Ep. 164: ManvsMachine's Mike Alderson on Crafting Eye Candy

Co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of ManvsMachine, Mike Alderson, grew up on the outskirts of Liverpool, England, getting into mischief, playing sports, and spending the many rainy days inside drawing ferociously. More practical than academic, Mike started off in a mechanical engineering apprenticeship before learning it was absolutely not for him. Then, after a short stint as a pro BMX racer, his best friend’s brother turned him on to design and he was hooked. He made his way to London, decided it was time to be an adult, and threw himself whole-heartedly into his studies, graduating from Ravensbourne with a degree in Moving Image Design. In 2007, after a series of events that included a night at the pub with his recent ex-boss, Tim Swift, Mike and Tim founded ManvsMachine. Since then, he’s moved to LA, led projects for a world-class client list, and managed burnout, all while remaining a big thinker, a master tinkerer, and continuously punching above his weight.

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Read the Transcript

Amy Devers: Hi everyone, I’m Amy Devers and this is Clever. And today I’m talking with Mike Alderson. Mike is Co-founder & Chief Creative Officer at ManvsMachine, an industry-leading design and direction company that operates predominantly in and around the fields of moving image; whether that be design, brand identity, film, animation or visual effects. The name represents their ethos of embracing the collision point between conceptual and technical. ManvsMachine was co-founded in 2007 by Mike and Tim Swift in Shoreditch England when Mike was only 26 years old.  15 years later, with studios in London and Los Angeles (where he currently resides) Mike and the team at ManvsMachine continue to strive at the forefront of moving image design with a stunning client list that includes brands like Google, Apple, Nike, Pepsi, and Fender Guitars… and an awards shelf that includes Cannes Gold Lions, Emmys and the highly coveted D&AD Black Pencil.

Mike Alderson: I’m Mike Alderson; I live and work in Los Angeles, California. I’m Chief Creative Officer and Co-Founder at ManvsMachine which has offices in London and Los Angeles. And I do it because (laughs) I chose to, it’s the path I chose. 

Amy: It’s the path you chose. In order to learn all about you and this path you’ve chosen, I really like to start at the very beginning of the path. Would you paint the picture of your childhood for me.

Mike: Yeah, so I’m from a town called St Helen’s, which is in Merseyside, up in the North West of England, just outside Liverpool. And it’s a great area, it’s the kind of area that you’re super proud to come from. There’s a massive sense of pride there. People from Liverpool itself, which where my parents are all from, they’re extremely proud people. They were the greatest city in the world for five minutes at some point in history and I think the pride that came with that has stuck and it kind of trickles down, even into the generations coming out today. So it was a great place to grow up. It’s a really, very regular upbringing, industrial town, working class family. My dad worked in the cheese factory, my mum was a receptionist at a doctor’s surgery. But I had a great time, you know, nothing fancy, just went to the schools nearest to my house. Hung out with the kids in my street

Amy: Did you have brothers and sisters? 

Mike: Yes, I’ve got one older sister, not the fanciest of places but because we lived on an estate, a housing estate that was built just before my parents moved in for new families and all that kind of stuff, the place was just full of kids. It was only new families, so you’d get home from school, take your uniform off, throw it on the floor and run outside and there’d be like 20-30-40 kids just out in the street, just all playing out. It was great stuff - just used to get up to all sorts because it was, you know, back in the early 80s, so security and safety was a little bit more relaxed back then, so we kind of do whatever we felt like and go home when we were hungry, basically (laughter). 

Amy: So what did that mean? Were you playing sports in the street, were you getting up to no good, what kinds of activities were you -

Mike: Yes, but anything from as innocent as playing jump rope to the other end of it, like shooting each other with pellet guns and stuff like that. The whole spectrum. We had a little rivalry with some other neighboring housing estates, so there’d be a little bit of argy-bargy between us and them, but looking back on it, it was such a brilliant place to grow up because that was your entire world and it’s such a small, small world that you lived in. And my parents have never left, they still live in the same house they moved into when they got married, that house. And they’re still very happy there. It’s fantastic. Thatto Heath is the name of the little village in St Helen’s. 

Amy: That sounds amazing. I’m really happy to hear, I don’t know, stories of you doing both the good stuff and the bad stuf. Can you walk me through the kinds of things you were fascinated by or what kinds of things interested you and as you’re leading into your teenage years, how you’re expressing yourself, were you the rebellious sort or more of a dashing, I don’t know, fashionista? (Laughter)

Mike: Yeah, I wouldn’t say I was rebellious in the sort of overtly naughty sense. I was a bit of a sneaky one, I was the cheeky kid in class, I guess, where I knew I was being mischievous, but I’d know where the line was, so I’d always try and stay just on the right side of it, but trying to impress my friends through being just naughty enough and all that kind of stuff. And as far as rebellious goes, I mean it’s not rebellious at all, but [0.05.00] one of the distinct memories that I have, there’s a photograph I’ve still got and it’s me and my best friend Billy, we were best mates, lived a few houses down from each other. We walked back and forth to school every single day. We used to love riding our skateboards, wearing our Liverpool football kits. And it’s just something that stuck with me ever since, this idea that we used to get challenged by other kids saying you can’t be into skateboarding or BMX and into football. You’ve got to choose a lane, which what you were attaching yourself to, that more sort of athletic sport world or the more underground, as it was back then, skateboard, BMX world. 

And it just always confused us, we just ignored them and carried on, but that was our favorite thing in the world. We’d spend the whole summers just skateboarding around in our full football kits with sometimes shin pads on and everything (laughter). We weren’t rebellious, but we just, me and my friend Billy, we just had an idea of what we liked and what we wanted and we went with it. 

Amy: Yeah, and so you weren’t adhering to some of the social categories that they were trying to foist upon you. 

Mike: Yeah, not consciously, it was all just us being idiots who couldn’t be bothered changing our clothes, really. 

Amy: But I think those kinds of social lines existed here in the States too, like there’s a… There was a real identification with whatever sport you chose and -

Mike: Yeah, for sure. 

Amy: understand that you left school when you were at 16 to become a welder apprentice?

Mike: In the UK, you can leave at 16 or go onto A-Levels, as it was called then, I don’t know what it’s called now, where you kind of continue on until you’re 18. But yeah, I was always more practical than academic. So I applied for a mechanical engineering apprenticeship that was £45 a week, which seemed like a load of money then. I thought I can save up and buy a car and yes, and I got the place. So St Helen’s is a huge glass manufacturing town, I think there’s like five/six glass factories just in that small town. So it was at the biggest one, Pilkington Glass.  spent the next couple of years learning. 

First year you learned to make your own tools, so that’s how you learned the mechanical side of it, you were welding, you were doing electrical engineering, you were doing all those things to get a grounding in mechanical engineering. And then I went to work in the factory and yeah, then you’re actually on site, learning on the job. And that’s when I learned exactly what I didn’t want to do (laughter), basically. 

Amy: Just as important as learning what you do wanna do, I think, is learning what you don’t wanna do. 

Mike: I’d go as far as even more important, because it gave me such an appreciation for where I’ve ended up. And I don’t mean that in an emotional sense, I can still refer back to that and think, I did not enjoy working shifts in a factory, being underneath a production line trying to weld something laid on your back, inhaling all sorts of stuff that you probably shouldn’t be inhaling. I don’t miss that and I know my dad who worked in a factory all his life was pretty keen for me to not go down that road as well, if I could help it. 

That was a five year apprenticeship that led to a really secure job, so it was a good thing to be doing. But I walked away after two years, which didn’t impress my dad, in the slightest. And mostly because I did it with no real plan, other than to ride my bike. I’d been racing mountain bikes, probably since I was 15 and I got good enough to race pro, so I decided to do that. So I just threw myself into that. 

Amy: So your dad understandably, even though he maybe didn’t want for you a factory life, he did see you in a five year apprenticeship program that would lead to a really great job and you abandoned it after two years to do something that didn’t really have any security associated with it, or a real recipe for security. 

Mike: Yeah, very unimpressed. 

Amy: Have you two worked through that or do you still -

Mike: Oh yeah, yeah, we have now. I mean the thing with me and my dad, we’re always more like, we’re such in the people, such in the personalities, what we’ve worked out in the long run is that we’re actually, we’re kind of more like brothers these days than father and son (laughs). I’ve got massive respect for him, but we’re so similar, we’re virtually the same person, just in a bit of a strange time delay (laughter). I think he actually had big aspirations, he was an excellent drawer and artist and he never got to express any of that [0.10.00]. So I think he’s happy I’ve ended up where I am because he was always frustrated that he could never go down a creative path himself . 

