Check Out Strong Bird’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Strong Bird.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
FYI – I wrote something entirely different here but the universe made me sit on it and while sitting on it I went through an artistic and deeply personal identity crisis. It was long overdue, I am finally through it, and I am redoing all of my answers to all of these questions because of it.
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So here we go, here are the new answers…
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My story is full of a lot of ups, more downs, and somehow I made it into a lot of rooms I thought I wanted to be in. But, over the last year I began realize how much I disliked being in all of those rooms so I proceeded to dismantle all of the things I was previously involved in and directed my focus on figuring out how to be the me I want to be (both as a person and artistically).
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It’s been a rough process that included me walking away from dream projects like working on the cartoon “Smiling Friends” and distancing myself from opportunities that lead me to a VMA nomination, working on a few SXSW and Oscar Nominated projects for Oscar Nominated individuals, and taking a break from working for dream clients like [adult swim] and others.
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With that said, I feel like I have finally arrived at “my life’s work project”; a project called, “STRONG BIRD”. I am very early in the process of developing it but in as few words as I can write, STRONG BIRD is a brand – centered on a cartoon – that I am going to use to build a community of creative, kind and hard working people to surround myself with.
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It’s been an eye opening experience to make it “to the top” of my industry and feel so alone. STRONG BIRD is my reaction to that experience and I hope to build something that attracts other people like myself that are stupid good at what they do but always find themselves feeling as if they’re not embraced at the party… despite planning the party, setting up for the party, cooking for the party, entertaining at the party, walking people to their car as they leave the party, and cleaning up after the party.
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2ND FYI – I apologize for any spelling and or grammatical errors in this response (and all future responses in this interview). I hope everything I am trying to convey comes across properly. If any of my responses make you curious to know more about me / make you want to chat with me, hit me up at strongbird.tv
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xoxo

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It has been a miserably bumpy road.
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I always believed that if I got super good at everything (I ignorantly thought that in order to call yourself “an artist” you had to be amazing at everything that could be classified as art) I would feel like an artist everywhere I went but all it did was make me feel like a fake everywhere I went and incredibly lonely for the first 39 years of my life.
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This resulted in me putting a lot of people on pedestals that didn’t deserve it… which resulted in a lot of toxic relationships for me creatively and personally… which resulted in sacrificing a lot of my personal artistic drive to help others achieve their artistic dreams and hoping people would lift me up after they went up the ladder… but no one did.
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I don’t blame anyone for not reaching back to help me up, it’s not their job or responsibility to help me (or anyone else), but I wish they would have. It would have made the ride a lot more fun and true to what I thought the experience would be… even more so since I (optimistically) grew up thinking that if I made it into the art world I would finally be around “my people” and I would be home but it proved not to be the case time and time and time and time again.
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Learning that lesson, the lesson of, “for artistic happiness you have to be a lightbulb – not a moth”, was far and away the biggest struggle along the way.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
STRONG BIRD is a brand built around a cartoon about a bird starting a wrestling league that I am using to build a community of creative people.
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I will still work on other peoples projects and “in that arena I specialize in making your shit look good” – aka, what Rick Ruben is to creating life in music I am to creating life in motion – but my main focus will be building the STRONG BIRD ecosystem.
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Based on all the people I’ve met in the industries I’ve worked in (music, film, fashion, design, animation, etc) I’ve learned that I am a somewhat rare person in that, when I agree to take on a project, I pour my entire being into it. Your baby is my baby and I will kill myself to make sure it can be the most successful it can be. You do run into that from time to time but the amount of people in these jobs that treat the jobs only as jobs is depressing.
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In terms of “services I offer”, I offer all services… even the stuff I don’t know I offer because I am an artist first and an artisan second and artists are curious people with artisan skills, so, if you have a cool project that needs an extra set of eyes or some energy / vibe injected into it, hit me up. I’m hungry to meet new people and always looking to be creatively stimulate.

How do you think about luck?
The lucky things that happened to me were: I was born to the parents I was born to, I was born in the year I was born, I was born in the location I was born in, and that my wife and I both happened to go to the same Halloween party 16 years ago.
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Everything else – good and bad – has been the result of hard work and saying “yes and no” to opportunities that could and have lead to good or bad experiences.

Pricing:

• Depending on the project I cost from FREE to $$,$$$,$$$.$$

Contact Info:

• Website: http://strongbird.tv/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/str0ng_bird/

Image Credits
The photos were taking by me,
They were modified by me,
And Chooves should get credit for being so damn handsome.