toronto Archives - Revision Path

Podcast

Episode 521: Tolu Adegbite

September 18, 2023
Tagged as: accessibility, author, Canada, intersectionality, Meta, Threads, Tolu Adegbite, toronto

Tolu Adegbite is a product designer in Toronto, Ontario working on accessibility design at Meta.

What does accessibility design look like at the largest social media company in the world? According to this week’s guest, Tolu Adegbite, it’s a lot more than you may think! Between websites, apps, and devices, there are a lot of considerations to factor in, and Tolu’s unique background makes her well-equipped to solve these problems.

Tolu gave us a peek into the mood at Meta fresh off the launch of Threads, and she spoke about her day-to-day routine being on the company’s app design systems team. She also shared her story of starting out as a developer, and went into how recent current events inspired her to get more involved with including intersectionality as a key factor in her work. Tolu’s also writing her first book, so she talked about how she juggles that with also being a graduate student.

Tolu is a great example of how using your life experiences can shape your creative perspectives!

Interview Transcript

Maurice Cherry:

All right, so tell us who you are and what you do.

Tolu Adegbite:

Hi. My name is Tolu Adegbite. I’m a product designer. Currently in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. And I work on inclusive design. Right now I work at Meta, specifically working on Facebook, the design system, and making that as inclusive as possible.

Maurice Cherry:

Nice. How has your year been going so far?

Tolu Adegbite:

My year so far has been really interesting. I think this year started off kind of tough. There were a lot of just layoffs happening in tech. I felt like everywhere I looked on social media, there were just like a lot of sad messages, layoffs people having to really rejig their lives. So I kind of took a step back. I got rid of most of my social media accounts, which is kind of ironic seeing as I work for a social media company, but I really needed to take some time out to get in a better headspace because of all the tough stuff that was going on. But now I’m definitely feeling a lot more optimistic. I feel like things are turning around, so I’m feeling good about the year from here on out.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, look, I can tell you as someone that also was laid off during that time, I know what you mean about sort of retreating from social media and just seeing all of that as it takes place. Because there was a period last year where I felt like there were layoffs happening every week for like a few months. And not in small numbers either. It’s like 200 people here, 1,000 people here, and it can be super demoralizing, especially if you’re somewhere and you’ve survived a layoff like that. Survivor’s guilt. It’s bad and social media just compounds upon it.

Tolu Adegbite:

Absolutely. I totally agree. I know so many people who experienced the same thing, but for the people who weren’t laid off, there definitely is that survivor’s guilt. Looking around, realizing that it could have just as easily have been you. It was a really unusual way to start the year, especially given last year was the complete opposite. Everyone and their dog had gotten a new job and was talking about it on LinkedIn.

Maurice Cherry:

And this is independent of, sort of, talks about layoffs. Social media as a concept has been in a tailspin this year, particularly with the advent of new services — and we’ll talk about Threads — but with the advent of new services and stuff like that, it’s causing a lot of people to sort of re-examine their relationship to social media. Like…we’ll just talk about it. Twitter is crumbling at the moment and people are looking at all these different alternatives to possibly go it could be on Spill, they could go on BlueSky, they could go on Mastodon, et cetera. And it’s causing some people to say, “you know what? What if I just divest altogether from social media and not use any of these new platforms?” It’s an interesting time to be a social media user, I think.

Tolu Adegbite:

It definitely is. I feel like for so long it’s been a source of a lot of community. I am a chronic lurker. So for years I would lurk on Twitter without ever having an account. But I don’t think you can even do that anymore. I definitely can’t see accounts now that I’m not currently on Twitter, so it’s definitely an interesting time. Definitely more difficult to look in from the outside if you are also a chronic lurker like I am.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I hear you. Yeah. Twitter is becoming a walled garden. Some of these other places are similarly like that, where maybe you can only see a couple of things, but you have to join. And it would be one thing if the social media were more inherently social, but then it’s like tied up with algorithms and data collection, and you’re just like, I just want to talk to my friends and see what they’re doing and look at cute pictures and all that sort of stuff.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, especially since the pandemic. I think social media started being a major source of interaction for me during those, what, like, years that we couldn’t really do much in Ontario. Our laws were pretty intense about lockdown. There was a point in time where you couldn’t even leave your apartment. You couldn’t go outside with anyone who you didn’t live with. So social media was pretty much as much as I interacted with my friends and people that I knew.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. What do you want to try to accomplish for the rest of this year?

Tolu Adegbite:

I’ve been thinking a lot about my mindset and perspective on my career. I’m going to keep it short, but ultimately, I think as a Black woman growing up in this country, I’ve learned to present kind of a palatable version of myself. And I realize in the work world, it doesn’t always translate to where I want to go in my career and I’m having to show up differently. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about that, and I’m really focused on my career this year, where I want it to go and how I think my skill set can kind of propel my career forward.

Maurice Cherry:

Can you expand on that a little bit?

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, absolutely. I’m one of those people who I think, lived in a fantasy land. When I was a kid, I was in my head so much, so I really remember my childhood very well. And I remember as far back as grade one, grade two, sitting in class, feeling like I had to be really good. I don’t think I could put it to words back then, but there definitely was this feeling that in order for me to not be seen as a problematic child, that I had to present myself in a certain way. I had to be super smart. I had to always be raising my hand and giving answers. I had to be super nice to the people in my class. I just had to be the best student, a model student, and I’ve definitely taken that through with me today. I feel like I’m a compulsive people pleaser. And that doesn’t really translate well into the workplace, especially when you want to take on leadership roles.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. These companies will drain everything out of you and ask for more, so I know exactly what that feeling can be like of always trying to make sure that you’re showing up in the right way and doing the right things. And oftentimes, even if you’re doing that, just how you’re presented in the workplace, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to have a good effect, which can be a bit jarring, I think, especially if you’re early in your career, it can be a bit jarring because everything that you’ve been sort of told and seen has been to that point where that’s what you’re supposed to do, that’s what you’re being told that you have to present and do. And then you get in the workplace and they’re like…not so much. It doesn’t necessarily translate that way.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah. Especially starting my career as a developer, I definitely did not think about this stuff nearly as much. But I feel like as a designer, half of your craft is just how you show up. You could have the most amazing ideas and innovative, I don’t know, ideas for apps and ideas. But if you don’t show up in the right way, if you’re not confident, no one is really going to take your idea on board as well as if you show up in a certain way, which is really interesting to me. Half of this job is just how you present yourself.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. I’m thinking of like ten to fifteen years ago, when conversations around Black folks in technology, particularly around this new area of tech with social media and stuff like that, and how those conversations have went about and how people are trying to present themselves and making sure that you were a part of all this. It’s kind of amazing that even now, after all of that, that these are still sort of such big concerns, because company culture — trust me when I tell you this — company culture has changed a lot. Like a lot, a lot since then, but yet these are still kind of these pervasive things that mostly people of color have to deal with.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah. Now that you bring that up, I feel like life kind of exists as life before and after the pandemic, but similarly life before and after George Floyd. And I think I saw a complete kind of change in how I think about work, in what we’re allowed to say, what we’re not allowed to say after that. I feel like that completely changed my career. It was recent, but a lot of conversations have happened since then. A lot of conversations that I don’t think would have happened before George Floyd.

Maurice Cherry:

I’m curious about this because you’re in Canada and granted, you know what you’re mentioning, like with George Floyd and things, this is like…I wouldn’t say it’s a uniquely American issue, but certainly it’s something that people worldwide have been able to resonate with. I’m just kind of curious know, you being from Canada, growing up in Canada, and now having to sort of hear about these issues and see how it affects your workplace. Like, how does that make you feel?

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, I think growing up in Canada is really interesting. Our proximity to the U.S. makes it so that sometimes I’m more aware of American news than I am of Canadian news. Our Canadian news sources are definitely talking about American news, but we definitely felt it up here too. I think there’s this perception that these are problems that are unique to America. They’re really not. Whenever I go to the U.S. and I meet Black folks, one thing that really strikes me is that very often I’m asked, “is there racism in Canada?” And it really breaks my heart in a way that the thought of Black Americans is like, is there a place out there where this doesn’t exist? And the answer is no, it exists up here too. But it’s definitely a different brand. I think Canadian culture kind of makes it more covert, it’s less out there than it is in America. But we definitely had those conversations. Definitely was a reckoning here too, but probably not to the extent that Americans dealt with.

Maurice Cherry:

Hmm. Well, I’m not going to stay on this. This is not a nationalist podcast about, you know, issues like this. I want to talk about you and your work, so let’s go into that. So you’re a product designer at Meta. Tell me more about kind of the work you’re doing there. You mentioned you’re on the, sort of, Facebook product. Like, talk to me about that.

Tolu Adegbite:

I know that when Meta came out as a brand, there was some confusion, but I’ll just explain it for folks who are listening. Meta is the parent umbrella company that is an umbrella over Facebook. WhatsApp, Instagram, Threads, Reality Labs, all that stuff. So Meta is the parent company over Facebook. So yes, I work at Meta, but specifically, mostly on Facebook at this moment in time. And it’s been really interesting. I think there’s a very specific external perception, and we’re not going to talk about that too much. But I will say working at Facebook at Meta, one thing that I’ve been really surprised by is just the amount of attention that’s paid to accessibility and inclusive design. It’s definitely a bigger topic here than it’s been probably anywhere else I’ve worked, which is really incredible. Yeah, it’s really incredible. And I’m excited that I’m here at this point in my career that I don’t have to fight and explain why what I do is important and we’re just getting to the work and trying to make these products as accessible and inclusive as possible.

Maurice Cherry:

Tell me more about what does a typical day look like for you? Are you working with a team? Are you working remotely in the office? Like, what does that look like?

Tolu Adegbite:

So I work remotely from Toronto. There are several of us here, but not a lot. Most of my coworkers are in the U.S. on the West Coast, in California. But a typical day looks like…it looks like a lot of conversations with the design systems team; accessibility falls under that team. We do a lot of the typical stuff. We do crits, we talk about components, we talk about the future of our design system. But we spend a lot of time actually thinking about how to make these things considering the largest number of people. When you work on a product that touches billions of people, it really is a huge consideration and something that we spend a lot of time thinking about and talking about.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, I know you mentioned you’re not going to get too much into Facebook stuff. We’re not going to dive into that too much. But on the show a couple of episodes ago, I talked with Kevin Tufts. He’s a product designer. He works…I think he works moreso on the Instagram side from what he mentioned to me. But when we had talked before, this was prior to the release of Threads, which is an Instagram app very similar to Twitter in that it’s sort of this microblogging platform that you can basically put out…I mean, I’m saying “tweets”, but you can put out these small posts. It’s connected in a way to Instagram in that you can share to and from things like that. And that just came out a couple of weeks ago. It’s had massive appeal. I think there’s up to 30 million plus people that joined within the first 24 hours or so.

Knowing that, what is the internal mood at Facebook like? Because Facebook has taken some knocks. They’ve had layoffs, there’s been the whole thing about the metaverse, et cetera. But now it seems like Facebook’s got like a win in the win column. Like, what’s it like there?

Tolu Adegbite:

You know, internally the feeling is really optimistic. There’s some really tangible excitement and that’s a really nice feeling, especially after how things have been in the tech industry lately. You can tell people are really excited and it’s awesome. So many people are trying it out themselves, wanting to test, wanting to dog food, kind of to make sure everything’s working as it should. So it feels really awesome to see that kind of excitement and it definitely is energizing.

Maurice Cherry:

Does any of your work deal with Threads in any way?

Tolu Adegbite:

Not so much. It’s mostly falling under Instagram, so they kind of do their thing. But there definitely are conversations, especially when it comes to inclusive design concepts.

Maurice Cherry:

I’m going to be really interested to see how Threads and these other similar services are going to play out in the market over the next few years. It’s not the first time that there have been a number of Twitter-like clones that have come out trying to unseat Twitter. And I think I mentioned this actually, I don’t know if I mentioned this on the show — I might have mentioned it a couple of episodes ago — but right around like 2006, 2007 when Twitter was starting to sort of come out of its quote-unquote “beta phase”, but it was becoming more popular and more well known. There were a number of other services that tried to compete for that same market share. There was Yammer. There was Pownce. Jaiku. Oh, God…it’s Plurk. That’s what it was. Plurk is another one. And they were all kind of trying to sort of compete for that same space of like “we also want to be a microblogging platform.” And this is prior to what people know of Twitter as now. This was 2007, because Twitter had pivoted from this podcasting startup. Actually, I don’t know if a lot of people know that it started out as this podcasting startup called Odeo — O-D-E-O — and then they pivoted into this sort of microblogging-esque platform around 2006.

So I’m just curious to see how they will fare because a lot of those services now got bought by bigger companies and then they shut them down or they’re just super popular in other countries and not so much here in the U.S. I know people are trying to migrate to Threads, migrate to BlueSky, migrate to Mastodon, et cetera. I’m still kind of taking a wait-and-see approach to see where the masses go or where the conversation — or really where the culture — ends up moving towards. I mean culture in a broader sense, not just like Black folks, but where the general Internet culture is going to migrate towards because it eventually will settle honestly into one place. Like it’s not going to be, I think as splintered as it is right now.

Tolu Adegbite:

I hope that happens, you know, for the culture. I really do miss Black Twitter. That was amazing. I don’t know if it’s still happening because I can’t see Twitter, but I would be really happy if everyone ended up kind of in the same space. That would really be ideal for me.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, only time will tell. I think it’s way too early now for anyone to really be able to pontificate on who’s going to, quote unquote, win. Still a little early to tell.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, we can check back in in a bit and see where this all lands.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. Speaking of that, Facebook’s coming up on its 20th anniversary next year. What do you think their place is now in this modern Internet age?

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, that’s an interesting thought. I definitely remember when Facebook became a thing, probably when I was in elementary school, high school maybe. It’s interesting to see how it’s progressed now, how the audience has kind of like grown and changed and shifted. I think Mark Zuckerberg has been really good. historically, he’s made a lot of good bets. Things are going really well. He’s invested in the right places. And I think going forward it’s still going to remain like a powerhouse. There are billions of users, there’s a really big international presence, and I don’t think that’s necessarily going to change. My great aunt uses WhatsApp. I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon, but I think we’ll definitely continue to see maybe things change, but I don’t really foresee it, I don’t know, going anywhere anytime soon.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, that international presence is also, you know, there’s all these other products that are not just Facebook. You mentioned WhatsApp I know there’s different versions of Facebook in other countries like Facebook Lite, et cetera, and…it’s not the number one website in the world by accident. In some places, Facebook is the internet. So to kind guess, you know, prematurely call it dying. Like I’ve heard a lot, certainly here in the like Facebook’s everywhere.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, it’s growing and changing. And I think Threads is a really big testament to the team being willing to kind of go where the audience needs them to grow with the audience and the base. So that’s pretty awesome to see.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, seeing that Facebook has that global footprint, let’s talk more about what you do in terms of accessibility. Can you kind of touch on how your work affects different products at Facebook?

Tolu Adegbite:

So I started out as a developer, like I mentioned before. Kind of fell into right out of school working on web accessibility, so finding accessibility issues, fixing them…, So when I say accessibility issues, I mean things like color contrast. If you go on a website and you can’t see the text because the color contrast is too low. Or visible focus indicators, if you’re pressing the Tab button to navigate through a form and you can’t see where your cursor is. So things like that eventually morphed into working on it from the product design angle.

But it’s been really energizing to come here and see that this is a focus area and be able to work on these parts of the app design system before they make it to people and starting at that stage. So there’s a small but passionate team working on that. And I kind of see my role on that team as coming from external places that talked about web accessibility and tried fixing it, working on it in multiple different ways. But these days one of the things I’m really most passionate about is inclusive design and specifically what intersectionality means in the context of all these things.

Maurice Cherry:

Talk about that a bit more.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah. So I’ll tell you how I started thinking about that.

I worked at Shopify a few years ago, and while I was there, I wrote an article for the blog. I can’t really remember why it came to mind. Probably still the fallout of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protest in the U.S., but I was thinking a lot about what this means for accessibility. So there’s this awesome woman — she wrote this book called “Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard.” She was the first deafblind person to ever graduate from Harvard Law, which is a pretty massive deal, in part because before she started at Harvard Law, there were not materials that existed for a deafblind person to make it through the program. Right? Like, they didn’t have access to braille for all their materials. They didn’t have, necessarily maybe, interpreters…things like that. And she got through it. I was really touched by her story, but also her social media presence. She talks a lot about her experience as a deafblind woman who is of African descent. She made a post in particular talking about how when she interacts with other blind people, they almost always assume that she’s white. And that really got me thinking. Why is that?

