Today we’d like to introduce you to Kevin Ulrich.
Hi Kevin, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I have always loved telling stories. At the age of eight, I was handwriting short novels about traveling the world with an anthropomorphic lizard as my sidekick. At age ten, I was using a tape recorder to make audio dramas of my Star Wars fan fiction. I viewed filmmaking as the gold standard for storytelling, but it was far out of my reach. That was, until 2001 when LEGO released the “Steven Spielberg Moviemaker set.” With a working camera and stop-motion software, suddenly the power to create movies was in my hands!
Stop-motion animation became an all-consuming passion. From age 11 to 18, every spare minute was spent creating stories, one frame at a time. I then went to film school at Biola University. Knowing that career opportunities in stop-motion were rare, I attempted to become a live-action filmmaker. But I quickly realized that I lacked the resources to produce the grand adventure stories about which I was passionate. So while I learned the ins and outs of live-action filmmaking at college, I spent my Summer and Winter breaks working on a 30-minute claymation fantasy film.
After graduation, my short film ran the festival circuit and picked up a few awards. I hoped this would lead to either a job or funding for a feature, but unfortunately, it did neither. Needing to pay rent, I got a job as a video editor, working on videos for corporations and nonprofits. For a second time, I fully intended to give up on stop-motion animation.
But the siren’s call of creative freedom kept calling me back. So in 2012, two years after graduating from film school, I started a YouTube channel where I uploaded several LEGO Lord of the Rings parody videos. The channel took off, garnering hundreds of thousands of views in the first few weeks.
After posting to YouTube for a little over a year, The LEGO Group reached out to me and asked if I would be interested in doing some freelance gigs for them. Still working full-time as a video editor, I started making commissioned videos on the side. This continued for two years, in which I regularly worked over 80 hours a week. Eventually, the freelance opportunities became too plentiful, and so in 2015, I left the security of my day job and became a full-time freelancer. It was a scary transition, and the inconsistency of gig work is often nerve-wracking. But it’s been 8 years now, the jobs keep coming, and I’m loving it.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
The road definitely did not feel smooth at the time. But with the virtue of hindsight, I can now see how each roadblock was in reality, just a redirect to another opportunity. I am very grateful to my younger self for all of the blood, sweat and tears he put into pursuing his goals. All the effort in my teens and twenties set me up for a much more peaceful and rewarding life in my thirties than I ever expected.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
Put simply, I take lots of pictures of toys, and when you play those pictures back, it looks like they’re alive. One thing that sets my work apart from other animators is that I treat my shots as if they were live-action. I have never taken an animation class in my life, but all of the live-action filmmaking techniques that I learned in college (lighting, camera angles, blocking, editing, sound design) give my work a more cinematic feel than a lot of other animators. I am most proud of a project when it feels fully “immersive”. As a child, when I played with toys, I felt like I was going on an adventure to far away and mythical places. And I love capturing that feeling and conveying it to my viewers.
What’s next?
Well, as of a week ago, I have a kid. So that’s a big change. But no, I don’t really have plans for the future. My life has never turned out how I expected, and so I have learned that “planning” often just distracts me from the opportunities right in front of me. So I intend to make the most of each and every day, continue developing my skills, and see where life takes me.
Pricing:
- $5-10K per 60 seconds of animation
Contact Info:
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BrotherhoodWorkshop
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@BrotherhoodWorkshop/