Amy: Hmm-mm, I’m glad he came to appreciate that, that you get to and that it’s hard won, that creative path. I also have a lot of respect for previous generations who just didn’t have those opportunities or that latitude -

Mike: Yeah, even my generation that you know, You had to see the career advisor in school before you deported and I didn’t even know that graphic designer was a job - you go there and they’re like, oh you can be a policeman, a fireman, you can be an engineer, but never did anyone ever say, because I used to draw sort of savagely as a kid because it rained a lot where I grew up, so you’d have to come up with things to do when it was raining and I just lay on the living room floor and just draw, and draw, I’d be drawing cars and houses and generally kind of mechanical things. So I knew what an architect was, so I figured that’s what I want to be. I think I mentioned that to the careers advisor and they were like, don’t be silly. Not in those words, but that was definitely the vibe. Like whoa, whoa, put me in my place a little bit. 

Amy: You’re not the only… Put you in what place, is that really your place?

Mike: Not exactly! (Laughter) And it wasn’t, I don’t want that to come across like someone knocked me down, but it was just like, they were almost like, yeah, that’s not really part of what we offer here, so maybe focus on the simpler stuff. 

Amy: Right, right, but I feel like I’ve heard, a similar story from a lot of people that I’ve talked to and - Just in culture we have a lot of these touch points that end up dissuading people from pursuing the creative path and not only that, we have a lot of lack of understanding of the career opportunities in design. So many people have told me that they stumbled on design or that they had never heard of it before, they didn’t even known it was something you could do. So anyway, I have a personal chip on my shoulder about that (laughs) which is one of the reasons we’re talking about it right now. But, sorry that that guidance counsellor didn’t send you into architecture, but I want to hear about the bike racing chapter of your life because that sounds pretty formative to me. 

Mike: Yeah, that was always my main hobby, it was BMX, skateboarding led to BMX, which I got really into and then mountain biking, got picked up, rode for a team, proper, when I was 16/17/18 and then sort of was at a level where I was doing international races, so I thought I’d just take a year and see where it led. It was brilliant. You didn’t get a big salary or anything, but you sort of lived for free almost. You were just travelling on someone else’s dime and it was brilliant. It was really fantastic. 

I got good but I pretty quickly realized that I wasn’t willing to commit what was required to take me to the real professional level and start making money, which was dedicating yourself completely, training like a mad man. I was always a bit more of an instinctive rider and an instinctive person in every situation than someone who is kind of methodical and planning, making plans into the future. I rode the wave, essentially and at the same time that’s when Billy, who I mentioned earlier - And his older brother, Paul, he was actually doing a design course at one of the local colleges. I think it was the Art Foundation, which is the thing you do after you’re A-Levels before you go to university in the UK. And so I’d go and hang out with Billy in the evenings when I was around and I’d see what Paul was up to and it just looked like the exact kind of things that I wanted to do. It was like, you know, that’s the stuff that comes naturally to me, the stuff I want to do, just problems to solve through, interesting ideas and pretty pictures. 

I kind of watched over his shoulder for a while and then when I was coming to the end of that year of full time biking, I just asked him, how do I get into what you’re doing. But I had to play catch-up a little bit, I hadn’t lost too much time because I had left school at 16 and then going to this little side story and then I wanted to get back onto track of where I think I’d always intended to be. So I had to do a little bit of cheating and I may or may not have borrowed [0.15.00] his portfolio to go to an interview at another college in… I did one or two, changed a few details and I did a few of my own bits. But I was quite opportunist back then, arguably still now (laughter). But I did -

Amy: That sneaky side of you is still [baked?]. 

Mike: Yeah, I mean just like the rules are there for the guidelines, aren’t they?

Amy: Yeah (laughs). 

Mike: so I went to a local foundation degree course, applied for it and they’re, what experience have you got? None. Blah-blah-blah, but I had this portfolio that I had made myself at home and I think they knew that I was kind of pulling their leg, but I think it was just my sheer enthusiasm that allowed them to let me onto the course. I guess they just thought, let’s give him a go and see what he’s got. And I just loved it. As I said earlier, because I think there’s half the people on that course are really into it and really there for the right reasons. 

And the other half they didn’t quite know where they were headed and that was where they’d fallen kind of thing, because you were the best artist in your class blah-blah-blah, I guess I’ll do graphic design because they obviously knew about it, maybe they were from the nice side of town. Where graphic design existed. Yeah, I just remember being almost like embarrassingly enthusiastic on that course. We’d be getting new briefs and I’d always be like, whoo-whoo (laughter), everybody else is just sat around like, oh my god, what’s wrong with this. But I loved it and -

Amy: It’s so endearing though and also it makes everybody else, it raises the energy, it’s great. 

Mike: I absolutely loved it and it was that thing where I’d gone and worked in a factory and done all that stuff and done shifts and done what their dads had done and then I’d had this little sort of hiatus with the bikes and I felt like right, let’s get this thing on track and show, maybe show my parents and show myself what I’ve got in this world. So yeah, I did two years in Liverpool at a local college and then I sort of again, slightly opportunistically, transferred myself into this second year of a proper degree course, rather than starting the first year, I decided myself that I was ready for the second year. So insisted (laughs). 

And I went out to London, I went and saw a few colleges and there was Saint Martins, LCP, but the one I really liked was called Ravensbourne, which is down in South East London, it was just outside, still is just outside town, it was even further outside town when I was there. But it just felt like they were preparing you for the world of work more than just teaching conceptual thinking and that just resonated with me -

Amy: I’ve heard that, it’s very process oriented. 

Mike: Yeah, it’s a huge broadcast college, so it’s a classic design school with graphic design, [** 0.18.05] a huge fashion course, interiors, interior architecture, but it’s got half of the school is broadcast. So you’ve got all these very practical people milling around as well and they do kinda collaborations between the students on the different programs. It was really good. It just resonated with me and the fact it was outside of the center of London, I figured that I’d actually be able to get my head down rather than having my head turned by other temptations, which I am. I’ve got the least willpower of anyone on this planet. 

Amy: Oh, we’re gonna have to talk about that (laughter).

Mike: Yeah, I’m easy to break! If there’s anything fun happening, I’ve got to be there. 

Amy: But it sounds like you found school fun at this point?

Mike: Yeah, I loved it, absolutely loved it! Yeah, so I was caught up at that point, I was joining the second year of a graphic… It was called Visual Communication Design, was the name of the course and so I was joining the second year, a three year degree and I was back on track. I was like right, and I was in London -

Amy: How’s dad feeling about this? 

Mike: I think he was all right back then, I’m not sure, we were (laughs)… It was, yeah, I think that was better than what was before. Definitely not fully there, but on the path. Yeah, it was kind of a big thing. Coming from that part of the country, there’s still the majority of people still stay in their home town or at least just move to a neighboring city like from Liverpool to Manchester or Leeds. So it wasn’t everyone who gallivanted down to London. So I was kind of proud of myself and it is that thing where you have your persona in your home town and then that first year of moving away and living away [0.20.00], it’s that opportunity to redesign yourself isn’t it? 

To reinvent yourself in that first meeting with whoever you’re gonna be with for the next three years, you decide at that moment which version of yourself you want to present. I remember being very aware of that (laughs) and some of my friends who might listen to this might be like, oh, wow, he was really planning his personality there was he? But it was more just an opportunity to shed some of the stuff I used to do back at home that was a bit more mischievous and time wastery, let’s say. Yeah. 

Amy: You’re a little too cryptic for my taste (laughs), I want some specifics. I appreciate that you say that, I do think when you leave town, you have an opportunity, it’s not reinvention because you’re the same person, but it is a chance to sort of interface with other people without their pre-existing expectations. 

Mike: Yeah, I suppose what I mean is, I intended to become an adult really. I knew that I was a very childish adult at that stage; I guess I was 20 years old then. I was immature and just loved being an idiot at any moment. I figured, I can’t keep doing this forever, so now is the perfect opportunity to kind of attempt to apply myself a little better and be someone who is, yeah, almost instead of being the cheeky scamp, being someone who is a little bit more applied and a bit more together I suppose. 

Because that’s what I guess I thought I was in my head, but then you’d always fall back into that thing. But for another reason I started reading about behavioral processes and there are certain types of people where their behavior is attached, almost like geographically to a location or a place or a room. And it’s so true of me. It’s so true of me because I remember talking to somebody about that and… Essentially I went through a massive burnout in 2013, jumping ahead a little bit. 