It got me thinking, especially [as] someone who works in inclusive design about things like alternative text. So, you know, when you go on a website and the image is broken and you see a little bit of text, like dog, you see that text. If someone has put an alternative text attribute, which basically is what someone using something like a screen reader would hear, when their screen reader hits that image, they would hear whatever alternative text you put on it. If you put any. And oftentimes if a website even has alternative text, it’s very basic. Let’s say we go on a news website and there’s, I don’t know, a picture of a farmer. It might say farmer standing on a field, but it won’t really say anything about what the farmer looks like. Typically when we do that, I guess in a society where white is kind of the majority is seen as the default, you kind of implicitly are sending the message that this person is white, right? Yeah, it really got me thinking.

I noodled on that for a really long time, and I thought about my own experiences in elementary school. I was one of those kids who had begged to stay inside at recess, so I’d go to the library and read by myself. I read a lot of books, and I actually didn’t read a single book with a Black main character probably until middle school. And up until that point, I kid you not, I just assumed that people didn’t write books about Black people. It never even occurred to me that I just wasn’t coming across books with Black main characters for a reason. And so I was like, “okay, this is absolutely an accessibility issue.” Let’s write an article about it.

And I did, and initially actually, it’s a little bit controversial. It initially was not approved to be published, which was interesting, but eventually the editorial team was like, “okay, we’ll publish it.” But my one condition was, “okay, we cannot publish it during Black History Month.” I’m not going to publish this during Black History Month because I don’t want this to be like a topic that we relegate to Black History Month and never again. But I wrote that article, and it was the first time I’ve ever gotten hate mail. So believe it or not, some folks from the inclusive design community, I’m assuming it was those folks who were reading it, some people made fake email accounts and just, like, sent me hate mail. And I was like, “wow, this is kind of wild, kind of offensive.” But I’m like, you know what? If this is upsetting people to the extent where they’re sending me hate mail about it and telling me that race is irrelevant to people who are blind, then it means that I need to talk a lot more about it.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, look, I can tell you, as someone that has done a podcast where I talk to Black designers, I can completely believe that you got sent hate mail because people are really shook by the acknowledgment of race. Like, what you’re saying is not pinpointing this on any specific person or people. You’re saying like, “this is a behavior that needs to be corrected for greater context.” And then people are sending you hate because you want clarification. It’s madness. But I can 100% believe that you got that, which I’m sorry to hear that you’ve gotten that, but unfortunately, I can believe it.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah. And I guess people had very strong reactions. But I guess working in accessibility, you kind of have these rose-colored glasses — or I did — thinking that, okay, this is a space where we’re talking about exclusion. We’re talking about people who are from marginalized groups. There absolutely should be a conversation about this. And I was really surprised that that conversation wasn’t necessarily welcome, which tells me that the folks who have the loudest voices in this community are maybe from one marginalized group, but aren’t seeing the intersection with others. Like the experience of a white woman who is blind is going to be very different from Black African immigrant who is blind, who is deafblind. And I think having more conversations about that is really important. But I’ve just really learned that for some reason, these conversations have not been at the forefront of the inclusive design movement. That tells me I need to talk about it more.

Maurice Cherry:

Do you think that it’s getting better?

Tolu Adegbite:

I don’t think I’m seeing enough conversations happen about it. The vast majority of people I know who work in inclusive design are white people. And I inherently…obviously the people who are going to talk about this issue the best are the people who’ve experienced it, right? So I think getting more Black folks in the inclusive design community will make it so that those conversations happen more often. But of course, people who don’t experience kind of what happens at these intersections of multiple marginalized identities, of course they can’t talk about it. They definitely shouldn’t be silencing us either.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. Now, we’ve talked a lot about. Your work, what you’re doing at Facebook, et cetera. Let’s kind of shift gears and learn more about you as a person, as a designer. Tell me about where you grew up. Are you originally from Toronto?

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah. So I was born in Nigeria in a place called Ilé-Ifẹ̀, and I moved here when I was about four years old, and I’ve lived in the greater Toronto area, like, Toronto, the towns in and outside of it ever since. So I definitely feel very Canadian. But at the same time, I think a lot about my culture. I speak Yoruba. My parents speak Yoruba. To me, we’re immigrants, and it’s something that I think a lot about. Even though I think people often don’t read me as an immigrant, maybe because of my accent, I think it’s still a very important part of my identity.

Maurice Cherry:

Were you exposed to a lot of design and stuff growing up?

Tolu Adegbite:

Absolutely not. I did not think this was a job, which is why I started out as a developer. I felt like that’s the closest I could get to making things online look nice. When I told my parents that I was going to do design, I think there was a bit of a freak out. My mom was like, “what are you going to design? Like, houses?” There definitely was a disconnect in what that meant. But yeah, it’s interesting what design actually means on the inside. It’s been really amazing, and I think there’s, like, nothing else I’d rather be doing.

Maurice Cherry:

Now you ended up going to the University of Toronto. Tell me about sort of, like, what your time was like there and whether it really kind of helped you once you got out there as a working designer.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, I went to U of T for my undergrad. I studied psychology. U of T was the first university I kind of knew of in Toronto. There’s kind of this joke in the Nigerian community that U of T, for some reason, is like, the only university Nigerian people in Nigeria know about. So when I was little, my dad would take us there, take us to downtown, and he asked me once, when I was like, maybe five or six years old, :which university are you going to go to?” And I looked around and we were at U of T. So I was like, “I’ll go to the University of Toronto.” And then I kind of did.

I think in my head I thought I would always go there because it’s just the one that I knew of. So that was really interesting. I learned so much studying psychology, and it’s probably very cliche because I know it’s, like, one of the most common undergrads that people take. But I learned so much about myself and the way that I look at the world in classes like sex roles and gender and cultural psychology, I just completely shifted my worldview. How I think of things, especially as an immigrant. When my parents and I argue, I look at it from a cultural psychology lens. Why are we arguing? It’s because our collectivistic versus individualistic outlooks on the world are colliding. So I think it definitely helped shift how I look at the world. And I think that’s been really important as a designer to not singularly look at things from this individualistic lens, but think of things from kind of how alternate cultures will look at things. And I think I definitely live in between two cultures, so maybe it makes it a little bit easier to shift my mindset.

Maurice Cherry:

And I would imagine, kind of with the work you’re doing with inclusive design and accessibility, that psychology background is probably super helpful.

Tolu Adegbite:

I’d like to think so. I definitely try to look at it from that perspective. But ultimately, there’s so many different disabilities that people have, you’re never going to understand necessarily where all your users are coming from. So I try to, I don’t know, stay humble, try to not fall into that all-knowing designer kind of stereotype.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, I think at least it probably gives you some empathy into knowing what those kind of different disabilities would be. So tell me about your early sort of post grad career. I know you ended up working for Publicis Sapient as a product designer and as a developer, and you were there for a little over three years. Talk to me about what that experience was like.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yes. So after undergrad, I was like, okay, psychology is awesome, but what am I going to do now? And I kind of just went online trying to find interesting things to do, and I was like, oh, web development looks cool. I could do that. So I studied web development for a year at Humber, and then I started working at Sapient as a web developer. That was really interesting in that I worked mostly on websites, on the digital side of things, worked on a lot of different things. But it was also my first time working with designers, UX designers and visual designers. And I just kind of spent a lot of time working with them. I felt like they were kind of like my people. We talked a lot about how users might think about their perspectives, and I was like, I kind of want to do this. I feel like I could do this. Eventually, I convinced my very supportive director to let me kind of dabble in both, and eventually I moved over to UX.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, usually when I think about designers that are working at an ad agency — that’s what Sapient is — it’s moreso, like visual design or art director or creative director. But you were working on the development side. So they had, like an in-house team, it sounds like.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, exactly. So we’d work on different accounts, creating their websites or digital campaigns, like mini microsites and things like that.

Maurice Cherry:

And you said this is your first time kind of working with UX designers and such; did that give you a greater sense of the type of work that you could be doing?

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, I had no idea that that job even existed. I think I always have loved creativity. I love art. I took art in grade eleven. Grade twelve. I took art as often as I could. I would go to art classes. But there was this one art class I took where the teacher told me I had no technical talent, and I kind of believed her. So for years…

Maurice Cherry:

Damn.

Tolu Adegbite:

I know, right? She was kind of right. But for years, I felt like I couldn’t even broach that world. I didn’t draw anymore. I didn’t paint anymore. I was never very good, but there were fun things to do outside of work. But for the first time, I saw design through a lens of not necessarily being making pretty things, but working on creating products and functional things that could exist in the real world, in the digital world. And I felt like I was more able to do that. I’m not going to be able to produce a beautiful oil painting rendering of you, but I can definitely design a landing page or a form. So I think that kind of work really appeals to me. It feels very logical in a way that appeals to me, but also creative in that you’re bringing together these elements in a way that kind of makes sense for your audience. But to me, it’s like the most creative job, even though you’re not necessarily making anything visually, like, groundbreaking or anything.

Maurice Cherry:

Now back then, were you focused on inclusive design and accessibility, or is that something which kind of came about later on in your career?

Tolu Adegbite:

I think starting as a developer working on web accessibility, it definitely was the lens through which I always wanted to work in UX design, product design. And it was kind of how I made my case in that we didn’t have a lot of people who are specializing in accessibility, but even fewer who did that from the product design side of things. So I was able to make a case for that need on the team by working on things through that lens.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, after you were working at Sapient, you worked at Shopify for a while, which you kind of mentioned a bit earlier. Tell me about that experience. I’ve heard that their internal design culture there is really good. Is that what your experience was like?

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, I felt like their culture was really intentional, and it kind of presented design through a different lens for me. Yet again, that’s when I started thinking of design not only looking like building interfaces, but building your team, building very intentional relationships with your partners in product management, in development. Yeah, definitely very intentional. Definitely lots of process behind the way that things were done. It was a really nice way to broaden my horizons I feel it was a really good experience.

Maurice Cherry:

And from a design perspective, what sort of things were you working on there at Shopify?

Tolu Adegbite:

At Shopify, I specifically worked on Shopify Fulfillment Network, which — rest in peace — they had a recent round of layoffs, which is basically shedding that part of the company. But it was kind of their answer to Amazon Fulfillment. It was enabling merchants, small merchants, to ship out things from warehouses from centralized locations. And I felt like design was just taken very seriously there.

I was working on a project to build, like, a system for the warehouse. And so I started by requesting a visit to the warehouse because I had never visited a warehouse before. And so I went to a warehouse. I worked there for a couple of days, chatted with all the folks on the ground and yeah, got to experience the warehouse through their eyes, I guess. And then I went to start doing the design work, but it felt like they took it so seriously. They actually listened to me. They actually let me experience what I was designing for. And that was really cool. That’s still, I think, one of the most maybe interesting projects I’ve worked on. I feel like it was kind of like that seminal project that I worked on that made me officially a designer.

Maurice Cherry:

I get what you’re saying. Yeah. Sometimes once you start to get that internal validation, or rather I would say, once you get that external validation from your team, that the work that you’re doing is making that impact, it does so much for morale. It does so much for sort of just building yourself up as a designer to know that you are making good decisions and that you’re doing good work.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, absolutely. I guess it brought that aspect of maybe what I love about psychology, getting to understand other people into it. It wasn’t just sitting in a room and I guess making decisions from afar.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. Now, you’re also currently working on a book about intersectionality and design, which we’ll get to. But before we talk about that, I’d love for you to kind of give your definition of inclusive design. What does it mean to you and why? Is it something that other designers should be sort of aware of as they work?

Tolu Adegbite:

I think inclusive design to me is going beyond just compliance and following accessibility laws and making sure you’re up to code. It’s about truly designing for a variety of experiences to make a good experience for the variety of users that you have, whether that’s users with disabilities or users without disabilities, maybe users with temporary or situational disabilities.

But for me, specifically, bringing intersectionality into it is what I thought of a lot after know those few rounds of hate mail. I think that word is so often kind of divorced from where it initially came, intersectionality. Kimberlé Crenshaw, like, that whole thing was about the multiple types of oppression that Black women experience, right? Like the misogyny and the racism, how does that intersect to create a unique social experience for Black women? Let’s pivot and look at accessibility in that same way. How does being disabled and being a Black person, being a brown person, being an immigrant, how do those things intersect to create a unique experience of disability, of exclusion, but kind of bringing Black folks back into that conversation? I’ve had experiences where I’ve seen people use the word intersectionality, and never do they even mention Kimberlé Crenshaw or Black people, which I’m like….that’s wild. That’s where the word came from. So I think we need to have those conversations. I think we need to acknowledge where this word came from, what the concept means. Kimberlé Crenshaw…shout out to her. She is still making books. She’s still writing things. She’s still talking about this. We need to acknowledge where this term came from and what it actually means.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, how does this sort of factor into the work that you’re doing with your book? Is it kind of expounding on this in terms of design?

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, I think what I’m hoping to do is have more conversations about this. Get people thinking about it, get people to understand that just like a lot of other places in tech in which we have kind of our dominant group in society, white men driving things, it’s the same thing in the disability movement right now, in the accessibility movement right now. And that needs to shift in order for the accessibility movement to truly be helpful for people who are not kind of the dominant societal group, right? People of color, immigrants are more likely to be disabled because of things like environmental racism, less access to essential health care. It absolutely is an important conversation to have because we make up so much of the body of disabled people in our countries.

Maurice Cherry:

I remember super early conversations around web accessibility back when I was — oh, God, I keep aging myself when I say these things — back when I was designing websites in 2005, and even just trying to advocate for alt text on images and being told that, “oh, well, that’s only for disabled people and they’re not really using the web and stuff like that.” And I know that a lot of the technology around accessibility has increased, especially as browsers have gotten better. but I remember when it was just like pulling teeth to get people to even consider accessibility when it came to their work. They just wanted to make interesting, cool stuff online and didn’t think about anybody, but just impressing, I don’t know, other designers or friends of theirs, not thinking about who the people were that could possibly be using the thing that you’re designing.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, and I think in some circles that’s still the situation, unfortunately. But I think a lot of people maybe don’t know people who are disabled or like a lot of folks don’t maybe or didn’t know people who are Black in the past and that kind of painted their worldview on who Black people are. But if you know people who are disabled like anyone else, people who are disabled just want to have their independence and be able to do things that everyone else does. So if we don’t make our banking website accessible, the consequence of that is…the real world consequence is that someone out there needs to trust a third party to handle their money, and that’s not really a situation that would be acceptable to anyone else. So why should we subject disabled people to that experience?

I definitely think that things like laws and getting sued and lawsuits are a big reason why people are starting to care. Companies are starting to care, net-net honestly, if that’s what gets them to make their websites accessible, that’s fine with me. Be nice if it came from a place of “this is what’s right,” but if it’s going to come from the law, that’s cool too.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I totally agree with that. Having that accountability is unfortunately the only way that some companies are going to make that happen. Like they have to be fined or otherwise censured in order for them to actually take it seriously.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, absolutely. And if that’s what gets us where we need to be and having the right conversations, I can live with that.

Maurice Cherry:

There’s a book on inclusive design written by Reginé Gilbert. She’s been on the show a few times actually, who wrote “Inclusive Design for a Digital World”. Really great book. If people are listening and they want to just learn more about this, they should check that out. But I’m super interested in seeing what your book is going to be like when it comes out because I think definitely what you mentioned with intersectionality and race as it relates to design is something that is still super important, especially during this current — I guess you could say in the U.S. — this current political climate. But I think it’s probably worldwide or starting to become worldwide as it relates to things like critical race theory and things like that, where things are being either rewritten or omitted that just leave race out of it or completely rewrite history in some odd ways. So I’m really going to be interested to see the reception that your book gets once it’s out.

Tolu Adegbite:

I am interested in seeing myself finish writing it. I’ll definitely keep you posted. I’m excited to have this conversation; hopefully get less hate mail this time. But yeah, the fact that people have reacted so strongly to conversations about that tells me that we need to have more of those conversations and it’s something that we’re not talking about enough right now. But we definitely have folks who are starting to build that conversation. So I’m excited to join the chat.

Maurice Cherry:

So between your product design work that you’re doing at Meta, you’re writing this book, I think you also mentioned a bit earlier that you’re in another educational program. Is that right?

