DIY whiteboard software limits

In this episode, Andrew Park shares how he crafts connected narratives across space and time using a range of tools. As the creator of the RSA Animate whiteboard animation series, Andrew shares how he’s used visuals to enhance learning in business and education.

Sponsored by The Reflective Travel Sketchnote Workshop Video

Have you ever wanted to create travel sketchnotes from an experience you’ve had, just using the photos and memories you’ve got?

In the Reflective Travel Sketchnote Workshop Video, I’ll guide you through my process for creating travel sketchnotes and then help you reflect on your own photos and memories so that you can make travel sketchnotes of your own trips, too!

This 2-hour recorded video includes a set of downloadable, printable sketching templates and a process to kickstart your own travel sketchnoting practice.

All this for just $20.
https://rohdesign.com/travel

Running Order

• Intro
• Welcome
• Who is Andrew Park?
• Origin Story
• Andrew's current work
• Sponsor: Concepts
• Tips
• Tools
• Where to find Andrew
• Outro

Links

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

• Hairy Hand Productions
• The Visual Flaneur Podcast
• Andrew on Instagram
• Andrew on YouTube

Tools

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

• Whiteboard paint
• Red and black Office marker pens
• Staples Whiteboard
• Moleskine sketchbook
• Leuchtturm sketchbook
• Photoshop
• Wacom Cintiq tablets

Tips

1. Use thinking visual German to go through ideas or solve problems.
2. In a visual way, don't procrastinate, just draw, create.
3. Don't be too precious with stuff. Find what works for you.

Credits

• Producer: Alec Pulianas
• Shownotes and transcripts: Esther Odoro
• Theme music: Jon Schiedermayer

Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army Podcast

You can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source.

Support the Podcast

To support the creation, production, and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off!

Episode Transcript

Mike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike and I'm here with Andrew Park. Andrew, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming.

Andrew Park: Thanks for having me on. It's a real pleasure.

MR: We were chatting probably longer than I should have chatted with Andrew before the recording 'cause I'm a huge fan. So I'm excited to have you on. I think there's lots of fans who probably are in this podcast or watching the video that—and we were talking about that a little bit. The idea of when you do something that's notable, often you're blind to the impact on other people. I know that I am. I occasionally get these emails in, like, "Your book changed my life." Like, oh, really? It was just a book to me. So welcome to the show. And I guess we'll just start off, tell us a little bit about what you do for your day job. I guess I know you as the RSA animate illustrator or animator.

AP: Yep.

MR: Or both, I guess. Obviously, you do more than that, so I'd love to hear what you do.

AP: Yeah, it's misnomer. Actually. I'm not a very good animator. I know the principles of animation, but I have a really talented team that actually bring my drawings to life. If I was gonna say anything, I probably would class myself as a cartoonist. Cartoonist illustrator. But then I'm a visual thinker as well. I know how to sort of join up concepts and, you know, build maps of things. A joined-up thinking cartoon is possibly, it's a bit of a mouthful, but that's kind.

So in my day jobs, obviously, the RSA films were quite successful and it enabled me to build a company around the methodology. So in about 2008, we developed the methodology, the process. It weirdly hadn't existed before. There were a couple of little smatterings of it out in the world. I think they did, I think a UPS commercial used a whiteboard and had a guy drawing on it as a commercial, I think, early on.

MR: Yeah, I remember that.

AP: But the genesis of it was graphic recording or scribing. That's where I learned how to put my pictures together. And then literally had a camera over my shoulder. I think that hadn't been done before, surprisingly. And I think one of the innovations of that, and it wasn't me that came up with it, was actually RSA themselves. They sent me a video of someone taking notes in a journal for the New York Library, and they'd sped the hand up. It was really interesting actually. I thought that's the missing component, because I was trying to literally draw these things live, fast which wasn't really working. I had the missing thing in my brain that why can't I draw a hundred miles an hour? And I literally couldn't work out, oh, you can speed it up. It's video. You know?

MR: Yeah.

AP: So once I saw that, it all sort of fell into place. There's an author called Steven Johnson. Do you know him? Where Good Ideas Come From?

MR: I need to find that book now.

AP: It's really good. And he talks about ideas don't come as eureka moments. They often come as slow hunches. You know, they build, they bubble up and things percolate. And I think in terms of the RSA anime, that's kind of what happened. I've been working, scribing, capturing conversations live, graphic facilitation, graphic recording. And then when you then put a video component in that and think, well, how do I make that work?