But when I was trying to… I refused to accept that that was a burnout, I thought, I must be ill, I feel so bad, it must be something physical and then when we finally got around to it, I think somebody said to me, if you really want to change your behaviour, you probably do have to remove yourself from the place where you behave in this way, where you work too hard, never say no, blah-blah-blah. Because for a lot of people that is the solution. 

And thinking back, that was it. It’s almost like you’d have one personality with your mates on your estate at home and then a different personality in the classroom and it was totally true of me. I would just be whatever personality I’d created in that space and stick with it. So it was interesting. I didn’t know all that stuff then, but I remember moving down to London and being like, okay, here comes the sort of more cosmopolitan worldly version of Mike. 

Amy: Well that sounds actually self-aware and I like that you brought this whole tangent up about, first of all burnout, I think that’s an important thing that as creatives we should discuss. But also this idea that social dynamics and behavior and personality can be so carved into geography and local systems that it can be really, really difficult to be someone different, especially when everyone around you is still operating as though you’re the same. 

Mike: Yeah, and that always kind of makes sense really because the actual physical location thing that really fascinated me and -

Amy: Yeah, yeah, that is. 

Mike: I can relate to it completely. To the point where you could arguably change the people in a space and you still wouldn’t be able to snap out of the behaviors that you had formed in that space. It’s just so interesting. 

Amy: Yeah, like I had a friend who told me that he had a friend, so this is not somebody I knew personally, but he’d quit smoking, but he always had to have a cigarette in a rental car (laughter). 

Mike: Exactly, that’s exactly it!

Amy: He could not get in a rental car without having a cigarette. 

Mike: Yeah, good for him (laughter). It’s fascinating, that’s the quirks that come with places, it’s funny. I guess when I’d got home to visit my home town, between semesters and stuff, I’d probably just become the same old version of myself as well and go out on the town and have a load of fun, not that I didn’t do that in London [0.25.00] that was the formative thing. So rather than the mountain biking being a formative thing, I’d say the move to London was the formative part of my life. 

Amy: That makes a lot of sense. It also sounds like you’ve clicked into something that felt like it had real momentum for you to find within yourself your own excellence and your own point of view and your own creative agency and ability to have impact in the world. And that’s a pretty powerful path to be on, especially when you’re clicking so hard. 

Mike: Yeah, and the words you just used are exactly what it was. But I’d have never been able to come up with those words. I was on a mission, I really was. I’ve always been very fortunate that my, possibly my strongest assets is my self-belief and yeah, that’s what I had, I believe I had something to say and I couldn’t wait to get… It was almost like at that point I couldn’t wait to get out of college to apply it to the real world already. I’m very impatient, but that’s where I was at. I’d almost gotten into that kind of catch-up behavior, even though I was caught up at that point. And I never ever really, I never let go of it. I don’t think I have to this day, which again -

Amy: Oh-oh, that’s -

Mike: We’ll get to the burnout, but (laughter) you’re starting to see patterns. 

Amy: I am, I am, which I love about this. it sounds like you found your path in college and you’re ready to get out into the world to apply your craft, what does that look like after graduation, how did you start to do that? 

Mike: So I did two years of Ravensbourne, I did the graphic design course, which was called Visual Communication Design, but after a year of that I saw the people on the other side of the room that we were in and they were doing moving image design. So in the classic sort of never standing still style, I switched for my third year to moving image design. So there was a bunch of catching up to do there because I’d never touched animation softwares or after effects, but it was just this idea that I thought nothing could be any better than graphic design and then someone told me that those guys over there were doing graphic design with a timeline. 

Amy: Ooh! (Laughs)

Mike: Okay, I’m going over there, I’ll see you guys later. 

Amy: You’re a bit of a dared devil aren’t you? 

Mike: Sort of, there’s a sort of healthy naiveté, I’d say, where I’m certainly not an over-thinker, most of the time, unless it comes to, trying to redesign the company websites at the moment and that’s taking, that’s where I am, a genuine over-thinker. Anything to do with our own stuff, I’m the worst with. But yeah. I just saw that that looked like a load of fun and it felt a bit more future-proof because it was, graphic design was quite traditionalist back then and you’re doing layouts still for magazines and newspapers and stuff like that. And I just saw what those guys were doing and it was, it felt like it was really interesting and it was another challenge, so I jumped over there. So yeah, I graduated with a degree in moving image design after scrambling to get my stuff together over there. 

Amy: Okay, can you just give me a little context about how moving image design, what was the state of that industry? Was it mostly motion graphics for movies and TV

Mike: Yeah, yeah, back, that would have been 2003. There was the web bubble thing sort of going on, but that wasn’t, that definitely wasn’t what we did. That was, I think that’s called interactive design and things like that back then, or digital design. It was not that, it was nothing to do with the internet. It was graphic design with a timeline, is the simplest way of putting it and you had the option to use an audio companion with it. It was all broadcast design and yeah, and if you were lucky enough, you’d get to work in the film world as well. But I graduated, I got a job, standard junior designer job and yeah, cut my teeth doing title sequences for daytime television shows and BBC documentaries and stuff, but nothing fancy, just the run of the mill TV world and TV promos, there was a lot of that going on. 

Amy: I have some years logged in the TV industry, so - I know what you’re talking about, yeah [0.30.00]. 

Mike: I got a job with, essentially a broadcast design company and then switched to another one that was a bit cooler called Mainframe and had a really nice two and a half years there. They’re still going strong, they’re a great company. And then in that job, Adam, who was the managing director there, the owner, he kind of embraced my slight aggressive enthusiasm (laughter), let’s call it.  It was a small company at the time and I questioned who was actually making the creative calls at this stage and he was like, me! (Laughter) No, no, I get it, but I feel like you need a creative partner who is going to take that weight off your shoulders. 

I was 24 years old or something and he was just like, are you sure? Are you sure? I was like, yeah. He’s like, okay, you want to come to the meetings with me then? Definitely, yeah. So he gave the title of Head of Design, I think I was asking for Creative Director, he was like, shut up! (Laughter) But he embraced that, take control, or try to, then obviously give it a go. So I was learning on the job and I was just really ambitious and yeah, playing catch-up, sometimes a little too much, you know, like just hearing myself tell that story, it was like, wow, that was a little bit forward, a bit douchey. But yeah, it’s what I was. 

Amy: I guess it can be douchey, but also unbridled enthusiasm is sometimes a pretty powerful energy to… Especially if somebody is over-burdened or has too much on their plate. If somebody really, really is enthusiastic about taking some of that… It’s not control, it’s almost like adding energy to the mix so that it’s lighter and easier to move. 

Mike: Always with a personal motive because anyone who says they’ve not got one is lying. But you can channel that into a collective as well. But yeah, to get us up the food chain, you know, to be doing that sort of top rung work and we were doing really nice work; there was definitely space to grow. So I was like, already sort of seeing the company as a project even though I was just a designer kind of thing (laughs) and yes, sticking my nose in where it maybe wasn’t needed or wanted sometimes. The bigger picture is definitely my natural forte, as in that’s what I see easiest. Whether it’s a design project or just when you’re renovating a home or doing whatever, I definitely always assess the bigger picture before assessing what the details or the smaller pictures within that are. So that’s just the way I’m made. That probably contributes to why I stick my nose into bigger pictures that are nothing to do with me (laughs). 

Amy: That makes sense. I always describe that kind of thinking or mentality as, well, it can be non-linear, but it’s also kind of an aerial view, like a hawk or somebody that sees things from above and then zooms in, in really granular detail, and then can zoom out. Like an aperture focus -

Mike: Yeah, I own this back then, but over the years I’ve worked out that that is the trick to sort of work out where to use your energy and your enthusiasm. It’s that aperture sort of thing where you kind of drop yourself in and parachute into the right parts of the job at the right times to make sure, yeah, you’re not, you’re giving other people space within the project and using your best skills in the right places. 

Amy: So it sounds like you were very bold and enthusiastic at Mainframe and you were doing some interesting work there -

Mike: Yeah. After two and a half years I left them to join a company called Precursor, they were my favorite studio when I was in college. They were three guys, super-cool, just doing MTV stuff, all the stuff that you really wished you were doing, the stuff that was in the books. There was a bookstore, still there in Covent Garden, I think, Magma, I’d just go there on weekends and just look at all the design books because I couldn’t afford to buy them. 

But these guys were in all those books about motion design and broadcast design. So I’d always obsess with them. I’d asked them for a job when I left college and they said no, we don’t need you, we don’t need anyone, we’re fine. I was sort of thinking, you’ve not seen the last of me [0.35.00]. I’d pestered them repeatedly over the years and then they finally got in touch with me and said, okay, I think we’re ready to hire someone like yourself now. I went and joined those guys. 