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, that’s right. So I’m starting a Masters of Inclusive Design program at OCAD U. So kind of a funny name, but Ontario College of Art and Design…University? It recently became a university. I’m so so excited about that. It’s a really small program, but it’s been really foundational in the accessibility and inclusive design community. And I’m excited to be surrounded by people who’ve done a lot of thought in this area and just to absorb their knowledge and learn from them.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I know Dr. Dori Tunstall was the dean there. She just came out with a book recently called “Decolonizing Design”, but I think she recently stepped down. And there’s another Black woman or BIPOC woman that’s stepping up as dean, I think.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, Dori’s amazing. I ran into her on the street in Toronto once and I talked to her for a while and she was super nice, and I was like, a weirdo. But she played a huge part in the creation of this program, actually, and in making it actually truly inclusive. This program has, like, remote and asynchronous options. It has options for folks who have to work while doing the program. And I’ve never really come across a program quite like that. So when Dori says inclusive design, Dori means inclusive design.

Maurice Cherry:

That’s awesome. Yeah, I had her on the show back in…oh God, 2015. Maybe she’s like episode 107 or something like that. At the time, she was still teaching in Australia. She was still teaching at Swinburne. This is before she came back to North America. So it’s been amazing to see just her glow up and change and really how fiercely she’s advocated for decolonizing design and inclusivity in her work. It’s been really a powerful thing to see.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah. And it’s one thing to say it, but actually doing it and creating a course that’s actually centered around being inclusive and providing multiple ways of learning where you’re able to codesign your education, that’s just walking the walk. And I really admire that. I never come across another higher education program like that, and I hope other programs take note and we can see more options for inclusive education.

Maurice Cherry:

So, Tolu, what does your downtime look like? I mean, I imagine a lot of this work takes up a lot of just, like, brain space and things like that. What do you do in your downtime?

Tolu Adegbite:

I’m working on that. I feel like I’ve been called by people in my life a bit of a workaholic, and I’m trying to just find hobbies that do not necessarily relate to my work. I’ve been doing some photography lately, which is fun. I really love plants. Trying to spend more time outside, but also watching movies, shows. Again, I feel like you really can’t unsee inclusive design. Right now. I’m watching “I’m A Virgo” about a 13 foot tall Black man from Oakland trying to find his way in the world. So, yeah, I really enjoy things like that. I need to get out more. But I love movies. I love film.

Maurice Cherry:

I need to catch “I’m A Virgo.” I know it just came out, I think last month — we’re recording in July. This will air in September. But I think it came out like June-ish something like that. I need to check it out because I’ve heard it’s really good.

Tolu Adegbite:

I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s amazing.

Maurice Cherry:

What are some pieces of advice that you kind of find yourself coming back to? This could be, like, life advice, career advice, et cetera.

Tolu Adegbite:

This sounds kind of silly, but I say this. I think this is a quote from Winston Churchill, who is otherwise very problematic, but “when you’re going through hell, keep going.” Honestly, whenever something weird happens, something demotivating happens, I just think of that and I find it incredibly motivating. If you’re in hell, why would you stop there? You got to keep going so you at least move yourself out of hell. I’m not saying I’m in hell, but I find that quote really motivating and I think of it often.

Maurice Cherry:

Who are some of the mentors that have kind of helped you out in your career? And these could be peers as well, but who are some people that have really kind of helped you to get to where you are today?

Tolu Adegbite:

Oh, my gosh. Basically everyone you’ve talked to on this podcast. But I’ve been lucky enough to have some really amazing mentors in my time. The person who I worked with at my first company, Allison Walton, who got me started in web accessibility, amazing mentor. Zoltan Hawryluk, who I worked with as a developer, I got to dip some of him once a month. Just people who have been in the industry for a really long time have taught me so much. Tory Hargro, who works at Meta, has been such an incredible mentor to me. He’s amazing and he’s so accessible, even at his level, which is amazing. I work with a designer called Alexis Cotton, who has just been an incredible mentor to me. I’ve learned so much from her about how to show up. She’s a really unique and interesting person, and I feel really lucky to have access to all these people who have made themselves so available. And, yeah, it’s very humbling, and I don’t think I’d be doing the things I’m doing now if it wasn’t for those folks.

Maurice Cherry:

I’m going to text Tory and I’m going to let him know that I talked to you for the show. When you think back on your career and sort of what you’ve learned to get to this point, and I think you may have somewhat answered this earlier, but what are you still working on unlearning as you grow as a designer?

Tolu Adegbite:

I’m trying to unlearn that kind of being a wallflower, being humble, minimizing and shrinking myself to be palatable. I think it’s going to be a long process of unlearning. But, yeah, I’m trying to just show up more. I look around at my peers and kind of how they show up in rooms and how they take up space, and I’m like, I should take up that space too. And I think a lot of women struggle with this in general, but I want to take up more space, and I want to show up as that person who yeah. Who just puts themselves out there and doesn’t need to shrink themselves to make a version of them that they feel like is palatable to the people around them.

Maurice Cherry:

Do you have like, a dream project or something that you’d love to work on one day?

Tolu Adegbite:

Honestly, I can’t even think of one off the top of my head. My dream project is talking about inclusive design and intersectionality and where Black people, where people of color, where immigrants fit into this design story.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, as you look kind of into the future, of course, like you said, you’re still working on this book, you’re in this program. Where do you see yourself in the next five years? Like, what does Tolu in 2028 going to be doing?

Tolu Adegbite:

I see myself deleting a lot of hate mail.

Maurice Cherry:

Hopefully more than that. Hopefully more than that.

Tolu Adegbite:

I see myself having more conversations about these things, about it becoming more of a mainstream conversation. I think in the larger tech community, we’re definitely at the point where we’re talking about needing more diverse representation. I’m really hoping we can talk about that in the inclusive design community as well. I see myself growing, helping other folks in the way people have helped me. It’s funny you mentioned that. I feel like ever since the pandemic, I’ve learned to think a lot more short term back then. Couldn’t even plan, like, two weeks ahead. And so right now I’m focusing a lot more on what’s on my plate.

Maurice Cherry:

Look, I’m right there with you. People ask me now about stuff to do in October, and I’m like, “do I want to do that in October? Where am I going to be in October?” So I think we’re all, in a lot of ways, still kind of trying to come out of this pandemic and think about the future. But it feels like with what you’re doing, your path is set. It feels like if you keep on this path now of working on inclusive design, I think you’ve got a bright future ahead. Especially as we look at things like Web3, the metaverse, other social media platforms, things of that nature. There’s just going to be more and more opportunities because the Web is expanding in a way to include everyone that it just hasn’t before. Because technology is changing.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, there’s a new frontier. There’s the Wild West, where no one has ever done these things before. And there’s definitely a lot of conversations to be had about how to make these completely new things inclusive and accessible. I definitely am super excited about the people who are around me at Meta. There’s actually surprisingly a huge number of Black folks at Meta now, kind of starting with Tory. I think he was actually the first Black designer on Facebook, which is pretty wild. But I definitely look around work and I feel like there are the right people around to help on that path, the right mentors, and that feels really awesome.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, just to wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more information about you and your work? Where can they find you online?

Tolu Adegbite:

My website is tolu.xyz. Tolu is T-O-L-U. My Threads handle/Instagram is the same — tolu.xyz. Email. I’m also on LinkedIn. You can’t find me really anywhere else. I’m trying to reduce the amount of things that I consume, so those are probably the best ways to find me. Also via email. Old-fashioned.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, you also have the distinction of being the first person on the show to mention that they can be found on Threads.

Tolu Adegbite:

That feels pretty awesome. Hopefully future guests will follow that trend.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, Tolu, it’s been such a pleasure to have you on the show. So great to learn more about you and about your you know, like I said, the web is expanding in many different, know, virtual reality, et cetera, and the work that you’re doing just speaks to the greater need to include everyone in the conversation. So I really hope that with the work that you’re doing that we are all moving forward and closer to fulfilling that goal. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Episode 466: Kamar Thomas

August 29, 2022
Tagged as: author, Canada, Centennial College, design educator, fine artist, jamaica, Kamar Thomas, painter, The Artist's Creative Vision, toronto, University of Connecticut, VCAD, Visual College of Art and Design, Wesleyan University

Kamar Thomas is a painter, author, and design educator in Toronto, Canada by way of Jamaica.

Every designer or artist wants to be able to make a living from their work, and this week’s guest embodies that desire. Generally, Kamar Thomas splits his time between being a design educator at two institutions — Centennial College and VCAD — but outside the classroom, he’s a prolific artist who specializes in vibrant oil paintings filled with deep meaning. He also just finished his first book, The Artist’s Creative Vision, which publishes this winter. Very nice!

Kamar started off talking about his teaching career, which also includes stints in the U.S. and Jamaica, and he talked about getting into art and painting as a kid before attending college at Wesleyan. He also spoke on the themes of the Black figure, masks, and abstraction in his work, his first gallery show this year, and what he ultimately wants to convey in his paintings. For Kamar, you can make art from wherever, and also have a great career!

Transcript

Full Transcript

Maurice Cherry:
All right, tell us who you are and what you do.

Kamar Thomas:
My name is Kamar Thomas. I am a fine art painter, primarily an artist. I’m also a professor at two colleges, Centennial College and Visual College of Art and Design. And lastly, because I have finished a manuscript, I will be an author of a book called The Artist’s Creative Vision.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Congratulations on the book.

Kamar Thomas:
Thank you, thank you. When it comes out, hopefully it does come out, I hope it makes an impact.

Maurice Cherry:
It will. I think every person’s book makes an impact, especially for the person who wrote it.

Kamar Thomas:
Especially for the person who wrote it.

Maurice Cherry:
Book aside, how has the summer been going so far?

Kamar Thomas:
The summer has been busy. I fill essentially three roles. I teach and I make and I write. And the summer is my season of making and writing, so I’ve had an exhibition in the summer. I’ve been going to museums quite a bit, and I’ve been just polishing up the manuscript, which is a whole long process in itself.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I see on the websites you’ve got the book here available for pre-order and everything. We’ll also make sure to put a link to it in the show notes so people can check that out.

Kamar Thomas:
Thank you. I’m very grateful. I need it.

Maurice Cherry:
What was your inspiration behind it?

Kamar Thomas:
It came from solving my own problem, which was I was a starving artist, and I didn’t want to be a starving artist anymore so the book is written to, if I can, eradicate that concept, get rid of the idea. And to solve that problem, it’s… The real issue is how does one come up with work consistently that people want to buy? Rather than just making and following the muse and blindly following inspiration.
And I sat down and I came up with a system. And by sat down, I mean with trial and error and teaching people and tried a few other method here and picking up things through teaching and applying them to myself. And the system is combine your interests with your biography, with art history, repeat. Eventually someone will buy.

Maurice Cherry:
Sounds pretty simple.

Kamar Thomas:
Sounds pretty simple, just like saving money is simple, but it’s really difficult. Just like exercise is simple, but it’s hard.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Well, I want to get more into your work as an artist, but let’s talk about your work as a professor first. You mentioned teaching at two universities. You’re teaching at the Visual College of Art and Design; that’s in Edmonton, Alberta. And you’re teaching at Centennial College, which is in Toronto, which is on in Ontario. That’s east coast, west coast geographically. How do you balance teaching at both of those schools?

Kamar Thomas:
Yeah, balance is a strong word. Let’s just say… What’s the word? Manage. Balance supplies. For a season, there is teaching Visual College of Art and Design is online, and their classes are two to three hours long. And I fit them in the schedule where I can. And I teach at Centennial in person; I’m full-time there. And that schedule is largely immutable. The meetings have to happen, the classes have to happen, and I have to physically be there. And so it’s just a matter of systematizing and being rather ruthless with what I say yes to and being very hands on with the planning. I spend a significant portion of time just planning just 20 minutes here and there. I think if I added it up over the week, it would be at least an hour and a half just on planning what I’m going to do with the time that I have.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, it’s good that you manage both of them because it sounds like one’s online, one’s in person, but then the schedules don’t seem to really cross over either, so that’s pretty good.

Kamar Thomas:
Yeah. If it’s one thing I’ve learned from teaching, it’s systematize. If you repeat anything, figure out the best way to repeat it rather than having to make yourself figure it out each time.
I have a complicated system of things coming into my inbox to moving to a… I gather up a place, I put them in a folder, and then once a day I go in the folder, I put those into the planner ,and the the next day I get out a physical piece of paper and I write down the things from the planner. And I keep it on my person so I won’t have to keep checking the planner. And then somewhere on the paper on my person, I have somewhere to put the new stuff coming in so nothing really slips through the cracks. Some things do, but for the most part, 90%, 95% do not.
The same with art; a system that you can go back to, that you can rely on to produce results is much better than inspiration-based or client-based. It’s more of if you have a method of working, you go, you consult the system. I do this. Let me check art history. What do I have inspired there? Let me draw something from my biography. Go.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s interesting, I didn’t really realize that about teaching myself until I started teaching. Which when I was in college, I would always have professors that would… They wouldn’t necessarily repeat themselves, they’d always just tell you it’s in the syllabus. It’s like, “It’s in the syllabus. I put it in the syllabus.” And I’m like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. Then when I started teaching, I was like, I get it, because the syllabus is like your system. You put everything in there, and it’s up to the student whether they read it or not. If they don’t read it, it’s not your fault. You put it in the syllabus. They should have read it.

Kamar Thomas:
Correct. It not only has everything, it has when everything is going to happen and it has how you expect it to happen and it has the consequences of if they don’t happen.

Maurice Cherry:
Yep. And then the students get mad when they’re like, “Well, I didn’t read the syllabus.” Well, that’s your problem. The syllabus is the key to the system for me, so I get it.

Kamar Thomas:
Yeah. That’s exactly right.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you’ve been a teacher for awhile now. Not just with these two colleges, but you’ve taught in Canada, you’ve taught in Jamaica, you’ve taught in United States. What do you learn from your students? Are there any differences between students in different countries and stuff?

Kamar Thomas:
Yeah, there sure are. In Jamaica, the difference in students in Jamaica, I was teaching high school. And the difference really… Well, what would have made the difference there is finances, it’s money. A lot of the issues could be solved by a few dollars here and there. The main challenges I was up against was actual art materials, was the space to make the art, was the resources. Once you have the money, those problems are solved.
In the United States, when I became a professor, the problem I faced the most was a problem of agency. And that I loosely define as is this thing for me? The students, a lot of them didn’t feel like making art was… Nevermind being possible, it’s possible, but just for someone else. And so a lot of my teaching was geared towards having students not only believe that it’s for them, but making projects that reinforce that belief. And there are very few things more encouraging than a few dollars in your bank account.
In Canada, it is the students I teach now, it is a equivalent of a community college. And the students I teach are adults, and they want to be professionals, and they need tangible results. The difference in Canada is students are a little more responsible because they’re a little school older. But they just need the resources. They need to know when and where what’s happening. A lot of my job is just finding things for my students to enter, finding outlets for them.
In Jamaica, it is a straight financial barrier. In the US, it is a problem of agency a lot of the time. And in Canada now, it’s a matter of finding and connecting the students to the resources.

Maurice Cherry:
I found when I talked to some educators here in the States that teach at HBCUs, it’s a combination of those things that you mentioned. If they’re teaching on HBCUs, it’s often the lack of funds and resources as well as the agency, depending on what program it is or how many people are in the department and such. It’s interesting how the problems scale based on not just country, but also just where you’re teaching and the students that you’re teaching, the type of students you’re teaching.

Kamar Thomas:
That’s correct. The agency is a rather complicated problem because it’s not an individual problem. You can’t really solve it by one student, you have to get the whole class to want to do well. And as a result, the individual will do well within that, so you have to set the expectation and then you have tom in a way, make it known that what they’re doing is hard, and it’s supposed to be hard, and see if you can get them on board for the difficulty. It’s a really delicate dance. But the US, that was the problem I faced, and hopefully I rose to the challenge. And I apologize to the students if I have not.

Maurice Cherry:
Do your students take you up on office hours?

