facial expression—and thinking, “I want to animate that”?

10. When you’re drawing by hand, do you ever deliberately leave imperfections in the work because they give it more personality?

11. What’s a creative decision you’ve made in your work that other people might not notice, but you’re secretly very proud of?

12. What emotion is hardest for you to draw convincingly, and how do you solve that problem as an animator?

13. If you had to remove the color, dialogue, and sound from your work and were only allowed to communicate through movement, what would you want the audience to understand?

Clients + Real-World Work

14. You’ve worked with different clients, so I’m curious: which clients or projects have actually inspired you creatively rather than simply giving you a job to complete? What did they bring out in you?

15. Have you ever had a client give you an idea that completely changed the way you were thinking about your own art? Tell us about that experience.

16. What’s the difference between creating something because you love the idea and creating something because a client believes in the idea? Can those two things eventually become the same thing?

17. Is there a client you’ve worked with where you thought, “This person really understands what I do”? What made that collaboration different?

18. What’s the most unexpected request you’ve ever received from a client, and what did you do with it creatively?

19. When someone hires you, they’re not just hiring someone who can draw—they’re trusting you with their idea. How do you get inside someone else’s vision without losing your own artistic voice?

Career + The Person Behind the Art

20. If we looked at your earliest animation work next to what you’re creating today, what would younger-you be most surprised to see?

21. What is something you’ve learned about yourself through drawing and animating that you don’t think you would have discovered in another career?

22. What’s a character, project, or piece of work that you almost didn’t include in your portfolio—but now you’re glad you did? Why?

23. What kind of creative problem makes you lose track of time?

24. When you imagine the next version of yourself as an animator, what can that person do that you can’t quite do yet?

25. And finally, if someone watching this interview remembers only one thing about you as an animator, what do you hope it is?

1. What inspired you to create an animated series that teaches entrepreneurship through food characters?
2. Why did you choose food as the main theme instead of another type of character?
3. What problem are you hoping this series solves for children?
4. Who is your ideal audience, and what do you hope they take away after watching?
5. Was there a personal experience that inspired this concept?
6. What values are most important for every episode to communicate?
7. How do you balance entertainment with educational content?
8. What makes this project different from other children’s educational cartoons?
9. Why do you believe it’s important to introduce entrepreneurship at a young age?
10. If viewers remember only one lesson from the series, what would you want it to be?
11. How do you design food characters with personalities that children can connect with?
12. Which character is your favorite, and why?
13. How do you decide what type of food business each character will start?
14. What has been the biggest creative challenge in producing the series?
15. How does the animation style support the educational message?
16. Are there plans to expand the project into classroom activities or an actual business?
17. How do you measure whether children are learning from the series?
18. What advice would you give aspiring creators who want to combine education and entertainment?
19. What exciting developments or upcoming episodes can audiences look forward to?
20. Where do you hope this project will be in five years, and what impact do you hope it will have on the next generation of entrepreneurs?