The hand from the New York video, New Library video was the, the kind of thing as a catalyst that made me think, here's how it could work. And then if you notice from the early RSA animates, they're really ropey, really rough, really handmade, if you like. And then as we've gone through, they've become more refined and more, you know, you just start thinking, oh, how, what can I do with these things? How can I—

MR: Process, yeah.

AP: So my day job now, is trying to talk about this stuff, extend it in the community. You know, people were interested in how visual thinking can help them. I work with companies and work with businesses to tell the stories. On the back of the RSA films clients came to us and said, "Hey, we want one of those. This seems like a really good way of telling our story." So yeah, over the last, ooh, 20 years now, building a company. I'm really proud of the team I've got. I've got some really fantastic visual thinkers and illustrators, animators that have taken it in their own direction. You know it's not just—I practice it in my way, but then the company has lots of different flavors of how that—

MR: That's nice.

AP: -kind of permeates the role. So, yeah, I'm really proud of those guys. There's some fantastic visual thinkers in Cognitive.

MR: That kind of gives your clients a menu in a sense, right? So you can show them different styles. Is that something that they think about?

AP: Yeah, I mean, there's a stylistic overlay that can go across the films, but if we're gonna talk about the methodology of whiteboard animation, it has the same DNA at its foundation which is showing information in space so that you can see the relationships between things.

MR: Yes. Yeah.

AP: Taking people on a narrative or a journey. There's lots of zooming in and zooming out.

MR: Keeping the focus, holding the focus. Yeah.

AP: Keeping the focus. I mean when we do plan stuff out, we are often—you know, you build the big map and you show a client the end state, it's really overwhelming for them. And then you say, don't worry, it's not gonna do that. We're gonna take you right into the beginning. And things draw and they build up in time. So what we have to do in the way that we work, is to have that end-state in mind when we build stuff. I suppose with Sketchnoting, you know, you are building it in time live, right?

MR: Yes. Yeah. Typically, yeah.

AP: Yeah, that's what you do. Whereas we would probably plan it to end up with that end-state, and almost then erase all that, and then go back to the beginning and—

MR: Work backwards. Yeah.

AP: -work backwards. Yeah. So that's how it kind of works.

MR: I was mentioning when we first chatted before we recorded that the first thing I thought when I saw the RSA—I don't know which one I saw first. Probably Dan Pink, the first thing I thought was, wow, there was a lot of preparation that went into making this video that I don't know people necessarily realize has been going on. Because as an old print designer, like a graphic designer who did print production, everything I designed, I had to find a way to make that print on paper. And I learned the hard way when things didn't work. And I changed my process based on it. And I knew once I saw that, like, wow, okay, somebody did some serious planning, and exactly what you said, they kind of reverse engineered from state backwards.

Okay, which, here's how it looks when it's finished. How do we piece this together in a logical way that holds focus and brings people through to the end? That was pretty immediately apparent. And I thought it was just like, wow, this is really cool. And I couldn't stop watching them. So as is true for a lot of people, right, it was a huge—I don't know, came outta nowhere, I guess, for a lot of people. And suddenly there's this cool thing and you can't get enough of it, which I guess is, was good for you, I suppose.

AP: Oh, it was great. But like you say, you know, you sometimes don't know 'cause you can't see the wood for the trees. You are involved in it, you're working in it closely, and it's rare that you put your head above the parapet. I mean, obviously I knew early on the RSA when we put a first couple out, they said, these are really popular. They're more popular than the talking head videos. And we were like, oh, great, cool. Then we should make some more then.

And then we continued. It was very much organic, let's make the next one and then the next one, you know. And then we started to—I think it was like the Dan Pink or the Ken Robinson RSA animates that just went bang. And millions of people watched those, which was really surprising. That enabled us to sort of think differently about—you know, I was no longer thinking, well, I still go out and scribe. And James, you've interviewed my friend James.

MR: James Bailey, yeah.

AP: Yeah, James Bailey. He said, "Oh, you've done a Beatles. You know, you don't play live anymore. You're in the studio." Which I thought was quite funny. Subsequently, I really do still go out and do scribing still.

MR: That's good.

AP: I like it. I like meeting people. I like talking to people. I like seeing things happen in the room live. Which you don't get when you're making animations, you know? There's a bit of a delay. Obviously, you have to make this work. But like you said, with the planning, weirdly there was a bit of planning, but I tend to work very organically and it's probably really annoying for my animators when I plan stuff, because halfway through I'm like changing my mind of things.

And in a normal animation pipeline, you know, you're making something for Nickelodeon or the Cartoon Network. All of this stuff's mapped out at the beginning, you know. It's rigid, you do your pencils, you do your, you know, inks, you whatever, until it's finished. And there's hardly any kind of room for maneuver, because it's all on tight deadlines and budgets and things.