Kamar Thomas:
Yes, they do. Because drawing is a bit like singing where it’s your voice, with drawing it’s your hand, it feels, and it’s your art, it’s what you are trying to say, a lot of the things that I give in class, it feels like I’m attacking them personally. They take up the office hours to tell me that I shouldn’t have attacked them personally. And then we have sessions to show them, no, it’s not you, it’s understanding of the subject matter that we’re doing is not quite there yet. This is what you’re doing. You’re over here. I need you to get to here.
An example of that would be I’m teaching measuring things, just measuring, and I’m I say, “You draw a line, a straight line, a perfectly vertical line and then you measure every other angle from that.” If I say picture a 90 degree angle, you have that in your head. If you cut that in half, you have a 45 degree angle. If you’re looking at a line, you can guess what that angle is because you know what 90 is and you know what 45 is. If it’s below 45, you can say, “Oh, that’s about 30,” et cetera.
And what students do, they don’t do that, they just guess. They just put it down, it looks right, and they come to office hours and say, “Hey, you were picking on me.” And I said, “I knew you guessed because you immediately put down something before attempting… Before I even finished the sentence.” Yeah, they take up office hours, they get extra time at the beginning.
Now, at the advanced level, when they’re about to graduate, they want to know if there’s a gallery showing, which ones I should contact. If there’s an art festival, how do I get in? What do I do now? I’m about to be out there. What do I do now? And I have a whole packet for them. I have what’s the steps that they take. What are the expectations? I break out the spreadsheet. Rent is $1,500. If you sell for $500, you need to sell three every month. You need to contact 10 people every month as a result. It’s 30 days in a month. If you do one every other day, you’ll get to 10; three of them might buy. And if you do this over a year, you won’t run out of money. That’s what my office hours are for.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, back when I was teaching… Oh my goodness, this might have been over 10 years ago. I started off teaching in person, and then I asked to be moved to teach online because my students were wearing me out. One, well, my students were all older than me, and so a lot of them tried to think that they would punk me because they’re like, “You’re my son’s age.” And I’m like, “So? I will fail you if you don’t get these assignments right.” Some of them would ask me to… They would bring their kids to class and they would try to use office hours as babysitting. They would have their kid come to office hours. And I’m like, “Where’s your mom?” And they’re like, “I don’t know.” What am I supposed to do? I’m not running daycare over here. And I asked to be moved online because I was like, I can’t keep coming out here and fooling what y’all doing this stuff.
And online is just different because the students just have to have more discipline. And again, this was 10 years ago, pre-pandemic. Now where I think everyone’s used to doing virtual work. Just trying to get them to have the discipline to just say something in the forum, just participate in class. Because there was a participation element to their grade. And then when they have office hours, it’s just like, “Well what can I do to make up for the time that I wasn’t speaking?” I’m like, “You can’t. You can’t make up participation. There’s no extra credit for participation. You didn’t speak up. That was it.” Trying to do anything they could just to pass. I would have students that would try to justify why they thought it was okay cheating because the class was online. And if the class wasn’t online and Wikipedia wasn’t there, then why would it be available as a resource? They’re very creative.
I was teaching a… It was basically principles of web development to business students, which was probably why they were so duplicitous, because it wasn’t design students, they were business majors that just needed a credit. They didn’t really care to learn, they were just like, “What can I do to get past you?” Essentially. And it would be just so disheartening because I would have students that would fail my class two and three times coming back doing the same stuff, and it’s like, “Do you want me to just pass you out of pity? Because it’s getting there. It’s hurting me to see you doing the same stuff. The assignment has not changed from semester to semester. I would think you would be better at it because you’ve done it before.” Yeah,. I do miss teaching though, I just don’t miss all of that, I don’t miss all of that.

Kamar Thomas:
Some people you’re not going to get when you are in… What is it? The lower school levels of everybody, and everybody’s decent. But as soon as you go to high school and you’re high school as 2,000 people, you know at least one or two crazy people, just absolute… You see them, you cross the street.
In teaching, some people it might be they might not make it. It might be that they, for whatever reason, their motivation, they’re unwilling to do the work; and that’s fine. I do my absolute best to not take it in any way personal. I actually take it as a point of pride to produce the same professionalism, no matter what the student comes with. And I treat them extra, extra nice just to make the D or the E that they’re about to get a bit more palatable. But I’m-

Maurice Cherry:
Wait, did you say D or E?

Kamar Thomas:
Listen, there’s no time machine. You’re going to fail this class. It’s over for you.

Maurice Cherry:
Wait, wait. There’s a grade that’s a E?

Kamar Thomas:
There’s a F.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, okay.

Kamar Thomas:
It exists, but I explain in great detail, the grades that are coming, and I explain the connection. And I try and point out what they can do next time, provided and they take it again. And I make it really long, and it takes a long time for me to do it. When they come back the next time I say, “Remember that long list I sent you? You haven’t done it. You showed up when there was three weeks remaining in the semester and you were asking me to perform a miracle, but I am merely a teacher. I am not the Lord. I cannot turn the water into wine. I’m sorry, I can’t make time return itself.” If you plan on making it, you have to come to a certain number of them to get participation. A lot of it is merely giving people the benefit of the doubt that they’ll try again and not taking it personally. And I’m going to be honest; it’s been really difficult.

Maurice Cherry:
I can imagine. I can imagine.

Kamar Thomas:
It’s very, very difficult. But again, systematize. I’ve seen it before now. I’m actually mad if it bothers me at all when I see the second time. I always think you’ve seen this before. You really [inaudible 00:21:30]. You see it’s not the first person that has come in three weeks before. Go look for the three weeks before folder, search to your computer. Oh, here it is. Oh yeah, this is what I said. Got it. And then I go and set out the template.
And that way, again, because in the US, agency was the problem, I always wanted to preserve the idea that this person felt like what I was teaching was theirs. And so I would try and be excruciatingly kind, the kind of understanding, “Oh, you’re still going to fail, but it’s an understanding fail.” It’s with love, it’s with kindness, it’s with accountability. And I think if the students have changed me in any way, I’ve become way more understanding and way more empathetic. Still going to failure you, though, but way more empathetic.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I get it. Sometimes I know students are going through a lot, and you try to do as much as you can. You want to get them to the level where they hopefully are understanding and doing it for themselves, and then sometimes you just don’t have that. But I think as educators, you and I both realize that it comes with the territory.

Kamar Thomas:
Unfortunately, yes.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Let’s switch gears here a little bit and talk more about you. I think, as folks can probably tell by now with the quiet storm voice, that you’re from Jamaica. Tell me what it was like growing up there.

Kamar Thomas:
I’m from port Antonio in Jamaica. Place called Boundbrook, which is near the town of Port Antonio. Yeah, it’s called Stony Hill. As the name suggests there are stones. It’s a hill in areas. Not forest. There are trees, lots of them. There are dogs wandering on your properties. That’s your dog now. My neighbors knew all of my business. It’s a small place and it’s…
My parents, man, they did a great job. They did what they were supposed to do. And as a result, I felt like I could… Not only was I supposed to do well in school, but it was like, yeah, when I pass any exams and I come home with some a good report, all right, that’s nice, but we were expecting this. And that environment, I think, is what I credit for my trying so hard at anything.
Growing up there, our national heroes are all Black people. Every teacher I ever had was a woman. The prime minister was a woman at the time. When I came to the US and the term African American or Black had anything negative attached to it, I was very, very surprised, to say the least, because we don’t really have any negative connotations towards a Black identity in Jamaica at all when I was growing up. Things may have changed. But when I was growing up, we didn’t.
I come to the US and, oh. In Jamaica, you’re a man, and you come to the US, you’re a Black man. What does that mean? And my work is a direct result of trying to answer that question exactly. What does that mean exactly? And the answer for me was to expand what I think Black identity is, to expand what identity is in general. And to do that, I make a whole bunch of paintings that refer to my identity on the one hand, but also does so in a more abstract way. I make a whole bunch of paintings that are abstract, but they’re real, and I’m trying to say identity is abstract and also real.

Maurice Cherry:
When did you first get into art and painting?

Kamar Thomas:
Ah, so that is a really good question. In Jamaica, we have, when we leave school, they’re called Caribbean examination council exams. Everything is exam-based. And I took art in these exams, and I got just a little bit below the best, so I was into art in high school.
As a profession, absolutely not. That’s not in the tables. That’s not a thing. It was at my university I met my painting professor; her name was Tula Telfair. She was born Capon. She had long hair. She wore Prada dresses. I don’t know if it was Prada dresses, I just know these dresses were expensive. And she got oil paint on them and it didn’t bother her. And she drove an Audi, a blue one that sounded like a hair dryer. And she could paint quite a bit.
And I was thinking to myself, I understand being a professor pays, but you’re not buying an Audi from professor money. And I actually asked her, I got up courage, “Hey man, how you sell these paintings? How does this work?” And she’s like, “Well, you have to get very, very good and go take the classes you need. And we can talk about it when you get into the class.” And I did. I took the classes that was needed. And while I was painting with her, she just treated me and all the other students as if we were already professionals.
Now, to many people, she was mean, but it’s a very specific thing where she wants you to be ready. As soon as you step out, she wants you to be already ready. And so she would come into this studio and say if she were a curator and she gave me a show, she’d take it back immediately. I need to be painting way more than this, and then just leave me to contemplate what she just said. She would come in and just really treat me like an equal, to be honest, treat me like, “Look, when you graduate, nobody going to know what this is. This is not fun and games. You really need to be making the work consistently and professionally.” And somewhere along the line, it just happened that I felt like I was a professional. It was very gradual, but a few well placed curse words got it into my head that one should be a professional, treat it you would like any other job. It was really in college.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s get back more into you, into your background. Was your family really supportive of you getting into art?

Kamar Thomas:
That is such an interesting question. Supportive is a strong, strong word. My father is an EMT, and before that he was a fireman. He’s out here saving lives. My mom was the secretary to the dean of a college in Jamaica. This serious working people. And they send their son to America definitely not to paint, definitely not.
I’m there. Initially, I was doing physics, and it went okay, but I decided, okay, if I attack the painting with the same consistency I was doing physics, I might be able to make it work. And I, behind their back, just major in art. Don’t tell nobody. Get down to business. And it’s time to graduate now. And I call them up and I go, “Hey, the graduation is nice, but it’s me and 700 people. Nobody cares. Why don’t you come to this thing I’m having called an exhibition?” And they came and I made some sales, but I told the people, “Could you wait and give me the money in the exhibition so that my parents could see that I’m out here making it?” And they did. And they’ve been supportive ever since.
They’ve been supportive of me as a person, but because I hid it initially from them, as an artist, after I graduated, they were on board. And they have the ordinary fears. All parents are afraid that their children will perpetually depend on them until they’re 60. Parents live like, “When are you going to grow up?” And once I demonstrated that I got this, I’m fine, then they were very happy. Then it was like, all right, relax, mom. You don’t have to tell this lady that’s doing your nails. Then it’s a matter of holding them back right.
But before that, if you’re an artist listening, your parents are afraid you are going to be broke. Avoid it at all costs and you will be supported. And then you’ll have the problem of having them… Telling them to relax on the support a little bit.

Maurice Cherry:
What made you decide to go to Wesleyan for school?

Kamar Thomas:
Yeah, so I got into medical school in Jamaica. Got into the University of the West Indies. I’m 17 years old applying to things, my dad’s an EMT I saw those medical books. And my dad has been going on, ambulances, picking people up, so I was barely familiar with what medicine actually means. And I thought to myself at 17 years old, nah, can’t do that.
And I was in this program for… I don’t want to say gifted. It was the Association of Quietly Excellent Scholars and Thinkers, AQUEST was the name of it. Just a group of people who met. And they said, “Apply to some colleges in the US. They give scholarships.” And I applied to a few and a few said yes. And I picked Wesleyan because it gave the most.
I went blindly with not very much information. These are the days of, of course, paper applications and paying for internet at internet cafes for half an hour at a time. The kinds of research that people do today, not possible. The virtual tours and the flying in and doing it, that’s not a thing. It’s you see a name, all right, it’s in Connecticut. How much of a flight is that? Okay. All right, apply, see what happens. And what happened was they called me and said, “Hey, you’ve been accepted.” And I go, “Great. What does that mean?” “It means you’re going to get a visa and come and you live here before.” “Oh, all right.” It was more of I need to get an education, and medicine at 17, at 18 is rough. That choice was too difficult, so let me go to a liberal arts school and figure out another path.

Maurice Cherry:
And what was that path? Of course, it was art, but tell me about that.

Kamar Thomas:
Initially, it was physics. In general, I really like excellence of any kind, but I really was into all of the great physicists, Faraday and Einstein and Niels Bohr. I read these people’s biography. I loved the mathematician, Riemann’s hypothesis. I was reading that. I was just in the library reading up about people, with their mind, with their head, they were doing things. And that kind of a thing was impressive to me because I’m nearsighted so physical feats, they were impressive, but they were hard. I wasn’t going to catch anybody. Got glasses and sorted that out. But what really wowed me was sitting into the library and reading. Wait a minute, this guy, Newton, came up with the theory of gravity and figure out white light is made up of all the other colors and invented calculus, and then he turned 26. Whatever he’s doing, I need to have some of this. These people were what were impressive people to me.
And then I went to college and I found out what professional physics was, which is you write some code and you run a model and then you refine the code and then you run the model. If you are a professor and you’re at the end, if you can manage a tenure position, you have a grad student write parts of the code and run the model. It’s not this romantic notion of sitting down and solving the kinds of universal questions I was hoping for. It was more of can you learn to code? And can you learn the math? And can you learn the math to tell it to code?
And so I figured that out around my second year when it was time to decide a major. And I was doing some drawing and I said, “If I actually flipped a coin, flipped it, heads, I stay with physics, tails, I go with arts.” It was tails. I then went, “This can’t be real,” so I went online and I took a random question answer generator, and it ended up with art as well. I said, “All right, I’ll go with art.”

Maurice Cherry:
What?

Kamar Thomas:
That’s what it was. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
You just left it up to chance, huh?

Kamar Thomas:
Left it up. Because again, I figured… Let me put it in perspective.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Kamar Thomas:
There was a guy in my classroom, his name is Zin Lin. He was from Burma. He skipped both levels of calculus, and multi-variable calculus, and was the TA of the physics class while he was taking it. And there was fives Zin Lins in my class of 20 people. And there are people who they’ve been doing physics so long, they are as good at physics as Mozart is as good at music. These people are good, good. You’re not going to catch them in your lifetime.
And I was working an extreme amount just to… I would get 92%, and that would be a B because somebody got 108% and the A was moved up to 108%. It’s this kind of environment where the effort I’m putting in, I’m thinking if I apply this work ethic to basket weaving, I’m going to have some amazing baskets.
And again, I was already doing… It’s not a random pick, it was something that I was already doing. I was taking languages, and I’m doing art at the same time, art and art history all at the same time. And I figure if I threw myself at this art the way I’m doing at physics, I’m going to be all right, I’m going to be cool. And that’s why I was comfortable leading up to chance. For those listening, that’s not wise. Don’t do that. Don’t do that. If you already have an arena of proven work ethic, go for it. But if not, then put some more thought.

Maurice Cherry:
You’re attending Wesleyan, you’re majoring in art, and you graduated. After you graduated, you ended up going back to Jamaica for a while, and then you ended up coming back to the States. Tell me about that time.

Kamar Thomas:
I graduated, and I just couldn’t come up with the money to move to New York so I stayed near that the school and worked at a little supermarket, sold paintings and again realized… really figured out that I don’t have a gallery, I don’t have a curator backing me. I have no critics looking at my work. I’m just a guy out here, but I need to eat. And so I would, for jobs that I was applying to that were arts related, I would send them what I was working on and just let them know that I painted as well and let them know what it was about very quickly. And many of them would respond, and I wouldn’t get the job, but they’d buy a painting or they’d refer me to somebody else, and they would buy a painting. I figured out pretty early, if you tell people, they will buy.
Then, of course, my visa expired and I had return to Jamaica where I was hired as an art teacher at my old high school. Taught 8, 9, 10th, and 11th grade. And then after that, while I’m in art school, I’m doing the same thing I did, just whenever I had to email somebody or whenever I met someone and I took their number, I just told them that I painted. And it worked the same way in the US, it worked in Jamaica. Somebody was like, “You paint. I never met an artist before.” Said, “Well, now you have. Would you send them what I’ve done?” And I sold paintings. And people would pay me in installments, so they’d pay a little this week and then another bit next week in Jamaica, and that allowed me to save up the money to apply to graduate school. Came to graduate school, did pretty much the same thing. And I’ve been doing it since.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, it seems like you always had your eye on the prize when it comes to that, which is good. Even though you were doing other things like teaching and stuff, you still were telling yourself and other people, “I am an artist.”

Kamar Thomas:
Yes. I think around half of the battle is just showing up and making the work and committing to telling people. Around half, which seems like an exceptionally large percent but the thing is, if you continually tell people, you are going to need to show them something that you’ve told them about, which is going to make you want to continue to paint. And the more you paint, the more you want to tell people, and it starts this virtuous cycle of making something, talking about it. And the more you talk about it, the more you make, the more you make, the more you talk about it.

