Meet Daniel Velez

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Daniel Velez. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Daniel below.

Daniel, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

I think more from my grandparents, I don’t think it was exposed in plain sight to me. But learning about their life seeing them work , how they model for us their commitment of getting their family ahead in such difficult circumstances and times was absorbed unintentionally on my mind. We have really parallel stories although I had a huge advantage. They came from small poor towns to NYC at a very difficult time and I did the same standing on the work they dis decades ago.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

Im a designer from Bayamon, Puerto Rico more specialized in motion and broadcast graphics. After trying different professional careers without knowing what I really was passionate about or like to do, I discovered what I really like after seeing the birth of digital video camera and how that made it easier to edit video on a regular home computer. I bought a Sony video camera with a sears credit card that took me over 10 years to pay it back and started exploring and playing with shooting and editing. That got me to buying a better machine and got a Mac and learned all the adobe software after effects primarily and some fundaments of design.

Long story short I ended up I as an apprentice in advertising doing print ads and freelancing for some animation projects using after effects. And that lead me to desire to learn more about motion industry and I knew I had to leave the island and move to NYC to learn more about motion graphics and work in the most interesting projects. After couple of years between internships , low pay jobs I ended up growing my resume and got an opportunity to work as a visual/motion designer at a studio in Manhattan that was my university, I was there for around 5 years and was able to develop my skills. After that I was able to move on to broadcast design on NBC News and later to NBC Sports were I was able to develop design packages for Winter a Summer Olympic Games. Working on the development of a graphics package of this magnitude was the greatest experience in my career . Starting with a small group of 3 people developing a concept for the Sochi Winter Games staring visiting museums , galleries , exhibitions, libraries and then see the package grow and share it to the rest of the company and the see it being use by hundreds of artists, directors, producers, and athletes is really awesome.

Im also really interested in photography and color grade, last couple of years I’ve been doing landscape photography and being more involve in my neighborhood here in PR which is a small ecosystem with wildlife, beach sports and city life.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

I think the weird way I ended up in the industry, from editing, to print design, to visual effects and then motion graphics I was a super generalist, much broader in how that word is used in the industry, So that help me to create or developed graphics, animations faster or different because I had the skills of more tools that didn’t were used commonly in the industry.

I think getting out of the computer for inspiration, getting out of the internet to start to develop something helps a lot, Getting out to parks, cities, nature, museums, objects can trigger a concept or story that can be developed into a graphic package or an animation.

Okay, so before we go, is there anyone you’d like to shoutout for the role they’ve played in helping you develop the essential skills or overcome challenges along the way?

I think the first person who hired me as an Intern in NYC. Lucien Harriot from Mechanism , he was really patient showing me the best ways to get things done in visual effects and also be more efficient on my projects , always looking what the computer is good on so I was able to focus in the more important stuff in the design.

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