Whereas because the whiteboard animation processes is quite organic, but it's also quite cheap, really. In the early days, it was just a camera over my shoulder filming on a whiteboard. So you could actually rub it out with your thumb and do it again. You know, it wasn't like, oh, there's a whole pipeline of people. It was literally at the beginning, me and an animator called Rob, and we were kind of shackled together a bit like Picasso and Brack when they were doing cubism, right? They were like egging each other on.

So I would draw pictures and say, "I wanted to do this. How can we do this, Rob?" And Rob would be like, "Let me go and think about that tape clean." Then you'd come back in about half an hour and go, we could do it this way. And it was literally, that's how those early ones were made. They were ramshackle experiments. Even the RSA team were the same. And as these things became quite popular, the RSA got approached by quite big clients, you know, big multinationals, and saying, how big's your marketing department or your creative team? It's like, well, there's just me doing the script and that was Abby. And then there's Andrew. They probably didn't even know Rob existed at that point, you know.

They were like, well, there's about four of us. And they were like, what? How can you make this thing that is a global thing with four people? I think it's just doesn't happen anymore. Things don't work like that anymore. I suppose now with TikTok and things like that and individual creators, you can do stuff on your phone, which we couldn't back then. You know, the early stuff was you had to have video cameras and they were quite big.

MR: Yeah. They had tripod. Yeah.

AP: The first film we made was with a flip cam. I dunno if you remember those.

MR: I think I that had one of those. I think I have one. Yeah.

AP: It had a red button on the back. You press it and it comes on. That was the RSA animates first film. I didn't wanna invest any money in the equipment 'cause I thought, they might not want these. So I thought Webcam. I dunno how much that was. Couple of hundred quid or something. And I thought, all right. Then the next one, we hired a camera, and then the next one we hired a better camera, and then we bought a camera. You know, it started like that.

MR: Escalated. Yeah.

AP: Yeah. So I think, you know, most things happen this way, don't they? They're very much kind of shuffling along and building as you go.

MR: Yeah, I think so too.

AP: No one has a plan.

MR: Yeah. And I think, you know, the comment that you know, "Only four of you are doing this." I think actually most innovations seem to come from small teams, because at some point, if the teams get too big, it can get really wonky. And it's hard to—suddenly people are worried about making mistakes or, you know, the impact, right? You gotta have a small team to have that agility, it seems like.

AP: Yeah. Agility's the key word, I think. You can make decisions on the fly, you can throw things away, you can change your mind. All of those sort of things are really important. And it's ironic now that I spend a lot of my working life helping large, complex teams talk about their stuff in a simple way. So it's like, you know, these multinational companies, they've got a lot of moving parts, functions, people, tires of work, you know. And they can't see their whole organization.

And the thing about what we do in the animations, we show their whole—you know, you can draw it in one ispan. You can draw a big picture of it and show how it works. And that's one of the really good benefits of—I think what I've learned over the last 20 years is being able to help people tell complex stories in a simple way.

MR: Maybe that's encouraging for people who do work, like any kind of visual work, whether it's animation like you do, or even mapping, live mapping. I've done some of that stuff.

AP: Yeah.

MR: The idea that these big companies are so big and so rigid and so conservative and worried about making mistakes that they're almost unable to do the kind of innovative, small, agile work. And so therefore they have to bring in agencies like yours and others to kind of see them because they can't, they're blind to it. Or, you know, they can't quite get their head around it. And so, they need someone to do that for them or with them.

AP: Yeah. I mean, complex—I just did a workshop with a professor of business, his name's Jonathan Trevor. And he says that "Complexity is the alignment killer." Which I thought was a really good phrase.

MR: That's interesting.

AP: Because complexity just adds all of this fog that you can't see around. And most businesses really need to align all of their functions and all their processes in order to achieve their goals, right? And I think that as a visual thinker, like, you know, if you're sketchnoting or capturing things live or making animations like we do, it's like a lighthouse. It cuts through that fog. It shows people direction. It shows the linkages, the joint, you know, the stories, the narratives. Sometimes even the process of mapping stuff out like you do, when you capture things live at an event, these things emerge. And they are aha moments for a group of people. They'd never have seen this before. It's almost like pulling a sheet off and look, it's there. And we can see it as visual thinkers, right? But they can't.

MR: Yeah.

AP: So it is a superpower.

MR: I think about this ability to make connections is really valuable. And I think many visual thinkers do it naturally because it's just the way, I guess we're processing information. And so then revealing it in this way and showing the connectivity, to us, it just feels like, well, of course, doesn't that make sense? And everybody's like, wow, this is amazing. Like, sometimes I'm confused by that.