And that was a, because there were three founders running that place, I had to work out where I was going to fit in because obviously I wasn’t going to be… It was a different role to being in a company where I was trying to carve myself out as a creative lead but I was just so into those guys, I kind of idolized them. But then very shortly after I joined them, they disbanded -

Amy: Oh no. 

Mike: For various reasons. I think it was only six weeks after I joined -

Amy: Oh my goodness. 

Mike: They had to disband the company and that’s essentially… One of those guys was Tim Swift who is my partner at ManvsMachine, that same night that they disbanded Tim and I met in the pub and vowed to start a company the next day. And that is exactly how ManvsMachine started with the founder of my previously favorite studio, so it was a very fortunate sequence of events. we decided to just hit the ground running with what was already available to us essentially. 

Amy: Wow. Whoa, so were you able to, yeah, build off of Precursor with ManvsMachine?

Mike: We kind of analyzed it and we didn’t want to just make Precursor with a different name, it was definitely a new company. So we had a chat. We vowed to do it together and take that leap together even though we didn’t know each other that well, but I definitely respected Tim and I think he respected me because he’d given me a job, an opportunity. But yeah, we analyzed it and we were like, what’s out there, what’s missing. So we evolved it for sure and it was kind of as simple as… Back then it felt like there was design agencies who were great with the conceptual side of things and the design side of things, but then when they were trying to apply it to more high end animation and CG, it was not coming out as good. So great idea, oh, animation is a bit lacking. 

And then there was the big post houses were, they’d be doing stuff that was kind of slightly run of the mill but in its, kind of conceptually, but then the impressive part was the execution. So we just figured, let’s try and be the one-stop-shop that can do both of those things. It kind of made sense to us. So that’s what we wanted to become, like the elite studio where concept and execution were equally important. Essentially craft, we just wanted to be… Our house style wasn’t going to be anything particular. That would form itself. 

But being that bit more refined and that bit more crafted than anybody else in our design world. We were a design agency who happens to make their own stuff and it happens to be as good as anywhere else you could get it made. That was the ambition. 

Amy: Don’t you find that If you can make your own stuff and you are the one with the vision, you are almost the only one who can make it to the standard it needs to be in order to really express that vision?

Mike: Yeah. Here in the States it’s even more extreme, of people staying in their lanes. Well, that’s what I’ve noticed, we’ve been building out the LA office, it’s definitely… Like the word ‘generalist’ is more of a dirty word here than it is in the UK, when you’re looking for artists and things. But the point being, we wanted to mix it all together, so Tim and I were sort of designers/creative directors, the pair of us. Luckily for me Tim had excellent business acumen, so he could look after that side of it as well and it was my job to answer the phone and stuff like that and do the more front of house stuff while he was looking after the back of house. But the first thing we did was hired the best animator, visual effects guy that we could possibly find -

Amy: By the way, this is version 2.0 of you on skateboards in your football kit. 

Mike: Exactly, that’s why it always comes back to me that thing, it’s this thing, where just doing stuff and we’re doing it, we know where we want to go, it doesn’t matter how we get there or what we’re wearing (laughter). [0.40.00] Some of the stuff I was wearing back then as well (laughter), it was not ideal. When you’re trying to verbalize it, it sounds like you inherently separate them to verbalize it. You’re like, it’s like concept and craft coming together. It’s idea and execution coming together, but it’s all the stuff in the middle is what it actually is. But it’s hard to say what that is because, there’s not really a general term for it.

Amy: Right, I totally agree with you. And in a way separating concept and craft is the artificial [** 0.40.56] that shouldn’t have occurred in the first place, like why do we have to put them back together, they never should have been separated. 

Mike: Exactly and it’s this idea that on a grander scale, without being super specific to our world of moving image design, it’s this whole thing that thinking and making need to be separate and I think that exists in all disciplines of life and walks of life and it’s just a shame because we just wanted to be tinkerers. The way we sometimes refer to ourselves, if we’re struggling to communicate to someone what our model is, is we’re basically a visual R&D studio who never misses a deadline. We don’t like open-ended stuff, there needs to be a finite timeline, there needs to be a clear problem to be solved, but we then become a R&D studio where we’ll attempt to solve that problem. Yes, through thinking, of course, but also through just making and trying things and it’s like a bit more like the scuplting process than the kind of standard, okay, let’s write some ideas, let’s storyboard them up, let’s put them into animation, send them to the floor below to be animated. It was intentionally not that, ever. 

Amy: Yeah, that sounds fun, I wanna go out there. (Laughs)

Mike: Yeah, and it’s like that was the whole business model and essentially still is to this day. We didn’t even have job titles for many, many years, it was just, you know, we didn’t have business cards, we didn’t do any promotion, it was just this idea that the work will be the marketing; it’s as simple as that. If we can get the work, we know [** 0.42.48] love, we’re fine and good work leads to good work leads to better work. And -

Amy: Well that’s certainly what happened. I mean since founding in 2007 you were 26 years old, very nice work partnering with somebody who already had the business acumen, by the way - It makes the calculation of the risk a little bit more -

Mike: Yeah, it never felt like a risk but we managed to make it a little riskier by deciding to be a high end studio from day one. And again, I’m not saying that this doesn’t work for some studios, but we were of the opinion that this whole kind of start with mid-range work and work your way up, we thought that was bullshit, to be perfectly honest. It was like, if you wanna be doing global network rebrands and multi-million dollar car ads in a few years’ time, you don’t want to be doing TV promos right now. You can get through it that way but we didn’t see that as the way. We thought because we’ve got a foundation and contacts, let’s not do anything until we get a job, like a high concept job in that is the sort of work we intend to do for the foreseeable future. So that was where the risk came because - We had to bide our time and then a rebrand pitch came in for one of the Channel 4 channels, I can’t remember exactly how we… We were just making people aware we existed at that point. And we pulled out all the stops to win it, no matter what. And then not long after that we partnered with a more traditional brand design studio called Proud who were as small as we were, who were around the corner from us and they’d managed to win the Syfy rebrand when they went from spelling it correctly to spelling it wrong 

Amy: Yeah (laughter). 

Mike: And they’d won that pitch, so they asked us to come on board with them as the motion partner essentially. 

Amy: Yeah, nice. 

Mike: We did that with them. So [0.45.00] it worked out, but there was a bit of a risk that that could just fall flat on its face because we felt ourselves sort of above a certain type of work, but it was a business decision, that was something that we thought was not pretentious, it was just that’s what’s going to be best for this business. 

Amy: I hear the strategy in it because I also am well aware sometimes if you start with bread and butter stuff in the middle, then that’s what you become known for and it’s really hard to challenge people’s expectations and convince them that you’re capable of so much more. 

Mike: Really hard (laughs), especially when you’re working with ad agencies because we worked direct to client predominantly, but we do work with agencies as well. And it’s, yeah, obviously they’re looking for someone to do something that’s almost like a pre-written, pre-mood board, pre-conceived idea. So they just look for the people who have done that the best already and -

Amy: Right, right, they’re not trying to reinvent the wheel, so they don’t want somebody who else is. 

Mike: Why should they put their neck on the line for you, and that’s why working direct to client was always our intention as well. So it was a simple business where for every kind of… Like I said, the job titles were not really a thing, but were internally, I can’t remember whether I read this somewhere at some point in an interview with someone else and I just latched onto it and loved it. The term, or it’s just something that came up, but we refer to ourselves as thinkers who make and makers who think -

Amy: Ooh, that’s good, I like that!

Mike: That’s how the business had to be balanced and again, same to this day. So the hardest part of this whole thing is the talent, the staff and just making sure… That’s why the first person we hired was a guy called John Norlander, who is out there doing great stuff these days and he was an amazing generalist, could do anything in that executional space, but he had an eye and it’s not like what do you want me to do now kinda guy. You forced the makers to think and we forced the thinkers to make, because that’s what we do, but obviously, hopefully, within that there’s a natural kind of hand-off of when it becomes someone else’s responsibility and the support mechanism becomes the thinker versus the support mechanism for the thinking being the maker. 

Amy: it’s also empowering the maker to have some ownership over the thinking and the thinker having some ownership over the making and so you’re equally invested and you’re also both kind of swapping hats all the time. 

Mike: Accountability, essentially. 

Amy: Yeah. 

