How did you discover your interest in animation, and how did your prior background in photography and fashion inform your creative direction? My interest in animation really began with photography. I was born in Brazil, spent part of my childhood in New Zealand and had my formative years in Tokyo, but it wasn’t until I moved to Florence for my freshman year of college that I became conscious of what it meant to look at the world from the outside. My roommate had a camera, and while traveling and backpacking, I started paying closer attention to people, culture, landscapes and small details that I might otherwise have passed by.

When I moved to New York, I took my savings and bought a medium-format Hasselblad camera. I assisted photographers on fashion and beauty shoots, traveled to the Galápagos Islands to photograph wildlife, and constantly photographed my friends. I loved that the camera gave me an excuse to hide behind something while I was really observing. I was less interested in the perfect image than in capturing a feeling or a moment that might disappear a second later.

Fashion was also always a part of my visual vocabulary. My mother has spent much of her life coaching women around identity and how they want to show up in the world, so image and self-expression were always connected to this point of view for me.

Animation came almost accidentally when I discovered the emerging motion graphics community in New York. I was drawn to the possibilities of bringing design, illustration, photography, movement and communication together. Over time, I found that producing was my natural role within the animation world. I loved recognizing strong ideas, connecting the right people and helping to create the conditions for distinctive work to emerge. I think my eye was being shaped long before I understood that having a point of view could actually become part of my job.

Throughout your career, what have been some of your favorite animated projects that you’ve worked on, and how did they change your perception of what you can achieve with motion? There are so many, but the projects I come back to are often the ones that changed my understanding of what animation could actually do. “Balloonerism,” the 24-minute long animated film we created around Mac Miller’s posthumous album is a recent example. That project reminded me how much emotional weight animation can carry. It can be intimate, strange, beautiful, melancholic and deeply personal without needing to imitate reality. It reinforced for me that animation can hold an audience for an extended story just as powerfully as live action can.

When it comes to creating work for clients, what advantages does animation have over other media that can help establish a relationship between brand and audience? I believe that the power of storytelling is not bound by medium, but one of animation’s greatest advantages is that it allows a brand to create a world that is entirely its own. Character, color, movement, texture and environment can all become part of a distinctive visual language.

That gives brands a different way to build a relationship with an audience. Animation can be funny, strange, tactile or beautiful, and it can express ideas or feelings that may be harder to achieve through live action alone. At its best, animation  gives a brand an ownable point of view that audiences can recognize, connect with and return to over time.

Why do you think the industry needs to invest more in human creativity and move away from focusing solely on algorithms and performance metrics? I think we’ve become overly dependent on metrics as a proxy for understanding people. So much of the industry is driven by algorithms, performance data, attention economics and constant optimization. AI is only going to accelerate that, creating more content, more noise and inevitably more work that is instantly disposable.

What gets lost in that approach are the things that are hardest to quantify: originality, emotional resonance, surprise, cultural relevance and the long-term relationship a piece of work can build with an audience. Metrics can tell you what someone clicked on, but they can’t always tell you why something moved them, stayed with them or made them see a brand differently.

What worries me is that we start trusting the data more than instinct, craft, process and human behavior itself. Great creative work requires time, care, trust and sometimes a willingness to make something before you can prove it will work. That is something we try to protect at Hornet. Technology and performance metrics should serve the idea rather than determine it.

Also, constant output and optimization don’t necessarily create better work. Often, they create burnout and disposable ideas. As new tools make it increasingly easier for anyone to produce more, I think human ingenuity, taste and the ability to make something genuinely meaningful become even more valuable. We should be in control of the systems we create, not the other way around.

What emerging technologies and innovations will have the biggest impact on how animation is created in the next few years? The biggest changes I see coming are advancements around: AI-assisted creative tools; real-time 3-D and rendering; and new forms of motion capture that make it much easier to move between photography, live action, VFX and animation. While these technologies themselves are not new, it is the innovation occurring within them; combined with their coming together into a new tool ecosystem, they will most significantly shape the future of work.

We are already moving toward a world where a photograph can become a navigable 3-D environment; performance can be captured without a traditional motion capture setup; and artists can explore camera, lighting, movement, and character choices much closer to real time. What excites me is giving artists more directable, editable ways to experiment and build. AI is obviously a major part of that—although we are still often underwhelmed by the finished work, compared with what great artists can make by hand, and deeply against the ethics behind pure generative work.

The future I am most interested in is technology that expands what artists can do, rather than substitutes for them. As the tools become more powerful and accessible, authorship, taste and point of view become even more important.

How can brands borrow from culture in fresh ways to tell stories that engage new audiences? The most interesting opportunities come when brands stop looking at culture simply as something to reference, and start engaging with the people, ideas and communities that are actually shaping it. Many ideas that eventually influence mainstream culture begin outside the traditional advertising ecosystem, in art, music, design, fashion, technology and emerging creative communities. Looking beyond advertising can reveal new visual languages and ways of communicating before they become familiar.

But there is a real difference between being inspired by culture and simply borrowing its surface. Audiences can feel that. The brands that feel most relevant take the time to understand a community, collaborate with the people shaping it and contribute something back. For me, freshness comes from a genuine curiosity about where interesting ideas are coming from and giving the people behind them a meaningful role in shaping the work.

In an era in which consumers actively try to avoid advertising, how can brands create authentic experiences that don’t feel like you’re being sold to? Consumers have become incredibly good at avoiding advertising. Between skip buttons, ad blockers and endless content competing for attention, brands cannot assume people will spend time with something simply because it is put in front of them. The question becomes: What are you giving people in exchange for their attention? The strongest brand experiences lead with a story, emotion or experience, rather than a product message.

Do you have any advice for creatives entering the industry today? Stay curious and develop your own point of view. The tools will keep changing, and people entering the industry today are incredibly comfortable teaching themselves new skills through YouTube, social media and whatever comes next. That ability to upskill quickly is valuable, but I would be careful not to shortchange experience and communication.

So much of this industry is about shaping an idea, articulating it, selling it and getting other people to believe in it. You need to know how to speak, how to write, how to listen and how to earn trust. No amount of diligent desktop work or step-by-step tutorials can fully teach you the art of convincing someone that an idea is worth taking a risk on. Those skills are learned by putting yourself in situations where you have to practice them.

Work alongside people who are better than you. Shadow real artisans. Find mentors. Be the understudy. Sit in the room and observe how experienced people communicate, make decisions, recover when something goes wrong and bring others along with them. A tremendous amount is learned through osmosis, not instruction.

Finally, don’t define yourself too narrowly too early. Follow your interests across disciplines and stay open to roles you may not even know exist yet. Craft matters, but so does perspective. In a world where technical skills will become increasingly accessible, your judgment, curiosity, resilience and ability to connect with people may ultimately be what distinguishes you. ca