I can tell you that my whiteboard story for you is I worked at a financial services company and we used to map out interfaces with a whiteboard. So I was pretty inspired by your work. And we had this giant wall-sized whiteboard. And every Monday it was whiteboard wire frame Monday. So we would sit the team down. It was developers, product owners, and business analyst. And the business analyst on the team was my buddy. And he assisted me. And we would queue up the feature and we would say, okay, this is the feature we're working on today.

We might look at it in the application. We had an old app that we're building as a web app. So we'd say, this is how it used to work. What can we do with this? And then we'd start the discussion, and I would go to the board, and as people talked, I would be drawing the stuff they were saying. I mean, just listening and visualizing it and annotating it.

And I remember there was one developer who, one day I was drawing something and he came up to me afterwards and says, "How are you drawing what I'm thinking?" It's like, "I don't know. I'm just listening to you. I'm making the connections. What you're saying makes sense to me, and I've got this capability 'cause I'm working with the software too." Like, oh, I see where he is going. And I would just visualize it on the whiteboard.

And it worked really well. It became sort of a unifying—and now that you say that, alignment, it was alignment really because the whole team was there. They all saw it going down. I mean, some of our most successful features were actually the ones that we had to struggle with three, four, five times in a session until we figured it out because It was complex. And we forced ourselves to work our way through that.

And a lot of times, I wasn't the one really coming up with the great ideas. It was the developers who would say something, or even better, they would say, "Hey, can I draw this?" Like, yeah, come up. And I would give them the pen and they would visualize it on the whiteboard. So they were starting to get into it. That environment was really fun. And I could see how it would be exciting for, you know, someone that you're working with who doesn't do that every day, that could be quite exciting to be participating in.

AP: Without being a bit woo woo about it, I think that I always look at what we do as in a kind of shamanistic way, right? So if we go back to the cave paintings of Lascaux you know, 30,000 years ago. You know, these paintings, they're a whiteboard on a cave wall, right? They function in exactly the same way as what we do. And we just do it on paper or whiteboard. You know, what you are essentially doing is taking a group on a journey and taking what's in everybody's brains and putting it in a group space.

So you know, I love cave painting. I think they're really, really fascinating. And I think that in a way they probably helped us evolve our thinking. I think they're very special in that way that they helped us develop as humans. Yeah, being able to show that probably. I mean, the use of psychotropic plants probably helped. But, you know, these things I was always fascinated by, by these cave paintings, because I was reading about the flickering flames that, you know, these were subterranean caves, pitch black, couldn't see anything down there, and they were actually quite dangerous to get to.

And, you know these artists, shaman, whatever you wanna call them, were responsible for taking people on those journeys. They were the ones that painted those images and they were the ones that's told those stories in order to—you know, no one knows exactly what the reasons were for those paintings, but they have some idea that they work some kind of rituals or tools, or maybe some kind of training and development. You know, they're like, training and development tools. hey, this is how they kill the animals that we want to eat. So it was almost like, you know, an onboarding course. Yeah. Come and join us on—

MR: That would make a hilarious video actually. You could have a shaman and, you know, like cavemen going down in the cave and like, "Okay, it's time for our learning and development session."

AP: "Here's how to kill the Jaguar." But the flickering frames are also really interesting. They have found evidence on some of the kind of outcrops of the cave where they've drawn different states of the animal, right? So when the flames flicker, it creates a sort of animation, like movement. So the leopards head moves when the flames flicker.

MR: Oh, interesting.

AP: And it makes it weird, right? And they've also found like little zoetrope things. So these little disks with a deer on one side and a lying down deer on the other. And they put a strap between the two and it spins.

MR: Spin it so you can see the movement.

AP: So you create a kind of deer that goes up and down. So they were experimenting with animation.

MR: Wow. All that time long ago. Wow.

AP: Yeah. And we think, oh, well, you know, these people were primitive. No, they weren't. You know, they had a limited tool set, but they were thinking exactly the same ways that we were thinking. You know, how can we get people on board with our hunting or whatever they were trying to do.

MR: Alignment. Here we are at alignment.

AP: Yeah, definitely. It was the alignment of the day.

MR: With the tools available.

AP: With the tools available. But I love all that. So I rather grandiosely say that we are kind of shamanistic than what we do. We have the abilities to take people that don't think they have those abilities. And you are doing a lot of work with that. You know, you are enabling people to think, oh, I can't draw. But you are enabling 'em to think in that way using sketchnotes. But for what we do, we take people that are just totally involved in, you know, strategy and business and say, you know, out of that ether, here's what you are thinking. And they go, oh my God. But you know, you are channeling just what they're saying. They said it. Like you said, with the app development, you know, it wasn't you doing it. You were kind of like an idiot Savon. You were like, oh.