Maurice Cherry:
But it’s also just keeping that dream in the forefront. It’s not about having whatever the weight of reality or the weight of the world kill that idea for you. You still had it in the front of your mind, I am an artist, I am an artist. You’re telling people, you’re doing it. I think that’s just a powerful thing for people to keep in mind as they go through whatever it is they’re going through as part of their creative journey; keep the dream at the forefront and keep striving towards that.

Kamar Thomas:
I was raised as a rather religious person, and in the church, they have daily bread. They have daily readings, daily Bible texts. And as a young child, this is bothersome. This is a problem. You’re up every day? kind of a thing. And I applied that same concept to my artwork, which is the daily reminders and daily things and daily… not affirmations, but something entirely dedicated to reminding me that I can probably be better but also looking back at what I’ve already done to give myself the permission to just do a little bit more. All around my house, I have all kinds of… Well, I have paintings that I’ve made, so I see them every day.
But I also have whiteboards here and there. And I’ll write a quote that I want to keep repeating. And one of them, the most recent one I have written is better to light a candle than curse the darkness. I didn’t realize that that’s where that came from until you asked me that question, but it’s the idea that you have to do something every day to remind, to get yourself to do it so that inevitably when you don’t feel like doing it, you’ve had 47 days of reminding yourself of the importance and looking back at what you’ve done so much, for how much you’ve done so far. And you eventually will just keep making stuff just because you’re in the habit of reminding yourself.
The same with exercise. I haven’t really missed a workout in years. And when I have to miss one, I feel it because when I get up, I exercise. I don’t even think about it. I get up, I exercise, them’s the rules. The same, I get up, I exercise, and before I leave, I have to see this thing that I wrote down with my hand. I’m surrounded by paintings that I like, so it’s a constant reminder. I think that’s really key when you’re pursuing something that is a creative risk, to constantly and regularly remind yourself and encourage yourself because outside is not going to do it. There is no reassurance coming. You have to provide it for yourself.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s get more into your particular art style and your process. Based on what I can see from your website, I feel like after you came back to the States from Jamaica, this is when you really started to come into your own as an artist, not just in words, but in deeds as well by the actual paintings that you’ve created. Tell me about your process. What inspires you to make the art that you do in this fashion?

Kamar Thomas:
Yeah, so the main inspiration was the difference of being a Black man from Jamaica to the US and trying to work out what identity means and trying to make something that says it’s a little bit more complicated than you think. And what changed in graduate school was I more clearly could articulate what the art was supposed to do and I could use better metaphors. I could talk about it better is really what changed. And talking about it better is a function of thinking about it better and more clearly.
The change I want to make was I want someone to look at whatever identity they occupy as something that’s within their control. That sentence took two years of making artwork that I didn’t like to figure out. It took two years of trial and error and critiques in graduate school.
And once you have a clear direction, then I choose from the tools that are available to me. Oil paint I can paint really realistically or I can paint really abstractly or I can use technology to manipulate how an audience interacts with that artwork. And I make series of paintings that are somewhere between really abstract or close to realistic to walk people painting by painting through the idea that your identity can also be… Sure, it can be tangible, it can be reifined, it can be reaffirmed, but it’s also changeable by you. What changed in graduate school was I refined the message a lot more.

Maurice Cherry:
And now you have a connection with one of our other guests on the show, Bennie F. Johnson. He’s the executive director currently of AIGA. How did you two connect?

Kamar Thomas:
After I graduated but before I graduated, a parent of one of the students graduating was walking by the cafeteria, and they had some paintings of mine in there. And she Googled me and contacted me and said, “Hey, I’m in the art business. I’d like to have a conversation.” And we had that conversation. And she introduced me to Bennie. And we went down to DC and I painted Bennie and his wife and hung out with his kids. Wow, those kids must be grown by now that I’m thinking about it, probably. He was really little boy and really little girl, but now they must be big.
Yeah. I made two paintings of him and his wife. And I actually painted their face with face paint with the kids. But the kids are just rough with the face paint while stabbing daddy with the paint brush. I’m like, “You have to be gentle. Just paint a little bit at a time.” And just attacking his face. And same, his wife Akira, I believe is her name, [inaudible 00:46:26], painted her as well I painted them both. I painted a pair of paintings, and I delivered it. And I believe it’s still in their home to this day. It was a lovely experience, and I thanked them for trusting me to do that.

Maurice Cherry:
He texted me the photos. They’re really something. I know the photos don’t do justice to your work, but they’re really striking

Kamar Thomas:
Again, remember I’m from Jamaica, I’m from this hill in Jamaica.

Maurice Cherry:
Stone Hill.

Kamar Thomas:
Yeah, Stony Hill. Washington, DC may as well be Mars. It may as well be a different planet. This is a place where people work in the government and people talk about the Capitol. And people are like, the president’s going to be… White House down there, and this is an Anacostia. And this is professional. He’s driving around and telling me about all this, and my world is expanding. And I thank him quite a lot for that, just telling me about the history of the place and the residents that were there and the kinds of just work that people do.

Maurice Cherry:
Actually, Bennie wanted me to ask you a question. When I talked with him, I told him I was interviewing you. He’s like, “Oh yeah,” and he texted me the photos. Bennie wanted me to ask you about how you use the Black figure and abstraction in your work.

Kamar Thomas:
Yes. When I came to college in 2008, around ’08, ’09-ish was when occupy Wall Street happened. And it was activisty, activist town, activist everything. I arrived in the United States in 2014. And if I remember correctly, that was when one of the first big public police shootings happened. It was just bam, I stepped out of the airport, and then the shooting happened. It was on TV. And it was very much in the air, the making of work that was overtly describing the Black experience as well as it is lived by many in the United States. And I said to myself, “They don’t need anymore negative portrayals of Black people.” I understand, I get it fully what’s happening, but I think… What’s his name? Do you know the book Between the World and Me?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm, Ta-Nehisi Coates. Yeah.

Kamar Thomas:
Ta-Nehisi Coates. Yeah. If I’m a writer, he got it. He nailed it. He got it. I don’t need to write another one like that. I think he has it. I said the same with my paintings. I think when I look through what’s being made right now, I think they got it. I don’t think if I say something, it will be nearly as impactful as if I really focus on this idea of agency, of mutability, of aspiration. And I think now more than ever is when it’s needed.
Never say never, but for the most part, I look at the Black figure… I want, when I’m an old man and my memory’s going in the art history books, they see images of representation that are complex, that are layered, that are nuanced, that are not only in relationship to whiteness, that are exploring the same way every other artist gets to explore. And so that’s how I use the Black figure. Complicated. Take its place, like everybody else.

Maurice Cherry:
Masks are a regular theme in a lot of your work. Tell me about that.

Kamar Thomas:
Yeah. Masks are a metaphor that I return to. And masks in the Caribbean… In Toronto, they recently had this big carnival called Caribana. It’s where one gets to put on a mask and put on a costume and go outside and essentially simulate sex through dancing, essentially, to a beat. And that’s only acceptable if you’re wearing this costume. You can’t just do this at your day job. You can’t pull up to accounts receivable and start doing this behavior.
And I use and I think about masks in that way. It allows you to occupy an identity that gives you privileges, that gives you the ability to act in a way that you ordinarily wouldn’t. And you don’t have to keep it forever. You can change it. And so masks, as a notion of identity is look, of course you are who you are, you’re born or you’re born, but if, when it comes to making art, if you view all of it as yours and like you’re supposed to be there, suddenly where you take influence from is much wider. If you view that the creative production is for you, then telling people about it is not that big a deal. If you think that you are supposed to be passing this class, that your identity is, yeah, pass classes. Then chances are, you’re going to work to pass that class.
Masks are this wonderful metaphor that I keep going back to, I keep finding nuances. Mask can conceal things. You can put it on, you can rob somebody, you can get away with it. Masks can review things. You can wear a mask for ritual purposes to act in ways to enter into states like trances, to enter into states, well, at carnival, et cetera. And masks, with the pandemic, went from being something to protect other people from getting infected with COVID to protecting yourself, to being a status symbol, to… The meaning of it changed over time, so I’ve been fascinated by this concept of masks.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you talked earlier about this exhibition that you had recently. How did it go? Tell me about it.

Kamar Thomas:
It went okay. What I did was I rented a gallery and just paid them the rent for a week and told as many people as I could about it. And people came and purchased the work. It was undertaking because when you pay for the gallery, you have to do everything. You have to show up and hang the work and sweep out the gallery and paint the wall and nail in the painting onto the wall and set up the lights. But from a introducing Toronto to my work perspective, it went swimmingly because one does it. I can show you better than I can tell you. It was a matter of inviting people. Many of them were new to Toronto. And I sell my art mostly to people who have never really bought art before, so it was a great success in that way. I got many, many people who didn’t even think of themselves as people who buy artwork to buy art and to think about it.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s awesome, that’s awesome. I’m glad that it was really successful for you in that way.

Kamar Thomas:
Thank you, thank you.

Maurice Cherry:
Are you planning on doing another exhibition this year? Or surely in the future, you’re planning on doing something.

Kamar Thomas:
In the future, yes. My time for the next couple months is taken up with the book and with… I’m going to be the coordinator of the program I’m teaching at Centennial, so it’s a lot of emails and a lot of tours and a lot of interviews, et cetera is coming up.
But next year I’m planning to… I’ll be painting the whole time. Next year, I have anywhere from five to 10 exhibitions that I’m putting into the calendar. But I’m going to be producing the work to get that done now next year, 2023, by January, the book will be out. By March, I’ll have at least one exhibition. By June, I’ll have another. By July, I’ll have another. By August, I’ll have another. And if my papers are right, I might have one or two in Jamaica as well.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, you got a plan. That’s good.

Kamar Thomas:
Yeah, I have a plan, but saying man makes plans, God laughs, because COVID really.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, well, that’s true, that’s true.

Kamar Thomas:
Here there’s a whole monkeypox coming on the scene.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Kamar Thomas:
We can’t get a break in this century.

Maurice Cherry:
What is it that you ultimately want to convey with your work?

Kamar Thomas:
Yeah. Ultimately, I want people to see art as something that is for everybody. And I want them to see it as a decent job. Now, will you get rich doing it? Probably not. That being said, will you get rich doing anything? Probably not. It’s not more difficult than anything else.
I want people with looking at my work to understand and think through their identity as something that they get to pick. I want to overall increase agency in the world. Increase not just confidence, but the idea of possibility.
My largest challenge is getting students to not just believe that they can do what I’m asking, but that they’re supposed to do what I’m asking, and they’re supposed to do it well. If you look at identity, there is… I think Ben Akerlof, he’s an economist, and he says identity is one of the most significant economic decisions that someone can make. That means when you pick your identity, you pick what clothes you’re going to buy, you pick what shoes you wear, what colleges you can get into, what person you can marry, what neighborhood you’re going to live. And I want people, after having consumed my work, see the significance of those decisions and see that they have much more agency over them. They have way more power.

Maurice Cherry:
When you look back at your younger self, let’s say your 16 year old self, when you look back at him, what advice would you give him?

Kamar Thomas:
Oh man, that’s such a really good question. At 16 years old, I was honestly not listening to nobody. You weren’t going to tell me I’m not going to be pretty good at physics. You weren’t going to tell me I’m not going to be pretty good at anything.
At 16 years old, well, I would actually say go to the dance, is what I would say. When I was in college, they had these things called winter dances. And I was a member of the ASA, African Student Association, and they had a dance. And every year they would ask me, “Just come practice for the dance and do it on the night.” And I would go, “No, I have to paint. I have this problem set to do.” And I never did the dance, never did the dances because, again, your undergraduate was so hard I never did them.
And it was in graduate school I realized how much I missed by not doing the dance, how much outside of class relationships I could have formed if I did the dance, if I just went through the thing and practiced and maybe gotten 98% instead of 100%. You still get an A. I realized at that time, because when I started selling paintings, I realized the need and the importance of human relationships. That’s most of life. Life is group work, is what life is.
I would tell my 16 year old self, A, just go to the dance. Sure, be focused, but you don’t have to be all that focused. Go to the dance. You will have a good time. You’ll form human connections. And when they need help, you’re going to be able to help them. And when you need help, they’re going to be able to help you. But go to the dance is what I would say.

Maurice Cherry:
At this stage of where you’re at in your career as a painter, as an educator, now as an author, how do you define success?

Kamar Thomas:
Yes. I was talking to someone earlier about this concept. I woke up when I was 26 years old and I realized that I had all that I wanted. I wanted to be a painter, and that’s what I did most of the time, most of my days. I applied for a professor job, and I was working as a professor at 26.
Success for me was spending my time doing and utilizing God’s gifts as they have been bestowed to me. And I can learn pretty quickly and I can teach fairly well and I can paint, and I do all of these with most of my time. Success is doing or using the gifts that you have for most of your time. Doesn’t have to be all the time now. We all have to pay taxes and commute to work; most of the time. And for me, I have all I want.

Maurice Cherry:
Given that, and you’ve sort of, I guess, already teased this out a little bit, but where do you see yourself in the next five years? What work do you want to be doing? Any bigger projects or anything like that?

Kamar Thomas:
Whenever I run into any new medium, I try and figure it out and do a project in that medium. Now I’m looking into AR, so Instagram filters and Snapchat filters, provided Snapchat still alive as a company. Those are the kinds of AR that everyone would be familiar with. Augmented reality is what AR stands for. And I’m thinking that this can be a really strong addition to my work. And I’m thinking if I can figure this out, if I can learn that small bit of code… I’m taking a class here and there. In four or five years, I will have two, three projects tying technology and the art that I’m doing.
When I moved in Quebec, all of my friends were concept artists, and they worked in the entertainment industry designing monsters and trying to tell stories. And a part of my job now as a professor is I found myself helping people become illustrators and helping them learn to design those monsters. And as such, I’m looking at them watching much more stories, so there might be some short films in the mix. There might be some form of narrative in the mix.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, just to wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more information about you and about your work and everything online?

Kamar Thomas:
You can find me at kamarthomas.com, or you can find me on Instagram at O-H-K-A-M-A-R. As mentioned earlier, I was a flowery languaged young man, and I got the sentence, “Oh, Kamar,” quite a bit so I made that my Instagram handle. And you can find me at those two places primarily, or if you type my name, Kamar Thomas, into Google, I am proud to say you will find me.

Maurice Cherry:
Sounds good. Well, Kamar Thomas, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. One, I think just like your energy, you really just come across as very self-assured and cool as well as artistic. But I think also just telling your story of coming from Jamaica and always putting your artwork and the work that you’re doing and who you are as an artist at the forefront as you’ve went through life I think, one, it’s granted you the success that you have now, but I think it’s just a really great example to set for others out there that can hopefully do the same thing. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Kamar Thomas:
Perfect. Thank you. Thank you so much. It was a privilege and an honor.

Episode 455: André Elijah

June 13, 2022
Tagged as: Andre Elijah, AR, augmented reality, Canada, creative technologist, immersive director, immersive experiences, metaverse, product designer, Ryerson University, Snap, toronto, XR

André Elijah is an award-winning immersive director, creative technologist, and the founder of André Elijah Immersive.

Virtual reality used to be a science fiction trope in the 90s, but now, virtual reality is actual reality! Take it from this week’s guest: the one and only André Elijah. His work building games and doing marketing projects as an immersive director is sought after by brands and celebrities worldwide, including Google, Meta, Snap, Drake, and Beyoncé. And that’s not all!

Our conversation began with a slight nerd-out moment about VR Troopers — shout-out to Michael Hollander! — and then André gave a rundown about AR, VR, the metaverse, and the ins and outs of immersive experiences. He also shared a bit of his origin story as a child actor, Ryerson University grad, and becoming one of the first people in Canada to use RED cameras (which are now a worldwide industry standard). André also gave some great advice for people looking to get into the immersive space.

There’s more than one way to success, and André proves that you don’t have to chase VC funding to do it!

Transcript

Full Transcript

Maurice Cherry:
All right. So, tell us who you are and what you do.

André Elijah:
My name is André Elijah and I’m an immersive director working in augmented reality and virtual reality.

Maurice Cherry:
How has the year been going for you so far? I can hear from in the background that you probably have started off this year with a pretty big announcement.

André Elijah:
Yeah, my twins are born in January. So yeah, I guess you can hear them in the background. I’ve got noise canceling headphones on.

Maurice Cherry:
No, no, no. You’re you’re all good. Congratulations.

André Elijah:
Thanks, dude. Yeah. It’s been a bit of a shift, but no, it’s been good. It’s been good.