Mike: Yeah, we’re all in this together, it should just work. even if you’re, yeah, you’re a high end 3D artist, if you’ve got the time, go and sit in that brainstorm because you’d be surprised at what it might fire up or what you might have to contribute and there’s a lot of very humble, very talented, technically driven people out there. But even if they just kind of absorb and then they go away and start playing with a little tool they’ve been building in their spare time and they’re like, hmm, this could be relevant, that was our think. Is that this idea that concept doesn’t just mean words and thoughts; it can mean something that you accidentally made for another project that you’ve parked on a shelf somewhere. 

And then you make it relevant  I sometimes kind of over [**] this point to kind of make the point, but post-rationalizing is a huge part of what we do. It’s a stigma where no one will admit it and it’s almost like a critique of someone, I mean you know, we all kind of look at our rivals work and blah-blah-blah, someone will be like, hmm, no, it looks a bit post-rationalized to me. But that’s so much of what we do. We post-rationalize our own visuals to be relevant to client briefs. And it’s not always in that order, but it’s… You’d be surprised how often it is in that order. 

Amy: Doesn’t post-rationalization though kind of just mean I did this intuitively; I’m not sure where it comes from. Oh, now I see it, now I understand it, here’s why that must have been coming from. 

Mike: Yeah, it’s great. 

Amy: Yeah, that’s exactly what it is! (Laughs)

Mike: But I think… Maybe it’s gone away now, now that people are so much more on the tools and… That coming through college kind of with these 3D skills rather than… And they’re making their own ideas. But there was definitely a thing where everyone as obsessed with having this beautiful sort of, immaculate conception of an idea that was pure and then it was realized. 

Amy: Yeah no, that’s still a thing, yeah. 

Mike: Yeah, I’m so stuck in our own world that I don’t even know how things work outside anymore. But it was just, this is the idea that no, you kind of like, adopted idea. [0.50.00] It’s not an immaculate conception. You’ve got this visual that you’ve accidentally made because it was a kind of happy accident from the previous project, or whatever, someone has been playing in the down time and you’re just like, this is too good not to put in the world, so let’s find a way of getting this thing into the world. And I really hope that some people do, but if I ever end up in any kind of teaching capacity, I will teach post-rationalization because it’s a really, really useful skill. Is that even a word, ‘post-rationalization?’

Amy: Well, you know, I’m gonna have to do some digging after this to make sure I’m understanding it correctly, or maybe we can just make up our own definition, but I am in a teaching capacity and so I’ll do some testing on teaching post-rationalization and report back to you. 

Mike: It’s a life skill, yeah, who can write the best concept, most convincingly (laughs), give them a visual and ask them to write a concept that makes it look like it came before the visual (laughter) because that’s what people want to buy. Like first time clients, we don’t tell them that, ooh yeah, we had this on the shelf for ages and then we remembered about it and thought, this is actually perfect for what you’re doing. So they generally want to think that it’s an immaculate conception, so we don’t do that. 

But then with our repeat clients we definitely let them in on the ride, where it’s like, you know what, we’re just throwing shapes, we’re just playing around (laughter) and we’ll see if anything good happens. And if it doesn’t, then we’ll try something else and we just invite them along for the ride and we’re super transparent with our clients and we show them the fuck-ups as well as the stuff that is successful and that we all have a laugh about it together. 

Amy: Isn’t that beautiful, after you’ve built trust with a client and you can kind of default into your shorthand and they know that fuck-ups are part of the process and they’re also inevitable, so let’s all just sort of have the inside jokes together and get this done -

Mike: Yeah, exactly, yeah, I mean that’s another huge thing is that, frustration about it is that the client, that, trying to never let the culture of the client being the enemy creep into the studio is a huge thing, I think and it’s the easy option because the bigger the companies you work for the bigger… You aspire to work for all these global brands which we’re lucky enough to, but there’s a lot more bureaucracy so there’s a lot more last minute changes of track and feedback. But you can just never let that become, let’s all turn on the clients because they’re paying you basically. They’re the reason you’ve got a job (laughs). 

Amy: Yeah. 

Mike: And that’s your job to respond to their feedback and sometimes it’s frustrating but you just need that culture where it’s like, we try and create a [siege?] mentality between us and our immediate clients because they’ve always got a boss who they report to, which is ultimately like a chief marketing officer or whatever in a big agency. So we try and make it feel like we’re in it together and we’re just trying to impress their boss. Because that’s the only way you get really cool stuff out there, is by impressing someone in an ivory tower who is going to green light it. It’s not more complicated than that. 

Amy: I love that you distilled it down into that simple goal, which is not always easy to achieve, but at least if you can see it that way, then you know what you’re doing and you have to bring everybody along with you because they have to be impressing everybody that they’re working with above them. 

Mike: Yeah, and to the point where we’d even ask clients who were working with us the first time, what’s your… The people who we won’t get to speak to but you speak to, what are they like? What’s their personality? Are they from a creative background? Are they the kind of people who… Are they going to be looking at the stuff you share with them on their phone, in a cab on the way to an airport or are they the kind of people who prefer to make an hour for you once every two weeks and really get into it and they wanna know the whole process. Because that will change how we give you decks and information -

Amy: Yeah, that’s so important, oh wow, that’s brilliant. 

Mike: Yeah and some of them are more forthcoming than others, but usually they’re just slightly a bit like, all right, well, why is this relevant? But then it kind of becomes more relevant as we go along.

Amy: It helps them help the project -

Mike: Don’t waste your time rebuilding a whole deck the way your boss likes to see it, when you could have just told us how… Oh no, if you say, our boss just likes to… We’ll distill your deck down to the five or six best pages, we’ll be like cool, we’ll just try our best to give you like a six to 10 page deck and then you’re good to go, right? And I find that side really fun almost, the psychology of it. Especially after you’ve been doing it a long time and you become a slightly… More of a sort of back into the bigger picture role because I’ve stepped away from the day-to-day design. 

That’s what becomes interesting, is how can we win these pictures in different ways? Sometimes you know you’ve got a great idea [0.55.00] but sometimes you know that there’s another company on the pitch list and you want that client, but the other company has done the last three versions of this same job that you’re about to do. So how can you find those little percentiles to be a refreshing alternative, let’s say, rather than… Because it’s the other companies to lose, so how can you somehow just prise it away from them, even…

Sometimes it doesn’t just come down to the idea or the treatment, sometimes there’s other things at play, but you just need to accept those and it’s not a creativity competition, unfortunately in this business. 

Amy: No, no it’s not. 

Mike: It’s a lot of other stuff, competition. 

Amy: I think it’s important if you’re the creative conceptualizing and technical building that you do is all usually in service of a strategy, then of course you’re going to have a strategy yourself, like strategy is going to be something that you think about. And so the psychology of how to win these pitches is that strategy of becoming really attuned to what means what to who and how to play on the field in such as a way as to surprise your opponent, or not even surprise your opponent, but like you said, refresh the client in a way that maybe wins it for you. 

Amy: But the psychology of winning pitches I think is something I’m really interested in and something I haven’t been that good at, historically (laughs). So hearing you talk about your winning strategy is very fascinating to me. 

Mike: Yeah, it almost became sort of an obsession for me (laughs), that’s almost the main thing, was winning the pitch and then you’d sort of lose sight of what the objective was sometimes because you were so into this idea that… Well punching above your weight and that’s what -

Amy: Okay. 

Mike: That’s probably how I should have described my formative years. I was always the kid who loved being the underdog in any situation. I was a really small kid. It was really weird, but I only had a growth spurt when I was like 18/19 years old, I grew about six inches. 

Amy: Wow!

Mike: So I always had the mentality of a small kid but I really reveled in that mode and that’s One of the reasons we have stayed relatively small, because we like being the underdog. It’s a lot easier to get yourself up for a pitch if you feel like you’ve got something to prove than if, you know, it should be a foregone conclusion. So we love nothing more than to see a 300 person company on a pitch list and then little old us and off we go. 

Amy: Ooh, I like it! Still scrappy after all these years! (Laughter)

Mike: That’ll never go away. 

Amy: I wanna talk about your creative process, but while we’re on this growth of ManvsMachine, I think it’s important to talk about what led to the big burnout of 2013. 

Mike: Yeah, I mean ManvsMachine and we kind of grew it in that way, as I said, we’d find a thinker who makes and then a maker who thinks and a thinker who makes and we kind of set ourselves sporadically in the studio and we’d just get on with it. We didn’t even have producers for a good few years, Tim and I would just do all that stuff as well. We never had any financial backing or anything like that when we started the business, it was just us two, all the risk was on our shoulders. 

Amy: Wow. 