MR: Exactly. Yeah. I was just channeling it. Yeah. Bringing it in.

AP: Yeah, channeling it.

MR: Yeah. I think it almost helped too, that me being a designer, like I knew how the materials of the software work, but these guys had to build it. So like, I could come up with crazy stuff and they might look at me and like, oh, Mike, building that, that's gonna be a challenge. So, you know, I had to rely on them. So I think a lot of it was just trying to see the opportunities. Yeah, that's really interesting. It's almost like being a facilitator, guiding people into a state of mind. Right, in a lot of ways, it's a state of mind.

That's what I always say when people, it's like the sketch noting stuff is way more mindset and listening. I could care less if you're drawing is not great. That's not the point. The point is, are you listening? Are you identifying the things that are valuable and then capturing them in a way that you can refer back to them or that someone else is inspired, right? That's where the exciting stuff happens, so.

AP: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. The ability to draw is, is kind of secondary. And you could probably do a lot with it, with the process, but, you know, just using shapes and stuff like that. You know, someone like Kelvy Bird would do something where she's doing a lot of shapes and patterns and forms to suggest emotions and things like that with her generative scribing stuff.

MR: Exactly. Yeah.

AP: It doesn't need like your—for people like me, I'm drawing like people 'cause I'm fascinated by people and anthropomorphic things. You know, it's a teacup with a face and it's doing stuff. You know, I love all that.

MR: This blend of things. Yeah.

AP: So, it's horses for courses, right. You tell your brand of storytelling or facilitation with what you like. I mean, I've come from a comic book background, you know.

MR: Right. You can see that clearly in your style.

AP: I love people like Will Eisner and all that sort of stuff. I actually went on a course with Scott McCloud up in Minnesota.

MR: Oh, wow.

AP: And he was a great guy.

MR: Yeah.

AP: And interestingly, when I was on the course with Scott—'cause I wanted to meet Scott. 'cause I love—have you read Understanding Comics?

MR: Oh yeah, definitely. I met him once. He came to Milwaukee and I think he signed my copy of the book. So that was fun to see him.

AP: I was in America at the time, I was living in Chicago. And I thought, well, let's go up there. He's running this course, 73 days or something. I went up there and I did it and he was running comic strip course, but weirdly, and this is before the RSA animates and everything like that. My way of doing stuff—I didn't want to do panels. I was just doing like mapping. And he was like, "You're not getting this." I was like, I don't want put panels around things. I'm kind of like formal around. I just like mind mapping it all. And he was like, "Well, I kind of want you to do panels, blah, blah, blah." Anyway, so I kind of did like that.

MR: You fulfilled his requirements.

AP: I fulfilled somewhat, and he was like a bit disappointed with it. And interestingly—

MR: That's funny.

AP: - when the RSA animates came in, I saw that he was using them in his slide deck and saying, this is one of the ways of the future of comics. And I was like, what? You told me to book panels here.

MR: You convinced him by delivering, right?

AP: Yeah maybe.

MR: You had to deliver the vision, and then he revised his thinking.

AP: Exactly. Well, I think the only thing that probably saved it was the fact that you could use animation with it, you know, rather than. You have to have some mechanism to drive people's attention around it.

MR: Yeah. Yeah.

AP: Yeah. I just thought it was quite funny.

MR: That's kind of funny how the worm turns, right? That's funny. I'm kind of curious. You mentioned that you'd be willing to kind of broadly talk about your process. Has it changed much since the early days? Obviously, you've figured things out and now it's probably more established. What does a typical project look like at a high level?

AR: Yeah, it starts with the client, really. It starts with their story. So we do an end-to-end process. The early RSAs, were all about response. So someone like Dan Pink, looking if his talk and they chop it down to 10 minutes and then they just give me the audio, right? "Here have that." And I would give them the animate. Yeah, there was no real—weirdly, there was no like, feedback or anything. I'd be like, they gave me the audio, I have gave them an animate.

MR: Whatever you wanted, right? Yeah, you get to decide. Totally.

AR: So I've been so lucky having that creative process. My team aren't so lucky 'cause they have to do all the client stuff. But when I do work now, I tend to just make my own stuff. And I'm quite unmanageable, really. I can work with clients, but I'm very much like, "No, this is the way it goes. This is how it fits together. So you gotta trust me on this." So a typical process in our team, it starts with the client. We get to unpack all of their information. So they tell us everything. So they bring their stories, anecdotes, slides, books, whatever they bring. We have a meeting with them, and then we can then write a script. And so we've worked out over the years that the sweet spot is a probably a two and a half minute, three-minute animation.