Maurice Cherry:
How has it been juggling work and family? Are you sort of finding that balance now?

André Elijah:
No, it requires a really good partner that can take care of things on the home front while I work maniacally at all hours of the day and night.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, let’s jump into that work a little bit. You have a studio, André Elijah Immersive, and you just recently celebrated your five year anniversary. Congratulations on that.

André Elijah:
Thank you, sir.

Maurice Cherry:
Tell me more about it.

André Elijah:
It’s basically a studio where we build everything we want to see in the world. There’s multiple parts to the company. We’re building games. We see games as the major catalyst to enable these new mediums and platforms. And so we want to be there and kind of build the content that we think will sell units and sell headsets and make this augmented reality and virtual reality future pervasive. And then on the flip side, we also work with a number of agencies and brands doing marketing projects, ad campaigns, that sort of thing, building interactive elements of that, or activations, augmented reality activations, metaverse activations, all kinds of stuff. So we’re constantly busy, probably a little bit too busy, some would say, but no complaints. This year’s been absolutely mental. I think I’m really lucky in that I was able to survive this long in this industry.

André Elijah:
A lot of people thought that VR in particular was going to pop off multiple times already and it didn’t and really kind of found its footing during the pandemic. There’s a lot of things that came together. Everything from Oculus Quest 2 or I guess now Meta Quest 2. Everyone being at home with the pandemic and needing something to do, the rise of VR fitness was really another thing that popped off and helped sell headsets and find a user base. And so all these things coalescing at the same time allowed for me to still be here and be in business all these years later. Definitely one of the lucky ones in that regard.

Maurice Cherry:
VR as a technology, I feel like has been trying to pop off since at least, I guess at least the ’90s, right, the mid ’90s.

André Elijah:
Yeah, that’s correct.

Maurice Cherry:
It has tried to gain some footing. The first, and this is probably weird, but the first thing I think of when I think of VR is VR Troopers. That really horrible, horrible show.

André Elijah:
That show. Yeah. In the ’90s it was basically a riff off of the Power Rangers because there was the three VR Troopers. I remember that. There was a TV station called the New VR and they carried VR troopers. Yeah, it was a station based at a Barrie, Ontario.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh wow. So, interesting thing. Do you remember the black guy that was on there that played JB?

André Elijah:
Yes.

Maurice Cherry:
He works in gaming. I’ve had him on the show before.

André Elijah:
What?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, yeah.

André Elijah:
That is wild.

Maurice Cherry:
He told me all the behind the scenes. That show is so chopped up. It’s like the video form of, I don’t know, scrapple or something. It’s like a whole bunch of stuff taken from different shows that they cobbled together and it’s wild. It’s not even from one show. It’s from five different shows that they put together to make that show because they have different outfits in VR grid versus when they’re fighting the monsters. And it’s so funny. There’s a video on YouTube, if you want to check it out. There’s a video where the cast got drunk and did a voiceover of one of the episodes. It’s so funny. It’s so funny.

André Elijah:
That is awesome. This makes me really happy to hear, I’m not going to lie. It’s funny because no one knows what the hell VR Troopers is. You can mention Power Rangers and everyone knows that. Occasionally you can mention Masked Rider and people will get that because it’s just Kamen Rider. You mention VR Troopers, no one ever knows what the hell you’re talking about. So, you made me really happy right now.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. But to go back to my earlier point, VR has really tried to pop off since then. You had Nintendo with the failed Virtual Boy. You even had video games that had virtual or virtual in it, like Virtual Fighter. There’s been all these attempts to try to make virtual reality really a big thing. And it seems like, as you said now-

André Elijah:
Even the Metal Gear Solid VR missions. And I think it was Metal Gear Solid 2. It was all these simulated missions that were, quote unquote, in VR.

Maurice Cherry:
But even now, as you said, there’s been this perfect storm of I guess the pandemic and the technology becoming at a enough of a consumer price point where it’s starting to become commonplace now.

André Elijah:
Yep. Hundred percent.

Maurice Cherry:
So with your studio, what does a typical day look like for you?

André Elijah:
I don’t really think there is a typical day. It’s everything. So, right now we’ve got multiple VR games in production. One is kind of midway-ish. One is at the tail end and we’re about to go into certification. We’re working on a number of augmented reality projects and advertising campaigns and things like that. So, every day is kind of a mishmash of touching base with my team to see where things are at, play testing our products and projects and giving some feedback there, investigating new technology that we might be called to use in a campaign of some sort or an activation, pitching projects that we ultimately want to build and do. It’s a mishmash. Every day starts early and it goes late, but there’s really no set formula, just whatever we get time to do.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Now we’re talking about VR virtual reality, which again I’m pretty sure most of the audience knows about. But I also just kind of want to level set the conversation because there’s a lot of terms when we talk about these immersive experiences that get thrown around, like AR, XR, the metaverse. Can you give us a couple of definitions of terms that are widely used in this space?

André Elijah:
Yeah. The three that I use are AR, VR, and regrettably metaverse because those are three biggest ones. XR I throw out the window because that just opens up its own can of worms. So, augmented reality is basically digital information overlaid on top of the physical world. So, whether that’s virtual screens that exist in your room, virtual pets that exist in your space and navigate your space that you interact with, things like that. Virtual reality is an entirely virtual space. So, you put on a headset. There is no pass through. You’re not seeing the real world. You are immersed in a fully virtual world with virtual interactions and virtual environments.

André Elijah:
And then we’ve got metaverse, which is basically a think ready player one basically networked experiences with other people in a virtual space. Doesn’t necessarily have to be in VR. You could make a case that Fortnite is a metaverse of its own with the way that people are able to express themselves with various designs and skins and way you can customize yourself. And you’re communicating with people and you have shared tasks and goals or you can just hang out remotely together. I think that’s the perfect example of a metaverse. And so those are really the three that I try and stick to because otherwise you get way too in the weeds with all the different terminology and you lose people.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Why do you regrettably say metaverse?

André Elijah:
Ever since Zuckerberg changed the company’s name, Facebook’s name to Meta, everyone’s been jumping on the metaverse bandwagon. I think in some ways it’s good that we have a shared language finally because if you’ve been working in this space for years, the terminology got pretty hardcore. You had AR, you had VR, you have XR. And then there’s a whole debate online as to what the hell XR even stands for and where the origins of it come from. That’s literally a Twitter battle every other day. And then we’ve got spatial computing, which Magically tried to use to differentiate themselves. And we have Microsoft with Mixed Reality.

André Elijah:
And so there’s all these terms and everyone has their own branded version of the same thing, which made having that common language difficult. So, here’s Zuckerberg blowing $10 billion a year, whatever to make the dream happening. Renames the company Meta in the spirit of the metaverse. And so everyone now is using metaverse for everything. But I just think if you’re building this content, you’re building real time content with networked interactions and expressiveness and personalization, all of things like that. Now we have everyone saying that Web 3 projects are all the metaverse. You buy an NFT and it’s for the metaverse, even though you can’t use that content anywhere else. I saw an article the other day about an audio metaverse and it’s like-

Maurice Cherry:
Oh God.

André Elijah:
Everyone is just… If you do a Google search every day, it’s just nothing but metaverse this metaverse that. And most of it’s bullshit. If people are selling you stuff that will be used in the metaverse, 99% of it can’t be used anywhere because there’s no interoperability with any of the platforms. So it’s kind of disingenuous I find when people use the term metaverse. I think it’s great because it grounds the conversation to a degree. And if anyone with real understanding will know that we’re talking about networked multi-user experiences that are digital. But for the most part, I think it’s become a bit of a hype train thing and I’m waiting for it to die off again.

Maurice Cherry:
It sounds like Meta, Facebook, whatever, they muddied the waters a bit by calling what they’re doing the metaverse because right after that, everyone of course is asking, “Well, what is the metaverse?” But they’re associating the metaverse with Meta and think that everything metaverse related has to do with Meta the company.

André Elijah:
Yeah, that’s true. But I was watching an interview this morning on the Breakfast Club with Charlemagne, and DJ Envy, and Angel Yee. And they had a Ja Rule on there and he was talking about how he’s building a Madison Square Garden for the metaverse. And I’m like, dude, what now? And so then he said two things later, he had said that he was building inside of the platform called the Sandbox, which is a crypto platform. But one Web 3 real time product isn’t the metaverse. He needs a certain level of interoperability between the different platforms and we need to be able to jump to and from them easily before I would ever consider it to be the metaverse. But it’s common parlance now. It’s to the point where 46 year old rappers are dropping the metaverse now in interviews.

Maurice Cherry:
Right. It’s funny. At work where I’m at now, we just released a print magazine and our next issue that we’re doing the theme for it is Web 3. It’s geared towards product communities. And so I’m trying to find what that intersection is going to be between Web 3 and product communities and stuff. But we were initially going to call it metaverse because of that kind of large encompassing, I guess, general definition of it as so many people jump on the bandwagon. But I think narrowing it to Web 3 hopefully will help with that. But I wanted to get those definitions because I think that along with NFTs and DAOs and all that stuff gets thrown in together and people just get confused and I almost feel like that’s on purpose.

André Elijah:
Yeah. I think the running joke right now is if you want to raise a bunch of money, maybe not right now because things are on a downturn, but certainly a couple months ago, if you wanted to raise money, you just say Web 3, metaverse, and DAO and a pitch deck and all of a sudden you’re valued at $50 million. And I was even thinking about doing some stuff in the crypto space and I talked to a couple investors. And honestly, dude, I didn’t have anything solid. It was pretty shaky. The idea that I had and the investors were like, “Yeah, your company, if you started right now, it’s valued at $25 million. I can help you raise $5 million tomorrow.” And it’s like, “Say what? Dude, I don’t even have a deck. I don’t have a company. What are you talking about?”

André Elijah:
I felt a little bit dirty having those conversations. I’m like, you know what, I’m just going to keep on doing this VR AR thing for a minute and just ride this out. But that was the thing. You throw enough of those terms around in a deck and you got a really big valuation and chances are Andreessen Horowitz is going to jump in and value it at a billion dollars, which is those things that was happening. So, it’s interesting.

Maurice Cherry:
So, I was going to ask this question. I’ll still ask it, but I can’t help but notice in your profile picture you have these Snapchat, AR Spectacles. And that’s one way that people can experience these immersive experiences. You also mentioned Meta Quest 2. Are there other ways that people can start to get a sense of what these immersive experiences are about?

André Elijah:
Yeah. So in the case of the spectacles, those are very much developer only or creator only, as Snap’s terminology would be. So, there’s only a handful of people in the world, maybe 600-700 people in the world that have Spectacles right now. They’re early. They’re very cool. I love using them, but they’re really for us to figure out what the capabilities in a lightweight headset need to be for augmented reality to be real and to go mainstream. So, there’s a lot of dialogue between people like myself and Snap to eek out the most performance and have an understanding of how we want to use these things in the first place. I think in the coming years they’ll hit mainstream and you’ll be able to buy them. But right now those glasses are very much for developers to spell out what the future is going to be like.

André Elijah:
In terms of what can you use today to get a sense of what all the stuff is going to be like, Snapchat is huge when it comes to AR. There’s hundreds of millions of active users right now using AR multiple times a day. So, a lot of the marketing projects that my team engages on are all Snap based just because they have a high number of users, the retention is really high, and people just love using the platform. And so my team has built projects for Direct TV and AT&T and Google and probably some others that I can’t even think of right now all on Snap.

André Elijah:
And typically when we get a request for breaking down the project, it always starts off with, “We’re going to target every platform. We’re going to do Spark AR and we’re going to do Web AR so you can hit the stuff in a web browser. And we’re going to do Snap and maybe even a dedicated app.” And two weeks into any of these processes, they’re like, “We’re just going to go to use Snap because they have the highest amount of users, the highest amount of retention, and the capabilities of the platform are dope. So, I think if you want to experience AR right now, Snap is probably the way to go on your phone.

André Elijah:
And if you want to experience virtual reality, Meta Quest 2 is basically the best headset you can get, best platform you can get. It’s a few hundred bucks. You can go to Amazon or Best Buy and pick them up and bring them home. And it’s honestly the best experience that you can get right now all in one standalone headset. You don’t need a computer, which I think VR was really held back for a while by the fact that you needed a gaming computer for the longest time to be able to drive these things. And so here we have a standalone device that’s basically Android phone on your face. And you get really compelling content. You get, if you want to work on your fitness, you got Supernatural, which is probably the best workout app ever. And I’m really into it for the boxing. We’ve got, if you’re into shooters, they’ve remade Resident Evil 4 in VR and it’s only available on the Quest and it’s probably the best VR game I’ve played next to Half-Life: Alyx.

André Elijah:
And so you’ve got all these games that are being able to run in a standalone form factor. And then if you want some of those PC only experiences, then you can connect with a cable or even wirelessly to your PC and have it be a PC headset as well. So I think if you want to get into AR, it’s going to be Snapchat on your phone for the time being. And if you wanted to get into VR, then it’s going to be Meta Quest. And even with the Quest, they’re enabling augmented reality and mixed reality experiences now, too. It’s black and white pass through, but all your content is color. It’s really compelling. It’s really compelling.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. I have a client that bought me, well, actually I had requested him to get me a Meta Quest 2 instead of paying me a deposit, it’s still in my closet. I haven’t broken it out yet. I need to give a spin.

André Elijah:
Yeah. Well if you open it up, which you need to, we can play together and you can add me and I will onboard you. That’s a promise.

Maurice Cherry:
No, you mentioned-

André Elijah:
[crosstalk 00:19:12].

Maurice Cherry:
All right. You mentioned these earlier clients that you’ve worked with. You said Snap, you mentioned just for some of the others I’m looking at your website here, Uber, Sony, Drake, Beyonce. When you’re working with these brands, are you seeing any specific trends when it comes to the type of immersive experiences they want to create?

André Elijah:
Early days VR was very much driven by hype. So, you basically wanted to have a very basic project. Keep in mind the capabilities when this wave of VR was popping off a few years ago, five years ago, the capabilities weren’t really as fleshed out as they are now. So it was basically you could look around in a headset. If you were lucky, you had motion track controllers. But you’re still tethered to a PC that wasn’t very powerful, especially when it was driving a stereoscopic two views at 90 frames per second. So, you were.

André Elijah:
Limited in what you could do. And early days it was basically let’s build this thing, attach a celeb or a big brand to it, and get press. And so basically you were building projects just to get press because there really was no market to make money. So, you were getting paid to build the experiences and your metric was how many views and how many articles did you get? And I think that did a lot of harm to the industry because weren’t creating anything really of value that stood the test of time. People weren’t getting much utility out of it and it hurt the space. And that’s why when I say I’m one of the lucky ones that’s still around, I mean 90% of my peers have died off in this industry to go to adjacent industries or something completely different because there just was no way to make money in VR for the longest time until the last couple years with the advent of the Quest and Quest 2.

André Elijah:
So, I think now we’re at a point where we have enough data and we have enough users that we can make a go of this, if you do it right, and really create value for people, whether it’s through an entertaining experience, like a game, or something that provides utility, like a workout app that actually helps people with fitness. Maybe it’s a meditation app that helps with people’s personal wellness and that sort of thing. So, I think we’re at a point now where we’re trying to identify what are the opportunities to create value for people? As opposed to what’s this flashy headline that I can get with a celeb or a big brand attached just for shits and giggles? And it’s a very different way of working. That’s why I pitch a lot of projects because I don’t necessarily have all these clients coming to me. But it’s like, “Hey, I see an opportunity because I’m working with the platform. I have some insight as to the numbers or percentage splits of who’s engaged in what kind of content. And I see an opportunity here if we do it right.”

André Elijah:
And I think that’s the key thing is doing it right because you don’t want shovelware. You don’t want to announce something that never gets out the door and you ultimately don’t want to fail the platform. As much shit as they take, Meta’s done a really great job in building a platform that succeeds for the developers and that you know that if you manage to get to that store and they push you in front of their audience, you’ll live to fight another day. You won’t have to close up shop, you can pay your mortgage, everything is good.

André Elijah:
And I think part of that responsibility is creating content that stands the test of time, that shows up and does well for its audience. And ultimately, I say this every time we take on a project, we got to come correct. I don’t want to build a thing that we ship on day one and we forget about it. I don’t want to ship something that people forget about. It’s like come correct, create value for the platform, create value for the users, and then identify the next opportunity, and rinse and repeat. But the key thing is to come correct.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m glad that you mentioned shovelware because first of all, that immediately took my mind back to late ’90s, early 2000s when companies were just starting to get on the internet. And they were making just trash just to say that they had some sort of presence, like Pepsi world or something like that. Where you go and it’s like, “Oh, you can view our latest commercial.” Why would I want to view a commercial? It wasn’t any sort of intent behind it, I guess, outside of it being just another commercial, another ad. But I think that was also because brands then, this was such a new technology and a new space, they didn’t know how to operate within it. I would imagine now with the metaverse, maybe companies are a little smarter about the type of experiences that they want to have, maybe, possibly, not really.