Mike: We didn’t have much money, so we just kind of sold everything we had and made it work. And yeah, trusted ourselves, we kind of clung onto all aspects, and we weren’t big. We’d grow two people a year, if that; it was about finding the right people. But I suppose by about 2013, how long had we been going by then, six years. I’d been feeling off for about a year, but I’d kept it quiet, just not feeling quite right, low energy, blah-blah-blah. I didn’t even tell my wife, who I met on the first day at Ravensbourne, by the way, that day I mentioned of moving down to London -

Amy: Oh my goodness, what a fortuitous -

Mike: Just when I was about to start thinking about reinventing myself, she came and did it for me (laughter). [1.00.00] I didn’t even tell her, it was just, and I kind of ignored it, in typical British stiff upper lip idiot style, until I kind of went to a doctor and said, I just feel… My main symptoms were this constant slight dizziness and light-headedness and just not feeling myself at all. I was convinced I was genuinely ill. I found it impossible to believe that it could be a mental illness or burnout or depression because it was so physically heavy on me. 

And I refused to believe, and my wife, she’s Swedish and they understand that a burnout is kind of part of life over there. They almost plan for it, in a strange way, which is really forward thinking. But I wouldn’t accept it and in the end I just… I had to go to my partner and say, I don’t think… I think I need to leave work for a while because I’m not going to get any better otherwise. And he, being the absolute legend he is, just said, “Just go away and come back when you’re ready, it’s as simple as that.” And it ended up being almost a year. 

During which time I almost had to reset but I had to have every test under the sun before I’d accept, every physical condition possible before my brain could comprehend that it was a mental… In the olden days I guess they call it a nervous breakdown, a burnout. I just hit the wall, completely and I was barely functioning properly. Everything was just difficult. I accepted it and then started the process of fixing it, which is very, very slow. Like I say, it took about a year and I manage it to this day. 

Amy: What was your particular process of fixing it, did it involve setting new balance for yourself and more rest or what? 

Mike: When I stepped away, obviously I was in the thick of everything; it was that whole thing where you’re nervous about stepping away because you carried so much… You were the face of the company, alongside Tim. So it’s like this could be detrimental to the company, but then you realize what’s the point in me killing myself for this? I remember Tim asking me, “What do you want me to say if anyone asks where you are? Do we want to come up with a story or do I just say you’re off because you’re not well?” I said yeah, just say that. I just need to focus on that, so let’s just keep it simple. 

Tell them I’m burned out, I need a rest. And it was interesting that quite a few people got in touch with me privately, from within our industry, peers who I’d met along the way and sort of discretely said to me, “I’ve been through something similar to what I think you’re going through and here are the things I’d wished I’d done.” And they were still very discreet and quiet about it and it was… So that was really reassuring. But there was just some great little nuggets in there. Obviously meditation is the big one and that did help a huge amount when I kind of started doing it properly.

Exercise, once I felt strong enough to exercise again, that’s huge. But there were little things like reflexology became a big one. Someone had recommended reflexology to me and I started going for that and just loved it. The gist of it was, I didn’t know how to relax. I didn’t have the skill of relaxation in my locker, it didn’t exist. It was always something and we were in the company and also me and my wife were flipping properties on the side and living in them at the same time. So it was just that whole thing. 

Amy: Wow. 

Mike: The pattern of me never being content with what’s there and trying to push for something else. So it made sense, in hindsight it all made perfect sense. But yeah, I would just say, I should not have ignored the symptoms or pretended I was fine for so long because that’s what put me in the deepest hole possible. 

Amy: That’s all you knew how to do. 

Mike: Yeah, that is literally all I knew how to do and I  mean if I’d actually shared it with people earlier, I’m sure they’d have given me advice that I could have used. But instead I just stuck with my very basic understanding of the human body and just try and power through, power through and it really didn’t work. But thankfully, I mean there were times when I thought I’d never get better, even an 80% version of myself. But thankfully I did in the end. 

Amy: I’m glad to hear that you’re feeling good these days and that you had to put in the work to… It’s a weird kind of work because it’s not about working harder, it’s about letting go. But it’s hard to let go, so teaching yourself all the little places where you were hanging on and all the little ways and techniques that you could do to let go and also giving yourself permission to let go -

Mike: I still don’t think I can let go though, that’s the thing that I learned. I learned that my solution wouldn’t be to try and teach myself to care less because it’s just not in me. That is something I cannot change. If I’m in a problem, a situation, I don’t have a sliding scale of okay, I’ll just be… I’ll care about that a little bit and I’ll forget about it when I get home. So I worked out that I just had to be really selective about what situations I did. To your analogy earlier, when you kind of zoom the aperture in, and what on, that’s what I had to, I had to really learn to master that. Either completely don’t involve yourself in aspects of the business that you don’t offer a lot to and the areas that you do thrive in and can offer a lot to, really bury yourself in those, was the solution essentially. 

Amy: Don’t you feel like even within those things that you do care so much about, there is a kind of movement that will happen whether you’re pushing it or not and if you don’t wear yourself out pushing it because it’s not necessary, that’s a kind of letting go?

Mike: Yeah, yeah there is, I suppose. It’s that -

Amy: I don’t mean to care less; I almost mean it’s more about when the current is doing the work. 

Mike: Yes, exactly, that’s a really good way of… And a lot of it comes down to trusting those around you and I realize I was just such a control freak, that was… If you asked me in two words, what’s the cause of your burnout – control freak! (Laughter)

Amy: Okay, let that be a word of warning to all the control freaks out there. It’ll get you!

Mike: It’s that whole thing where it’s just like, it’s easier if I do it myself than to spend half a day trying to teach somebody else to do it. Not teach somebody, but I just never graduated from that. That was the great thing. A lot of good things have come out of it, to be perfectly honest. Me learning how to have a more healthy lifestyle, but also things that have really helped the company and allowed, like take away my stranglehold. I know it wasn’t me who just lovingly called myself the ‘creative dictator’ at times because at times I can be quite demanding of people and forceful. But all those things, yeah, it’s trust, I think it’s that sort of current as you’d call it, yeah, I wasn’t there for nine months and it ran just fine (laughter). It was like, okay, maybe the be-all and end-all isn’t me. Which was really healthy to learn.

Amy: Have you found other unexpected benefits as well? Maybe not even business ones but personal ones. Obviously your health is a huge one. 

Mike: I suppose just the knowledge that it is a thing and understanding of mental health as a bigger thing and how misunderstood it is still compared to physical conditions and all that kind of stuff. I can have conversations very comfortably about things that I probably wouldn’t have been able to before that and just a kind of emotional understanding sense. 

Amy: Yeah, totally and I also think it’s really, those times when you’re in need, but you’re not asking but people reach out anyway -

Mike: Yeah. 

Amy: Is just such a beautiful aspect of humanity, I love that. 

Mike: Yeah, it’s the best. There’s always going to be a few bumps in the road, and that was a pretty big one, but like I say, it’s something that I would love to find time to kind of delve into a little bit more, going forward. Not trying to find a fix for that, but just how it exists in our industry and I know a lot of people are writing a lot of really interesting stuff. But I think a lot of it is quite academic still. It’s like how can we make that more of a, something that’s almost a practice that we learn. Almost like the post-rationalization, you don’t want to teach people to know when to back off too early, but you kind of do need to at the same time. [1.10.00]

Amy: Yeah, I mean I think it has to be understood to the point that we build it into our business practices, our creative practices and we support each other around it and it becomes a sort of common enough vernacular that it doesn’t feel difficult to bring up or talk about. 

Mike: Yeah, for sure, the way we operate still to this day is through hunger and yeah, if we’re in a job that we all really want to do, we’ll go to whatever lengths it takes to make that job as good as it can be, even if it is working longer hours and all that kind of stuff. I don’t think the solution is to try and remove that hunger from the labor intensivity of the way we work because that is almost inherent to what we do. But it’s just trying to, like you say, allow space around that. It can’t be that all the time, that you sometimes need to let the current carry you, like you say. 

But sometimes, yeah, you want to be swimming upstream to try and do something that you’re going to be proud of and becomes part of you, as a collective and as individuals, it’s something that… The best thing we did that year essentially, that’s what we’re still trying to strive to do and it’s a kind of strange contradiction really isn’t it? You’re pushing yourself to try and be the best motion design studio in the world, that’s what we wake up and try and do every single day. 

Amy: Yeah, but if you kill yourself, then that’s not… You’re not gonna reach that goal (laughs). 