MR: Yeah. Sounds about right. Yeah.

AR: Because you're using multimodal approach, IE words, pictures, text on screen, vignettes, symbols, speech balloons, the whole pantheon of like visual, you know, what you're dealing with, you know, boxes, arrows, all of that visual language, you can actually tell quite a complex story in a short amount of time. And so, we're kind of geared up to doing that. So once they've got a script, then we can get into what we call story mapping, which is creating a blueprint. Literally, this is the point where the visual thinkers get to translate the words on the page to the images on screen. And we kind of build that big flat end state. That's the box where everything goes in, right?

MR: Mm-hmm.

AR: The frame. And then it is just a question of just directing the flow, the animation from that point, where do we zoom in? Where do we zoom out? What bits pop on? What things get drawn on with the hand? I mean, the hand is a big part of it. You see things getting drawn. And to be honest Mike, over the years we've learned the formalities of the process. When I first developed it, it came instinctively. And, you know, sometimes, like you probably did with writing your book, you have to then think, what am I doing here? Formally, how is this working in order to teach people, right?

MR: Yes.

AP: So you build the process after you've built it, right? Understand setting up the Ikea wardrobe once you've built the Ikea wardrobe, kind that's how it rolls really. So yeah, we formalized all the processes and then it's just the questions tightening those things up over time or innovating certain areas, but the basic building blocks are there. It's telling a connected narrative in space and time using various tools. Yeah.

MR: Yeah. Interesting. So I'm kind of curious, so you talk about doing the end-state as a blueprint, and then the next step is the flow and like zooming in and out and effects.

AP: Yeah. So you kind of know what you start with, right? It's like whatever they—I dunno. Whether it's an app they're talking about, like a widget or something, or whether it's a process or whether it's like a story, you know, it could be, you start with, the hand comes on and draws the character, the main character, and then you pull out slightly and then the world builds around them and then an arrow. Do you know what I mean?

MR: Yeah.

AP: But we know what the end state's gonna be like. We know the scenes and how it fits together.

MR: How to get there. Yeah.

AP: But you start off with a kind of magical planting of that seed and it visually grow.

MR: So do you do storyboards to kind of think through those changes? Do you do an overlay on the larger story to kind of map, we start here to kind of work through like that? How do you kind of get between the pieces?

AP: When I used to work—when I first developed the RSA animate series, I had a big whiteboard. Not on the first ones. Actually, ironically did the first one on paper. Bizarre.

MR: Oh wow.

AP: But about the fourth one, I got this stuff called idea paint. Have you heard of this stuff?

MR: Mm-Hmm. No.

AP: Essentially like whiteboard paint, you paint on a big wall.

MR: Okay. Yeah, so I think I've purchased cans of that. I don't think it had that name.

AP: Yeah.

MR: Yep. I know what you mean.

AP: Yeah, it's basically whiteboard paint. So I wanted to get as much real estate as possible because when you are doing this stuff, you wanna leave it up.

MR: Yes.

AP: And then in the animation, there might be some things over here that you cut to, but they're not in the main picture. So you need lots of kind of working area. But what I used to do was, initially I'd listen to the audio probably about 30 times. So a 10-minute RSA animate, I'd listened to and when I was driving. I think I used to burn it to CD. So I'd get the thing and burn it to CD. I had CD in the car and I used to listen to it over and over and over again and over and over again. So weirdly, the first protocol when I started these was the audio.

It was really interesting because I would get to know—you know, when you listen to a record and you know the beats and you know when they breathe in and when they did the guitar, that you know exactly where things fit. That's what I kind of did with the audio for the RSA. I used to know the beats and so that would give me some indication of where to draw things slowly, the hand doesn't speed up too much or where to pop things on or where to slide the film over here. So it was starting with the input of the audio, but then I would start to build pictures in my mind as I was driving and kind of construct them. And then when I got to the studio, I'd have to like jot them down.

MR: Quick draw them. Yeah.

AP: You know, I'd make really, really rough pencil sketches, block shapes, match characters, whatever. And then I would number them in sequence. What goes where, when. So that would be the flow. Obviously, it's a bit more sophisticated now.

MR: I guess. Yeah.

AP: Yeah. And there is a kind of story map that the senior creatives in my company talk clients through and they do the same thing, which is go a number, the picture, and then they took them up. At this point we may go up on the top left of the thing and we'll zoom into that bit. We don't tend to storyboard, I don't like to crunch my thing. Look, this is where Scott McCloud comes in again

MR: Yeah, back to the boxes. Yeah.