André Elijah:
I don’t want to anyone under the bus, but no. There’s group chats with people and we see the latest headlines every now and then from the Verge or Engadget and we trade it around. We say, “Why does this even exist?” There’s a lot of that going around still. That’s kind of the nature of the beast to a degree. You got these huge multi-billion dollar companies that are trying to create platforms and they want some big names attached and the people that have access to those big names. It’s the traditional agency model in a lot of ways where agencies aren’t really run by creative people. There’s a million levels of abstraction involved and everyone takes a meeting on every little thing and it’s designed by committee and none of it is breathtaking. None of it is new. None of it’s innovative. And the end product hurts.

André Elijah:
So, I think a lot of these projects and products that come out that are associated with a big agency and a big brand, you can probably guess that it’s not going to be the greatest thing ever. But if you have a really small, nimble team, that’s dope at what they do and they’ve studied the space and they’ve worked at it, they’ve put in those hours, and they get a hold of something valuable, like a brand or IP, then they’re going to knock it out of the park. That’s been the game with everything from the internet to we saw what happened in last year with the NFTs and Web 3 and all this stuff. Did we really need a Matrix Avatar project that’s basically just a rebranded version of Unreal’s Meta Humans? No, I don’t think we needed that. So I think, VR, AR none of it’s really all that different. I think you just need the indies kind of lay the groundwork for everyone else to follow. And you just make sure that the indies get their flowers and they get their paycheck so they can live another day.

Maurice Cherry:
That makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense because what you are seeing are a lot of small studios and independent developers trying to stake their claim. And now the larger brands are kind of trying to rush in. And now that they see that, oh, this is something that I think we can be a part of in some way, now they want to try to rush in and get a piece of it. So, that makes sense. But some of these considerations you’re talking about, there’s so much to think about with, quote unquote, the metaverse there’s virtual wellbeing, there’s economics around NFTs and stuff, there’s intellectual property. How do you factor in these other types of considerations within your work? Do you think about that stuff?

André Elijah:
No, I try and limit the scope of what I do to exclude all that or else I wouldn’t get anything done all day. Our business right now on the games front, we’ve got a couple original games that we’re working on and we’ve become the master’s of porting games. So, we have access to the IP. We don’t have to worry about any of that. So, we’re in a good spot there. And then when it comes to the agency side, obviously we’re working with the brands and agencies. So IP again, isn’t really a concern for us because they’re coming to us and saying, “Use our name and do this thing.” So, I think the way I’ve tackled this, we kind of get around all of that. I don’t think I have, as well as the studio’s doing, I don’t think I have enough dollars for all the lawyers that would be involved with everything you’re mentioning.

Maurice Cherry:
That makes sense. Let the big companies sort that out. That’s what they’re paying for, right?

André Elijah:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I love that you’ve got this portion on your site with rejected projects. Why did you decide to show those?

André Elijah:
Yeah, so it’s weird, man. So, a lot of what people do when they’re indie is build products and projects and prototype things. But if you take a look at their portfolios, they only have the finished projects, the sexy ones, the ones that shipped. And you never know about what happened in those three months or four months between them shipping stuff. You never know what the backstory is. You don’t know the genesis of so many of these things. And I found myself for a while not shipping projects and doing a lot of prototyping and having a lot of discussions. And I just wanted an avenue to show it off and put it up as in a way that’s like, “Hey, this is not final. It’s not shipping. It’s not representing anyone. But these are the things that we’re thinking about. These are the conversations that we’re having behind closed doors.” The people that we’re talking to are probably people that you would want to want a product from or at least the conversation with to figure out what this would look like.”

André Elijah:
And ultimately I just said one day, “Fuck it. I’m just going to post all of this stuff sitting on all of these decks and all of these ideas and all these email threads and conversations that I’ve had. Why shouldn’t people know about it? They’re not secret.” I did the work to come up with the idea and get it in front of the right people and pitch them. So, maybe people should know that I’m not just kind of sitting around playing Fortnite all day, but I’m not shipping stuff, but I’m actually trying to get things done. I’m trying to build alignment behind the scenes with big brands and stuff. And so just kind of decided one day I got enough material, let’s do it.

André Elijah:
And to be fair, I’m probably showing only a 10th of the rejected pitches that are pretty decent. Just a matter of I need to find the time to throw all that stuff up. So I think we’ve got, what do we have in there, dude? We’ve got some People stuff. We’ve got Title and RocNation who I was talking to for a while about doing some stuff. I think we got Dead Menace in there. So, there’s enough cool ideas and content in there that it just kind of made sense to put it out there and say, “Hey, yeah, I know all these people.” And if we have something strong, I can take an idea back to them as well. And maybe we’ll do something in the future.

Maurice Cherry:
And it’s probably also just a learning experience, hopefully, for people that are like, “Oh, we just got pitched on a similar project. Maybe we don’t do it this way, or something like that. So it’s kind of a learning tool.

André Elijah:
Yeah. A hundred percent

Maurice Cherry:
Now as these immersive technologies become more readily available, now we’ve got, like you said, Snap Spectacles, we got Meta Quest 2. I’m sure there are going to be more peripherals that come down the line in the years to come. What do you think is going to set each experience apart as these technologies become more readily available?

André Elijah:
I think part of it is understanding the tech and how to make it work and understand the limitations and polish everything that you do. Like I said before, you got to come correct. So when we’re creating these different experiences, some of them are games and some of them are applications, mixed reality applications that add a layer of utility on top of your physical space, your home or whatever. I think user experience is really important. Onboarding users that have never touched a headset before is really important. Letting them feel comfortable and getting them to a point of comfort where they can share with their friends, “Hey, put on this headset and try this thing out.” We need to stop getting away from these high end technologies because this kind of tinkerer space or this hardcore technology space and realize that it’s for everyone. So I think polish and onboarding and taking the ego out of it is really important to grow that adoption.

Maurice Cherry:
Now we’ve talked a lot about your work. We’ve talked for the past 30 minutes about your work. Let’s kind of switch back to the real world. Let’s learn more about Andre Elijah, the person, the man. Tell me about where you grew up.

André Elijah:
Yeah. I grew up in Toronto, middle class family, parents working their asses off to give me a future. Initially wanted to be a child actor and got into that for a little bit. And that kind of kicked off my whole film industry thing. So, did a lot of auditions, was in some commercials and couple small movies and that sort of thing growing up. And really loved the energy of being on set really loved being creative with people. So, that I think set the tone for the rest of my career and seeing how people collaborated and worked under really stressful situations on a set to create something really, really dope.

André Elijah:
And grew out of that a little bit. Just the auditions were a lot with everything I had going on at school. I had a lot of extracurriculars and bands and drama and all that sort of stuff. Kind of aged out and then there was an opportunity when I was in, I think grade eight, seven or eight to do what was called an options program and I sucked at sports. So, it was basically an opportunity to do more creative things. So on top of doing debate, there was an opportunity to be part of the film club. And that piqued my interest immediately. My first time shooting and editing, it was a… My first camera that I used was a Canon and GL1 camera, which is a 3CCD or three chip semi-pro camera from Canon. And my first edit suite was I think Final Cut 3 on a Power Mac G4 with mini DV capture deck and external monitors and all that sort of stuff. So I started, they threw me in the deep end and I got to play with the pro stuff first.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

André Elijah:
It was probably seven or eight years before I ever touched iMovie. After I started in Final Cut, I found that whole process of shooting projects and editing them and taking them through post production really, really interesting and fascinating. And I picked it up quick. That just kind of became my thing. And I was always a geek and loved playing with computers. So, the fact that I could create the stuff that people would watch and enjoy while geeking out on these really hardcore computers was a dream from true.

André Elijah:
A lot of the older students, I was grade seventh, grade eight and a lot of the older students that were in grade 11, 12 when they graduated, they went off to work in the big leagues. We had some guys that went off to New York and worked on the Sam Raimi Spider-Man films. We had a couple guys go off to work at visual effects houses. We had some that went off to China and worked in documentary films there. And so I guess they all kind of took me under their wing and I got to see life through their eyes for a while and they onboard me to their projects. So, I was this young kid that was getting really shitty duties on their projects, but it was dope. And eventually I got good at editing. So I became an editor, freelance editor while I was still in high school and all that.

André Elijah:
I ended up working with Radio Television Hong Kong. I was editing some of their documentaries and a buddy of mine that I worked with in the corporate world, we were both moonlighting in the film industry. He ended up going to the American Film Institute. He became a directing fellow there and I edited the three short films that got him accepted into the American Film Institute. So, that kind of set me up. And then I worked at my first agency ever I worked at as a video editor initially cutting together demo reels for them and content for their clients. And then they turned me into a flash developer before flash got killed off by Apple, Steve Jobs, and one letter. They turned me more into a dev than anyone else. And let me see what happened when you press a button and something bounces on a screen. They did that. And I think in a big way kind of set me up to where I’m at now.

Maurice Cherry:
So, you got introduced into tech at a early age, but through media. I think that’s pretty cool.

André Elijah:
Yeah. I really just always love the creative process and being able to geek out to pull that process together. It’s been a lot of fun. It’s been a lot of fun. You see a lot of stuff and yeah, I think the common thread in my career though has been being on the cutting edge of technology. So whether it was the film and using janky ass versions of Final Cut Pro on these ridiculously powerful computers. I did a stint at Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. So, I was a systems analyst for them working on some hardcore service stuff. Years later, after film and agency stuff, working in AR and VR, again, cutting edge of technology. So, I think that’s always been kind of the constant in my life and in my career.

Maurice Cherry:
And now you went to Ryerson University, which I think by the time this interview comes out, people know it’s now Toronto Metropolitan University. But you majored in fine and studio arts as part of their new media program there.

André Elijah:
That’s correct.

Maurice Cherry:
What was your time like there?

André Elijah:
It wasn’t great. I went to Ryerson because the founder of my first agency, he was actually in the first batch of new media graduates at Ryerson. That guy has always been my hero and I love him to death. Shout to Spencer Saunders. I wanted to be like him, so I went to Ryerson and hopped into the new media program over there. And it was very different than when he went to school. I was one of those people, man, I like doing stuff. I don’t really like the theory of things. I like getting my hands dirty. It just didn’t click for me, which is fine. Maybe it clicked for some others, but I like getting my hands dirty. I like building stuff. I like doing the work.

André Elijah:
So, sitting in a class and watching someone code on a projector doesn’t really teach me that much. Hearing about a VHS fine artwork from 20 years prior when we’re doing stuff online didn’t really connect with me. It’s just one of those things. I think that’s been another constant in my life too. I just like doing, I don’t really like the instruction. I Just like getting my hands dirty with the code and seeing how things react when I change things around. So, Ryerson wasn’t really my bag.

André Elijah:
First couple years, I think I was in school full time. And then the last couple years I was working down the street at Canada Pension while I was doing my classes. So, Canada Pension was really cool. They let me slip off to class when I needed to for an hour or two here and then go back to work. So, I start my day early. I’d end it kind of later in the day, probably five, six o’clock. And skip out for, instead of taking lunches or whatever, I’d just go to class. So, at least my last couple years I had real work that I was doing to kind of balance it all out.

André Elijah:
But yeah, go get your degree. That’s the thing that gives you credibility I guess. But I can honestly say, at this point in my career, I don’t think I’ve ever looked back at Ryerson and been like, wow, they set me up for this or everything that I did there led to this. God, no. It was me just kind of downloading Unreal Engine when they announced Unreal Engine 4 and being able to play with those content examples and build my own stuff that really kind of got me here.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s interesting. I have I guess similar experiences to when I was in college. I would imagine that college is still set up this way where your first two years you’re just slammed with classes because you have to take your humanities and all the general stuff before you can really get into your major. And then once you get into your major, there’s not so many classes hopefully. So, you have more time just outside of school to do things. My first year at Morehouse I was ready to go. I was like I don’t know if this is what I want to do. And I stuck it out because eventually I did have part-time jobs. I actually started working in the computer science lab at Morehouse and that’s how I got into, not necessarily how I got into technology. I was into it before then. But I got to spend so much time in the computer lab teaching myself HTML, basic JavaScript, et cetera, reverse engineering webpages, figuring that stuff out on my own that had nothing to do with what I was actually learning in my major courses.

Maurice Cherry:
And so I think if I look back at my time, similar to what you’re saying, I don’t know if I would really recommend it. I could say, “Oh, I went to Morehouse.” And that means something to people in the world. To me, eh, it was okay. It was all right. I got my degree. I got out, no debt. I can say that proudly.

André Elijah:
Key part, right? You got out, you survived, you did it.

Maurice Cherry:
We had our graduation outside. They normally have the graduations outside and it stormed on my graduation, lightning hitting electronics stormed. And I’m sitting there in my cap and gown drenched because the person next to me had an umbrella and he wouldn’t let me get under the umbrella because he’s like, “I don’t know who you are. Our last names just happened to be together in the alphabet. Get away from me.” Yeah, I get what you’re saying.

André Elijah:
At least you went to you graduation though. I skipped mine. So yeah, that tells you everything.

Maurice Cherry:
So after Ryerson, you started out as a freelancer. You were working as a production artist. You were doing a lot of post production work. Was that kind of where the education for you really set in, doing the work?

André Elijah:
Yeah. But even what I was doing half the time there was no template for, there was no real learning other than doing it. So, I was fortunate enough that I got my hands on the first couple RED cameras that ever landed in Canada. So, for the people that don’t know-

Maurice Cherry:
Oh wow.

André Elijah:
Yeah. So that was a big deal. But for people who don’t know, the RED camera was really the first 4K digital camera that film productions could get their hands on. So, it’s from a company called RED and Peter Jackson was the first director that would create a project with them. And it was a short film that he created specifically for the company. And since then, they basically redefined Hollywood and they’re kind of the norm now. And if you watch videos from any of the big YouTubers, like MKBHD, or iJustine, or Jonathan Morrison, any of these people, they all have REDs.

André Elijah:
And back in the day, REDs used to cost as much as a house. So the guy that went off to be a directing fellow at American Film Institute and someone else that I was working with, they both happened to get REDs at launch because they could spend as much as a house on a camera and they were directors. They didn’t want to know how these things worked. They didn’t need to know. So me kind of being the post-production guy and ultimately becoming an onset workflow person, I learned how the camera worked. I learned how to get the footage off the cards, transcode it.

André Elijah:
I could see a camera shooting and know whether or not it was going to die. And in the early days reliability wasn’t that great. And I just became the guy that knew how these damn things worked. And so I was consulting a lot on RED productions. Known as the RED whisperer because I just knew everything about them. I figured it out on the fly. There was no real support network for these things. No one had them. So, we just had to figure it out by the seat of our pants on a really expensive production on set. And so worked with those cameras for years.

André Elijah:
And then that’s kind of what led into me working with Beyonce. So, we were shooting a commercial, a real estate commercial, completely unrelated in New York City. And on the last day of the shoot, I got a message from the director of the Beyonce project saying we’ve got 10 REDs on the floor at a place called Off Hollywood and we don’t know how to set them up. And my partner and I went over there and we got all the cameras on the same firmware version. We set them up so they could do multi-cam shoots. And we got them all up and running at the facility or at the location, which was Roseland Ballroom in New York City, which I think is closed now. And we got those things up and running for four nights and in a day basically.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

André Elijah:
For a live via satellite, quote unquote, live via satellite segment for the Michael Jackson tribute concert. We got through that shoot and it was the first 10 RED multicam shoot ever. And we did it for Beyonce and that just kind of we hacked that together. It wasn’t supposed to work and it did. So all of this stuff, it’s you learn by doing. You learn by throwing yourself into really uncomfortable situations and just saying, “Fuck it, let’s just figure it out.” So, that’s kind of led me from thing to thing and it hasn’t failed me yet.

Maurice Cherry:
Now you founded a studio back then, Last Step Studios. And based on what I’ve heard, your current studio evolved out of that over the course of a weekend. How did that happen?