Mike: Exactly, exactly! That’s why I think we can talk about it until you’re blue in the face, but it’s like, yeah, everything I say I’ve probably contradicted myself in the last 12 months, never mind the last 15 years since we started the studio. Even though I know the pitfalls, I probably still fall into them. It’s really interesting to work out what the… Especially with all the changes in working rhythms and habits, it could even be a good time to try and implement some stuff that protects people. But maybe everyone is not as stupid as me and when most people feel sick, they actually go to the doctor (laughter). 

Amy: I know people, there are people in my life that are exhibiting symptoms that I think honestly, are really stress induced, but they’re somatizing and they’re real physical symptoms that are plaguing them and they’re treating them in ways that are more medical than psychological. Part of me is very much invested in this idea of a holistic approach. You got to treat all angles, your body, mind, soul and spirit and that’s gonna mean different things for different people, so you’ve got to find how you can push yourself and go with the current. For some people that’s going to be a daily meditation practice, or surrounding them with people that they trust. But you know, it’s too reductive to think that other people have it figured out and they go to the doctor and they get it sorted and the problem was just due to your own ineptitude (laughs). 

Mike: Yeah, no, it’s something… It’s interesting actually. I said my wife is Swedish and there’s almost like an allotted burnout allowance, almost, the way I understand it, from the way she talked to me about it. It’s like, yeah, it’s not abnormal for someone at around, a certain age when you’ve been working for a good 10-15 years to call in a burnout and say, “I think I just need to take three months or whatever to reset myself.” British mental health is definitely not the (laughs)… 

Amy: And they get to keep their job?

Mike: Yeah, it’s protected, yeah. 

Amy: That’s pretty amazing. 

Mike: Crazy social system over there. 

Amy: I’m curious; you talked about being interested in the psychology of winning pitches. Did this whole experience make you interested in your own psychology?

Mike: Not massively, no because I guess in a weird way the key to winning pitches is creating the most concise pitch, that’s what I believe. Getting rid of the shit and boiling it down to a palatable thing and I suppose that’s what I tried to do with my own personal self, understanding of my psychological state, if you like. Is all right, I’m a simple being, let’s just work out which things I need and which things I don’t need and just move forward with the things I need. [1.15.00]. So it’s not led me on a deeper journey into psychology, but it’s definitely given me a massive dose of empathy. Before I probably would have been, like turned a nose up or pfffed if someone told me they were tired so they needed to take a bit of time off. I probably would have poo-pooed it, but now obviously I’ve got a very different understanding of that, what that could mean. 

Amy: Well, I mean, you never want bad things to happen to people, but when they do happen, you want them to be actually sort of blessings in disguise and it sounds like this was for you in that you were able to not only recover from it, but learn a more sustainable way of working with yourself and working with others in the process.

Mike: And I guess, as I said earlier, the fact that I am not as important as I thought I was, was probably -

Amy: Isn’t that liberating?

Mike: It is, that was really liberating, that’s the most poignant lesson that came from it probably. Okay, but that’s the beauty of being a collective and that’s why we are a collective first, or it turns out that’s one of the massive advantages of it rather than being a solo designer who is kind of  name studio or a production company where we have named directors who wing pictures under their own name, under our wing. We always work as ManvsMachine, the collective. I don’t put my name on projects, other people don’t put their names on it, we work together, ManvsMachine is the product that people buy, not the individuals. Obviously when the life eventualities happen, we’re in a much better position to deal with it than if we were all trying to compete with each other internally kind of thing or -

Amy: Yeah, it makes the whole man part more resilient and the machine part more fluid. You can absorb the shock and adapt -

Mike: Yeah, it’s gonna happen and it will continue to happen because it creeps up, all that kind of stuff and it’s about being a… You having a support mechanism in place at all times. 

Amy: So, when did you move to Los Angeles and was that about removing yourself from the geographic place where your behavior was destroying you?

Mike: No. Luckily we moved studios as I was coming back actually and that wasn’t, it was a very happy coincidence that it was time to move to a larger studio. So I kind of came back and then within six months we actually did move to a new studio, so I could actually apply that thing of okay, fresh start, different room, same people, but yeah, I remember that being a thing. That happened, that was a nice, well-timed moment, which helped. 

Amy: How do you like Los Angeles? I lived there for 20 years. 

Mike: I love Los Angeles, yeah, I moved here five and a half years ago, as a kid who was into skateboarding, BMX -

Amy: Yeah, that’s your place, those are your people. 

Mike: Southern California was always the mecca and I’ve always been a bit of an Americanophile, so yeah, it was time, we got up to a certain number in London where we felt like the studio is a really comfortable size, adding more people probably isn’t going to strengthen us. So let’s try and do it, repeat the model essentially in a new territory where there’s fresh talent. So Los Angeles was the place that I would like to go and we all agreed that that was the place to go. So off I went (laughter) to Los Angeles and yeah, we’re here five and half years later. I adore this place, it’s for someone who likes to have as many hobbies and recreational interests as possible at any given time, there’s not many places better than this. 

Amy: I’m glad you’re having a good time. You’ve talked a lot about your creative process in terms of running the business, in terms of thinking about how to make things happen, being a thinker who makes and a maker who thinks. Moving image and motion graphics, that’s, moving image design and motion graphics [1.20.00] is out of wheelhouse, except I do recognize the tinkerer at play here. There’s a very kind of hands-on materiality that underpins a lot of it and there’s kind of a celebration of the physical tangible aspects of things by way of exploded view. And so is that something that you think has developed from your intimate understanding of materials and how things get made and go together? 

Mike: I wouldn’t say that, but it is something that has been a very successful specialty of ours. But we are obsessed with [craft?], that’s where the internal competition does exist in our studio, where people are just always trying to, almost one-up each other in a kind of competitively healthy way. Someone will find that way of getting something to look that bit more material and yeah, we do a lot of product driven stuff and our approach is, again, quite reductive. We are not storytellers, but for the sake of this conversation let’s say we’re not trying to make a narrative film that has a product placed in it conveniently. We make product films. 

We put the product front and center, make it the star and then ironically, I think a lot of people think by showing less products, you’re being more creative and as a director you’re expressing more of your individual style and leaving your legacy. But I kind of think the opposite we’ve done a few, let’s say Pepsi, one of the most formulaic brands in the world. We did a few Pepsi ads. 

Let’s just define what boxes need to be ticked. There’s the ice shot. There’s the consumption shot and there’s that ahhh, they have to exist. Do not waste your energy fighting those (laughs). Do those really well and then the client is on board, they know you get it, but then you’ve got these gaps which is the other 40-50% of the spot. That’s where you’ve bought yourself the time to have fun in those spots. It needs to be coherent, but structure is a huge part of what we do as well. 

We don’t always believe there has to be a beginning, middle, end, we’ve got a very strong belief in Uber (laughs) crafted eye candy and that can be enough sometimes. It doesn’t have to have a big reason, a big story behind it. It just needs to engage people and for them to lock into it and then they can release it and let it go. We actually find that we can be a lot more creative when we accept that there’s a really rigid structure and recipe to how certain clients do their thing. That wasn’t something we discovered immediately. 

But I’d say it definitely is true because you’re not fighting the clients, you’re doing exactly what they need you to do, but you’re trying to find a new way of doing it and a better way of doing it, but you’re ticking those big boxes. It’s about putting product front and center, it naturally puts us in that kind of tactile physical world because the products, we don’t tend to work with many digital product clients. They tend to be tech products and cars and anything else. 

So yeah, we’ve become sort of very well versed in creating these kind of fantastic worlds. I could go on forever because I’m obsessed with trying to find this kind of perfect universal language. The simplest way I can say it is, we’ve always been obsessed with mainstream, not trying to make stuff that, Tim and I never wanted to make things where you’d go down to the pub and meet all your other designer/director friends and they’d be like, oh, that’s brilliant mate, well done. And then they’re the only kind of 30 people who would ever see it because it’s just that cool. 

We wanted to do stuff that gets 300 million views, but still make it good. That was always channelled. It’s making mainstream cool, embracing mainstream, that’s… We’d much kind of step away at the end of it all and have rebranded and relaunched and helped define the visual language of the biggest companies in the world. And have as many million eye son [1.25.00] on it as possible and therefore having hopefully influenced taste levels more -

Amy: And shaped culture. 