AP: I don't like panels. I don't want to do—I kind of like free form stuff, so. Plus, I was lazy. You know, drawing panels all the time.

MR: It's extra work. Right.

AP: It's extra work. Yeah. And white balls were brilliant for like, oh, I could just rub that bit out and then redraw that bit, not the whole thing.

MR: Yeah.

AP: Right.

MR: Took advantage of the medium. Yeah.

AP: A lot of the technique came from, at this point, I'm just gonna rub that character out and draw it in a different state rather than I have to draw the whole scene again.

MR: Yeah. That's smart. I think about like, you're using the material in the way that it works, right? You're taking advantage of the materials as they ought to, yeah.

AP: Is was a lot of lazy boy techniques, I think. Could be. How can I be really efficient with this? And you know, over the years—so we've migrated now to doing purely a digital whiteboard, but we still draw on screen. So we have these Cintiq monitors where we actually draw and record our drawings live, but from the inside of the computer rather than having a camera.

MR: I see. Yeah, you don't need the camera anymore. Yeah.

AP: Yeah. And then we put the hand on it too.

MR: That's interesting.

AP: But they are hand drawn and there's a lot of kind of knockoff. You might have seen this kind of digital DIY work on a whiteboard.

MR: I was gonna ask you about that. Yeah, the whiteboard tools where a fake hand draws or something.

AP: Yeah. They're weird. I think they're kind of built by technical people, not visual thinkers.

MR: I think so too.

AP: It's not Microsoft, it's like PowerPoint. It's made by techies. They're not made by people who communicate very well. That's why it's kind of linear and you know, if you go into that clunky. And I think these, these DIY whiteboard that they—there was a story I heard recently in friend of mine talked to me about it. Do you know Concord, the Supersonic plane?

MR: Mm-hmm.

AP: The British and French developed a plane in the '70s and '80s that could fly to New York in three hours or whatever. It's a beautifully designed aircraft. But the Russians got hold of like, they saw this and thought we are gonna make a Concord, right. But they didn't know how it worked, but they saw a picture of Concord and so they'd made a replica Concord. It looked like Concord, but it had like, I think weird jet engines on it. You know, all the mechanics inside of this plane weren't real. It had afterburners on or something like that, which they could only fly the two hours and they couldn't fly fast enough or whatever. It looked like Concord, but it didn't fly like Concord.

MR: Yeah.

AP: I think with these DIY softwares, they kind of look like what we do, but they don't fly like what we do. Stylistically this is what they think it does. It's a whiteboard, it has this, it draws in time with a VO, but it's like, well that's not what we do. That's part of our visual thinking. What we do is we tell visual stories and we unpack at the the DNA level, what is your story about? And a lot of these DIY things, I think people don't understand is, "Hey, I've downloaded this now it's gonna make it for me. I just pressed the animate button.

MR: Yeah.

AP: And it doesn't. You know, you've gotta go, oh shit, I've gotta write a script and I've gotta work out the flow. All the stuff we do, they've gotta do themselves, but it makes you look like, you know.

MR: You take the burden on yourself in a way.

AP: Yeah.

MR: And you're not prepared for that.

AP: And so, we've had a lot of people come back to us and say, yeah, sorry. We went down the cheap route and tried to do it for 30 quid a month, or buy the software and they come back to us, said, we tried it actually, the cost of making it, you know, my time, scripting, trying to animate, working out what drawings I need. It's like you don't go to a restaurant and cook your own dinner, right?

MR: Yeah. And then it's probably limited too, right?

AP: I mean those things, I was originally mad at them thinking, what are you doing your, 'cause you're kind of diluting the methodologies. You're making it appear rubbish. 'Cause I think it does a really good thing. It solves good problems. And when you dilute it with a kind of crappy solution, people think that's what it does. And it does take a lot of work to go. It's better than that.

MR: Yeah. Now that was the question I had for you is, does that software actually bring more people to you? Because I think of it this way, the more they have to do in that software, they realize what you're doing and suddenly your service becomes a real value. Right. Because you're really good at it. I'm sure they probably run into situations where I wanna do this, but the software won't let me because the software was built to just do MVP, whatever and whatever it can technically pull off. Which is not everything, right. You're not really getting the full capability of a team like yours. So that would get frustrating and probably push people back to you. That seems true.

AP: Yeah, it has happened. I mean, obviously, I think people are still motivated by price in a lot of ways. But I do think that essentially what this is, is like Microsoft clip art, but with moving components. 'Cause the thing about what we can do as visual thinkers and including yourself, Mike, is that we can draw things bespokely, you know?