André Elijah:
Yeah, I’ve had multiple studios. I guess, multiple studios under different names. And I keep on using up all the cool names. That’s why it’s Andre Elijah Immersive now because I just can’t come up with any more cool names that should be the name of a company. So in that company, I founded it with another student from Ryerson and we wanted to make video games. And on day one we realized, oh, crap, video games are very expensive to make, very expensive. And we don’t have money because we’re broke students. And so we pivoted immediately to doing architectural visualization work using real time engines. And so it was initially Unreal Engine.

André Elijah:
The work that we were creating in Unreal, it looked cool, it was realistic looking, and we could change material on couches and on walls and stuff. And that impressed some people, but they ultimately came to us for more traditional rendering work or dollhouse renderings and some static renderings, that sort of thing, because game engines was so new to the real estate market. It didn’t really get a lot of pickup. Ultimately, I think we wanted to do different things.

André Elijah:
I saw the demo of the HoloLens. I think it was at E3 where they showed off the Minecraft demo in AR. And I thought that was really kind of awe inspiring. And I wanted to try my hand at making something like that. I didn’t have the computers to do it. I didn’t have the know how to do it. I just wanted to do it. And at the same time, the Oculus Kickstarter had popped off and VR was trying to find its footing with Palmer at the helm. And there was something new and sexy and crazy about it that I really wanted to be part of. And it just reminded me of the same energy of so many other things that I chased over the years, whether it was doing the post production stuff in Final Cut or I was getting hands on time with the RED.

André Elijah:
It was just kind of new and unexplored and I wanted in. And I saw it. I saw it pretty clearly in my head what it could be. And I just figured I had a chance. So, literally two founders kind of going in different directions and we dissolved the company over a weekend. And by Monday my new company was spun up and I started trying to land that kind of work. And so tried to figure out ways to differentiate myself from everyone else. And I didn’t really know what to do. And I had never 3D modeled in my life. I was the engine guy, my old co-founder was the modeler.

André Elijah:
And I figured, you know what, if I’m going to do anything, I’m just going to go build Drake’s house and see what happens. And so I learned to 3D model and I built out Drake’s house, which I think was I don’t remember now. I think it’s 25,000 square feet or something ridiculous like that, his new house. The floor plans have leaked on the BBC. And so I had the floor plans and I built it out. I made a website for it, sent it out to a couple places, a couple media outlets. It wasn’t anything… I didn’t do a full court press for it or anything.

André Elijah:
And all of a sudden everyone picked up this goddamn house and there were stories everywhere. Teen Vogue picked it up and the Verge or Polygon picked it up, everyone. And I got millions of views in record time. And everyone started hitting me up, platforms and technology companies and other brands. And they’re like, “What are you going to do with this thing? Can you do product placement in this house? Can we roll it out to our platform?” Et cetera. And it took on a life of its own for a while there, trying to figure out what it could be.

André Elijah:
And that kind of gave me the legitimacy in a weird way. It was a horrible project technically. My computers were really weak, so I couldn’t render shadows properly. Couldn’t render post processing. My processors were too weak so I couldn’t even bake the shadows. It was God awful. But again, you have a big name, like Drake, who he’s huge now, but he was big then. You take his name and then you add on something crazy like VR and all of a sudden that’s the perfect combination there for some headlines.

André Elijah:
And so from there, I got a bunch of companies and agencies reaching out to me to do some work and then created the first new home sales suite in real estate for Canada off the back of that. And it actually happened to be for Drake’s agency, the agency that represented him for a bunch of stuff and worked with him for a bunch of stuff. They hit me up to do the first new home sales suite in Canada using VR. And so we rolled that out and prospective home buyers actually went into VR in the sales office and checked out their future homes. And so we rolled those out. And I did some stuff out of Miami. And then all of a sudden I’m doing VR for real estate. The thing that I was intending to do with my old co-founder I’m now doing on my own. And from there other companies started reaching, startups started reaching out to me saying, “Can you prototype ideas of ours? Because we don’t have the talent in house.” So, that was a stepping stone.

André Elijah:
And then suddenly bigger companies are more amenable to me working on their stuff or they’re reaching out. Pretty gradual growth until a couple years ago. Epic Games gave me a MegaGrant for an educational project that I’ve been working on called Innocence in the Fire. And that was the first major co-sign that I ever got. And they were really great. And so as soon as I announced, “Hey guys, I got an Epic MegaGrant.” Bam, life went into overdrive and Snap took me in and has been really supportive. And they keep on shining a light on me with different profiles and different features at their conferences and stuff. And then now I’m working with Meta. I’m working with some other companies. So, it’s been, the last couple years have kind of everything’s gone into overdrive, which I really love and appreciate. But yeah, it took a minute and some craftiness to get in position for that in the first place.

Maurice Cherry:
It sounds like things really kind of snowballed after that. I think it was Drizzy Manor, that was what you called it, right?

André Elijah:
Yep, exactly. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Things kind of just snowballed after that. And now you’re also on the AR, VR program advisory board at Vancouver Film School. How has that experience been for you in a way entering back into education? Although not as a student this time, of course.

André Elijah:
Here, we’ve got a school that has some really amazing graduates. We’ve got Neill Blomkamp went there. End of story, Neill Blomkamp, it’s done, it’s a lock. We’ve got this really amazing traditional film school that wants to explore new media and a new platform. And they’ve really crafted amazing programs and talent to foster that growth. So, initially there was a buddy of mine that was teaching there. He had me just give a guest lecture. The students were really into it. They asked really great questions. And I was honestly impressed because I think certainly myself and my peers weren’t solid students like they were when we were younger. Just talking to the staff and the program coordinator, I was like, “Wow, this is legit. And let’s figure it out.” They just kept on calling me back to give talks.

André Elijah:
And for the project that ended up getting the Epic MegaGrant, we actually used some of the students for their thesis project. We let them build a prototype of the game. The work was really great. And so just in conversations of how do you teach the next wave of people how to get into the space and teach them to prepare for the future. That just kind of became the onboarding to bring me in as advisor for the program. And it’s been great. They take our ideas seriously. The students that they have are amazing.

André Elijah:
The talent they have teaching, they’re all practicing professionals. It’s not those who can’t teach. It’s like that’s not the situation here. They’re all professionals in the space. They’re all people I work with in the space doing really dope shit. And so the students are really lucky. I wish all these teachers were at Ryerson when I was there because maybe I’d take something from it. But no, it’s been a really great experience working with the school and seeing the impact that it’s had on these students and seeing where they land after they graduate has been really dope.

Maurice Cherry:
Now you’ve been quoted as saying that your biggest goal for the future is to set the standard for interactive and immersive education. Where does the passion for that goal come from?

André Elijah:
I went to private school when I was a kid and the best we had were VHS’s and DVDs that were horribly boring. And I think that if you’re paying that much in tuition, maybe there should be a better learning experience there. And I think with the accessibility of the Meta Quest or Snap on your phone, the level of access to content has never been more amazing and higher. And I think that if we, instead of doing shooty, shooty games all the time, we tried to engage people in new concepts and ideas and reinforce learnings, I think we’d be further along. So, I just think ultimately that if we were to use all these skills to build something dope, maybe the future has a chance, particularly around climate education.

André Elijah:
We keep on putting people into videos of this is a polar bear dying or this is the world on fire and it hasn’t really made enough of an impact. You just kind of see the trajectory that the world is on. It’s not great. So, I think that if we were to engage people more and actually show them the effects of their actions in a digital environment or in a simulation, that maybe it’ll hit different. The study’s have proven that if you experience things in VR, your retention is way higher. You understand concepts way more clearly in VR. And I think that if we were to use that for some good, maybe the world would be on a better path. So, that’s just one of my weird altruistic things. But I’m hoping that by making these games that are mainstream and onboard more users and get more people there, there’s a viable path to creating really dope immersive content for education. And then maybe we can turn this world around in a decade from now. That’s the hope anyway.

Maurice Cherry:
Now your career to date, as you’ve described it just in this interview, has been extremely prolific. Who are some of the people that have really helped you out over the years, whether there’s been mentors, peers, anyone?

André Elijah:
Everyone, man. I think this whole industry. I would say the immersive industry is more open and friendly and awesome than any other industry I’ve been part of. I think at the heart of it, we’re all a bunch of misfits trying to find our way and trying to lock in and create the future that we all want. And so it’s been ultimately way more collaborative than any other industry I’ve been part of. So, it doesn’t really matter if it’s a major executive at a company that’s doing immersive stuff or it’s a lowly developer that specializes in some weird thing. The whole industry has been really collaborative and really cool. And there’s you basically check your ego at the door. So, to single anyone out would be kind of weird because I’ve literally gone up to the top execs at Meta, formerly Facebook, and been like, “Hey, I really want a meeting with so and so.” And then they send a message and the next day I get a meeting with that person.

André Elijah:
It’s just one of these things. I think VR and AR, I don’t think anyone that’s in it, really in it isn’t a geek. I think we all identify with each other in really profound ways. And so there’s a level of humility involved in the industry that’s been really great. You see inside of industry Slacks and Discord groups and everything. We’re all sharing information. We’re all sharing learnings. We’re all helping refine each other’s pitches and play testing each other’s games and applications. And as much as it’s Andre Elijah Immersive, there’s a lot of people on my team and there’s a lot of people not on my team that have helped out and helped to get us where we are now. So, it’s really one of those things, it takes a village to raise a kid. So, I think we’re no different

Maurice Cherry:
If there’s somebody that’s out there that’s been listening to this and they want to follow in your footsteps, whether it’s I would imagine just getting into this world of AR and VR, what advice would you give them?

André Elijah:
I would say just do it. I don’t want to sound flippant with that, but this is one of those industries where it doesn’t take a whole lot to be able to get in and start building. When I worked in film years ago, you needed more than a Handycam to have a good looking image. You needed more than just iMovie to have a really solid edit and final delivery. You need the color correcting and all that sort of stuff. And so you have all the software and hardware considerations and all that. With AR and VR, you need a not so powerful computer and a $300 headset and you’re off to the races. Game engines are free. Unity and Unreal are free. They have lots of example projects and tutorials online that you can follow to find your footing and start building, but you don’t need a powerful computer because these headsets are all running mobile parts.

André Elijah:
So, you’re not pushing for photorealism for these projects. So I think for under a grand ultimately you can be set up and you can start building. And so I think that removes a lot of the barriers and a lot of the excuses as to why you can’t get into it. So, I would say literally just Google some of your favorite games and how to rebuild some of those mechanics. There’s literally YouTube channels that just show you in Unreal or in Unity how to build mechanics from games that we all play and like. Learning about the interaction systems and how to set up a project and how to compile. This is all stuff that’s available at your fingertips. So I think more than ever in this industry you want to do it. You can just go ahead and do it. You don’t need to ask for permission. There’s no one gate keeping any crazy hardware or software. You can literally just start.

Maurice Cherry:
What do you think you would’ve went into if you didn’t get into this field?

André Elijah:
I asked myself that a lot. For a while I wanted to be an entertainment and intellectual property lawyer. And for a while I wanted to be a robotics engineer. And for a while I also wanted to be a professional jazz trumpet player. I played trumpet for a number of years.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice.

André Elijah:
It was going to be one of those three things.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. So given how fast all of this is progressing, the technology and everything, where do you see yourself in the next five years? What do you want to be doing?

André Elijah:
I’m going to be shipping a number of games in the next two to three years and then probably go investor. My team members know that I can maintain this pace for a couple more years. They’re all young. They got a lot longer to go and I want to be the first check in on their companies when they go ahead and do their own thing. And I tell them all the time, “I need you guys to bang out these games on these projects and we’re going to do them together. And you’re going to have them to your name and it’s going to be great. And then you’re going to go out and you’re going to do your own thing and you’re going to stomp all over me and it’ll be fun. I just want to be the one to fund you.” So, I really want to be the ones that open some doors for them once they’re done with my stuff and just help the next generation I think.

André Elijah:
I think there’s been this whole thing since early web days, and then you saw the shift to the app store and everything and all these tech companies, there’s a certain progression. And you need to go get your Tech Crunch articles and your press and go get your venture capital and all this sort of stuff. And I think there’s other ways to do that. I think if you’re really good at shipping products and projects that connect with people, there’s a different way forward. And so I just want to impart my wisdom on these people and I know a lot of people and look at my rejected section, I know a lot of people. So if there’s a way for me to open some doors and connect some dots for folks, then I think that’s the position I want to be in a couple years. And not necessarily shipping a project for a brand every month, month and a half and deal with these crazy ass hours. I’m getting old.

Maurice Cherry:
And you got kids!

André Elijah:
And I got kids! I got to watch them grow up and do after school activities with them when they’re older and stuff. So yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Well just to wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more information about you and your work and everything online?

André Elijah:
Yeah. My website is www.andreelijah.com. And my Twitter is @andreelijah. So if you want some industry hot takes, that’s probably the place to go. And then yeah, my website, that’s where the portfolio lies. And if you want to know the work that we’ve done or the stuff we pitched and rejected section, it’s all there.

Maurice Cherry:
Sounds good. Well, Andre Elijah, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. Just hearing this, I don’t know, almost this whirlwind of activity that you’ve got going on, not just with what you’re doing now with the studio, but what you plan to do in the future and really how you’ve had this passion to do this for such a long time. I think it really points to the fact that while these technologies, VR for instance, have taken a long time to get off the ground, there’s been this constant steady push by people like you to really push things into the, not just the mainstream, but to the next level to create experiences that in the future we’ll be talking about for years and years to come. So, thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

André Elijah:
I appreciate you, dude. Thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun.

Episode 251: Nuff

July 16, 2018
Tagged as: Canada, designbynuff, graphic designer, multidisciplinary designer, Nuff, Ontario, RGD, toronto

Nuff is a multidisciplinary designer in Toronto, Ontario.

So there’s a bit of history behind this interview with the mononymous Toronto-based designer Nuff. He was one of the first people I reached out to over five years ago when Revision Path began, and while we’ve kept in touch since then, it’s only until now that I’ve been able to get an interview with him. And let me tell you…it was worth the wait.

We touch on a lot of different topics during our interview, including the Toronto design scene, his creative process behind his digital and physical works, staying creative in the face of impostor syndrome, and more. It’s a pretty comprehensive look at someone who has been forging his own path in this industry while staying true to his ideals.

Did you like this episode? Get special behind-the-scenes access for just $5/month!

Revision Path is sponsored by Facebook Design. No one designs at scale quite like Facebook does, and that scale is only matched by their commitment to giving back to the design community.

Revision Path is also sponsored by Glitch. Glitch is the friendly community where you can build the app of your dreams. Stuck on something? Get help! You got this!

Revision Path is also brought to you by Google Design! Google Design is committed to sharing the best design thinking from Google and beyond. Sign up for their newsletter!

Revision Path is brought to you by MailChimp. Huge thanks to them for their support of the show! Visit them today and say thanks!

Podcast

Episode 212: Mattieau St. Cyr

October 9, 2017
Tagged as: Canada, cinematography, director, Manikk Realm, matte painting, Mattieau St. Cyr, Ontario, Sheridan College, toronto, VFX

Mattieau St. Cyr is a multidisciplinary creator in Toronto, Ontario and the founder of Manikk Realm.

When it comes to his work, Mattieau St. Cyr’s philosophy as a creator is to always stay open. The multi-talented Torontonian has his hands in a lot of projects and wields a number of skills. As a visual storyteller, Mattieau created Mannik Realm, a vehicle for all his creative projects which includes film, apparel, design, and more.

We talked about the inspirations behind Mannik Realm, and Mattieau talked about how his time in Japan helped change him as a designer. He also shared the processes behind some of his work, as well as his influences and some of his goals for the rest of the year. According to Mattieau, anything is attainable, and I think Mannik Realm is a great example of creating the world where you want to live!

Did you like this episode? Get special behind-the-scenes access for just $5/month!

Revision Path is sponsored by Facebook Design. No one designs at scale quite like Facebook does, and that scale is only matched by their commitment to giving back to the design community.

Revision Path is also sponsored by Hover. The first 100 clicks on hover.com/revisionpath will get 10% off their domain!

Revision Path is brought to you by MailChimp. Huge thanks to them for their support of the show! Visit them today and say thanks!

Revision Path is also brought to you by SiteGround. Save 60% off all hosting plans by visiting siteground.com/revisionpath. Excellent!

1 2 »

Tag: toronto

Episode 521: Tolu Adegbite

Sponsored by Brevity & Wit

Sponsored by School of Visual Arts

Episode 466: Kamar Thomas

Transcript

Sponsored by Hover

Episode 455: André Elijah

Transcript

Sponsored by Hover

Episode 251: Nuff

Episode 212: Mattieau St. Cyr

Looking for something?