Mike: Yeah, totally and we’ve been doing it long enough now where I do think, in the 15 years we’ve done it, we have shared the visual languages of some pretty huge companies, like Nike, Apple have a pretty strong visual language already but we’ve been a part of that journey with them - And then there’s a whole load of other clients who we work with and we’re in the process of doing that with now and it’s fun and it’s that obsession with craft of us trying to kind of eke another couple of percent of… And it’s not always trying to make it photo real. Sometimes you’re intentionally trying to make it a little bit fantastical because that just adds a little something that people can’t access or can’t shoot, so that’s why you should come to us because yeah, we use live action as well when the problem requires it. But usually we try to get into this kind of in between world, which is this… I suppose by embracing the recipes and the formulas of slightly more traditional advertising, you’re putting a twist on reality as opposed to trying to create a completely fantasy world from scratch. Good luck selling that to a client, whereas when you’re taking something everybody understands but then just putting your own twist on it or shifting the perspective slightly, which is quite literally the idea with some of the things we’ve done where we have altered perspectives and bent worlds - That’s where the ideas come from. To try and answer, to go back to your question about the materiality and tactility of things, I think it’s original to that, of us embracing the product first and foremost and then working from the out and this idea of things always being grounded in some kind of reality. But you can pick and choose which realities you keep and which ones you play with. Something might look photo real, but it might act in the way, it’s physics might be completely wrong for example and that’s interesting to watch, it never fails. 

And you can pick and choose which combinations of those things. It’s like correct, correct, incorrect and whichever combination you do, you’re usually onto a pretty good thing where you’ve got something that you can sell and win a pitch with, because it’s understandable, but you’re also opening up that kind of 40% fun space to have fun.  It hopefully serves the mainstream but it’s also progressive work at the same time. 

Amy: That’s the feeling I get when I see your work. I appreciate that you are deliberately targeting the mainstream with such a high level of craft because I feel like that’s the ultimate goal, is we should all strive to elevate the quality of things as opposed to sort of race to the middle or the bottom. But the other thing is, and I make furniture, so I understand materiality and I see in some of your work, like the Fender piece is one that comes to mind, an understanding of materiality that comes from real knowledge of it. You’re not posing at understanding the mechanics, the sensuality of a wood grain, that’s not faked. So for me it feels like it’s coming from some place that’s super authentic and has a real understanding of what makes the materiality a visceral access point and working with that in a way that you put your own twist on, which is super cool. It’s very fun to watch and it makes me excited (laughs). 

Mike: Yeah, it’s safe to say that at this point, after all these years we’ve definitely got a good understanding of where the line is with bending the rules or bending the materials and not bending them. And our team is, I can’t take any credit for that level of detail and craftsmanship because that’s those people who do that day-to-day and continue to amaze. I think to try and put it really simply, we never want something to look like it’s come from a computer. 

But we don’t want to think about that, it’s almost, if someone, the ultimate compliment for me is for someone to just watch what I’m doing and be like [1.30.00], oh that was really good. Not to say, oh what did you make that in? What software did you use? Is that shot, is it live… It’s more just like, oh, that was really good, that’s all I want to hear and I want to walk away, even that was nice, I like the word ‘nice.’ Oh that was nice. Because that’s what eye candy is and we happen to be an industry where, whether we like it or not, we are purveyors of world class eye candy - It’s half the job, so there’s no point thinking it’s anything beyond that sometimes because that’s what we’re being paid for. 

Amy: Well, thank you for all the eye candy I enjoyed while researching you for this talk. Where do you think, with all this experience in your review mirror, including your burnout and your recovery and taking your personal life into account with your professional life, where do you see yourself pointed? What direction are you rolling forward?

Mike: As far as the company goes, I think we’re in a really good place, really healthy company with two offices and we’ll continue to do what we do. I don’t think there’s any reason to change that. We’ll continue to strive to be the best motion design studio in the world and that’s what we continue to strive to be. Whether we ever get there or whether we are there is a different question, but we’ll always strive to do that. 

For me it’s interesting because I guess I live here in LA now and you see other opportunities and you see other things. Your peripheral vision is very different to what it was when I lived in London. So it’s all those side projects and the hobbies that you pick up are very different. I don’t know. On a personal level it’s going to be an interesting next five years or so to see what sort of interests and influences I start to pick up because everyone is always like, oh, but you know… You direct stuff; don’t you want to do long form?

And I’m like, not really, I’m kind of afraid of anything longer than 90 seconds. Some people really struggle to understand that because I think a lot of people, direct commercials as a means towards becoming a long form director eventually, that’s the only reason they’re doing it kind of thing. Whereas I kind of… I guess I’m kind of doing my career in reverse a little bit. Where I got lucky to start the company with Tim at such a young age that I kind of, my goals were achieved or achievable really early. 

So now it’s more kind of trying to do the things and apply what I’ve learned to things that I think will benefit from it. There’s still a kind of few bucket list brands, one of them that we’ve never done, big projects with, where you have shaped, not just that brand, but the culture because they are the biggest TV network in that nation, for example. There’s one of those that we’re doing now. It was on the bucket list for sure and so there’s still a few jobs like that where you… They’re kind of cultured defining jobs that it would be really nice to make sure we bag a few of those in the coming years, to continue to feel like we’re making stuff that is getting in front of as many eyes as possible to me that’s how you help share the more tasteful society and by having as much good looking stuff out there as possible. 

Amy: (Laughs) Well, thanks for distilling it down to the most concise pitch. You’ve got the job! (Laughter)

Mike: We’ll take it, all right.

Amy: Thank you so much for sharing your story and thank you for sharing your challenges as well. I think that’s really helpful for people to hear, for the same reason that it was helpful to you when people sort of reached out and let you know that they’d been through something similar. I think when we talk about it a little more openly; other people feel a little more empowered to do something about it. So thank you for that. 

Mike: I hope so, my pleasure. 

Amy: Well, I enjoyed talking to you, I’m gonna keep my eyes peeled on the work that’s coming out because it sounds like it’s culture defining and I want to be there. 

Mike: It’s a slow burner, it might be a short while yet, but there’s some nice ones in the pipeline for sure. 

Amy: Wonderful. Thank you so much Mike, this has been amazing. 

Mike: Thank you, thank you Amy. 

Amy: Thank you for listening! To see images of Mike’s work and read the show notes, click the link in the details of this episode on your podcast app, or go to cleverpodcast.com where you can also sign up for our newsletter, subscribe to Clever on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you would please do us a favor and rate and review - it really does help a lot! We also love chatting with you on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook - you can find us @cleverpodcast. You can find me, @amydevers. Clever is produced by 2VDE Media with editing by Rich Stroffolino, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan and music by El Ten Eleven. Clever is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit airwavemedia.com to discover more great shows. They curate the best of them, so you don’t have to. Clever is proudly distributed by Design Milk

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What is your earliest memory?

Being afraid of the vacuum cleaner

Mike in his Liverpool Kit, 1989

How do you feel about democratic design? 

It’s vital. But sadly I don’t see it being a priority for the majority of the design world anytime soon. I hope I’m wrong.

What’s the best advice that you’ve ever gotten?

“Go for it”

Skateballing in 1989

British Dual Slalom Champs 1999

How do you record your ideas?

I write them down, usually in Milanote.

What’s your current favorite tool or material to work with?

Milanote! I’m really into being super-organized at the moment and find it great for managing both personal and collaborative thought processes.

What book is on your nightstand?

Let My People Go Surfing - Yvon Chouinard

Mike twinning with his dad

Why is authenticity in design important?

Because the best work is imbued with the personality of the people/person who created it.

Favorite restaurant in your city?

Destroyer — http://destroyer.la/

ManvsMachine studio in London

ManvsMachine studio in London

What might we find on your desk right now?

The classic BIC ballpoint with four ink color options. Definitely my all time favorite pen.

Who do you look up to and why?

Anyone who has the ability to be content. A trait I don’t have, but wish I did.

ManvsMachine project Brunch for Google

ManvsMachine’s project on rebranding Film4

What’s your favorite project that you’ve done and why?

Probably the Film4 rebrand, it was a while ago now but was such a great project. Network rebrand like this allow us to flex all our muscles; concept, strategy, brand design, animation, live-action direction.

What are the last five songs you listened to?

The Encanto movie soundtrack. Not through choice, my kids have it on 24/7.

Where can our listeners find you on the web and on social media?

Web — mvsm.com
Instagram — @man.vs.machine / @mike.vs.machine

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Clever is produced and hosted by Amy Devers with editing by Rich Stroffolino, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan, and music by El Ten Eleven.

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Clever is produced by 2VDE Media. Thanks to Rich Stroffolino for editing this episode.
Production assistance from Ilana Nevins and music by El Ten Eleven—hear more on Bandcamp.
Shoutout to Jenny Rask for designing the Clever logo.

Clever is a proud member of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit airwavemedia.com to discover more great shows.

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