MR: Exactly.

AP: Things that haven't existed before. You know, very niche things. Where a company comes to you and go, "This is what we do, and we're very niche." You can actually go, "Okay, we could draw exactly that." Whereas with these DIY softwares, it is like I kind of need an office scene, but it needs a little, and then they have to get it off the peg and it's not quite right. So they're compromising their storytelling by using flip art.

MR: Spare parts in a way. Yeah.

AP: Yeah. And so, they're building a kind of hash together story, which then obviously they're gonna feel frustrated at 'cause it's not doing what they want it to do. I dunno, some people might be happy with, that'll do, but it doesn't help with telling nuanced stories.

MR: Yeah. Not for the kind of clients that you're normally working with. Right. So, interesting.

AP: Yeah. I mean, I'd imagine it works to talk about very simple stories in a school setting, maybe where it's like one or two concepts and you're not having to dig too deeply with the visual concepts or whatnot. I'm sure it's fine. It's like, but then you might as well use PowerPoint.

MR: Yeah. Yeah. And I guess there probably is some sweet spot of someone who the tools are just enough, and it does exactly what they want. And they would probably never hire you to do it because they don't have the budget for it. So there's probably an ideal of customer, but, you know, beyond them, that's—

AP: And I think that what those guys do well is good marketing. You know, they make it look like it's gonna solve all their problems, gonna panacea to, you know, their visual thinking nightmare, and then they get it and they go, oh, I'm a bit embarrassed about asking for my money back. It's only $30 or whatever.

MR: They just, you know, cancel the subscription and not worry about it anymore. Yeah.

AP: Yeah. Cancel the subscription.

MR: Interesting.

AP: And it's like having a bad restaurant, isn't it? Bad restaurant by the seaside, you know, these people aren't coming back every year. They're gonna have a bad meal and then they're never gonna come there again, so.

MR: Exactly.

AP: Whereas, you know, if you want a nice restaurant, you've gotta work on it and you've gotta make sure it has great food, great service, so you attract repeat business.

MR: It's gotta have all the pieces. Yeah.

AP: Yeah.

MR: You mentioned something before we began and you said that you did some work for an education company with the kind of stuff you're doing.

AP: Yeah.

MR: I would really be curious to hear what your thoughts are on that, that the visuals that you're using can teach, like mathematic concepts and stuff. How do you feel about that kind of thing? We've been talking probably more like commercial applications, like selling our software or our service or whatever, but like, learning, and we talked a little bit about this too, that schools often because of the industrial era where they began focus a lot on producing industrial workers.

And so, therefore it's a lot of verbal capability and they're sort of forgetting a lot of the visual capability. It was interesting that you mentioned that this education company, doesn't matter who they were, would use it to kind of communicate learning. So talk a little bit about that and your thoughts on using this technique and this approach for learning.

AP: I mean, it's a logical step, isn't it? If you are—I mean, and it happened at just post pandemic there where everything went indoors, right? Everybody was learning at home and they needed to have viable solutions that were in classroom based. They'd seen the RSA films and other films that we'd made in that style, and they asked us to put together a kind of proposal and an example of what they could do. And it was really nice collaboration actually. Interestingly, we learned a lot about how they would structure their lessons so that we then responded in, if you're gonna structure lessons this way, we'll respond in that way. So there was an advanced organizer, you are familiar with the concept of an advanced organizer?

MR: Mm-Hmm. No, tell me about that.

AP: It's a piece of content that kind of primes you for what's gonna be learned.

MR: Oh, okay.

AP: "In this lesson we're gonna be doing this and it's gonna do that." That was an interesting thing because when you're priming people to be educated, then they get into the zone and that's it.

MR: Switch into that mode, right? Yeah.

AP: I thought, oh, that's a really interesting way. They were like, oh, why are you animating that? We were just giving you a heads up of what the thing was about. I said, no, but that's perfect though, isn't it? Because they're gonna get a advanced organizer to tell them what's they're gonna learn, they're gonna learn the stuff. And then we did a recap, which is you learn this. This is kind of how we structured it was like, tell them what they're gonna learn, tell them what they're learning, and then tell them what they've learned. At the end of the videos, the hand would go, you learn about this and this and this. And it literally pointed to content on the screen.

MR: Interesting. Yeah.

AP: We lent very much into the kind of literally a whiteboard how it would be used in a school, right? I am a teacher, I'm teaching you this stuff, and it's gonna be in order, and you're gonna learn that, and we're gonna drill down into this bit, and then I'm gonna tell you that you've learned that bit. So it was kind of like that. You know, we made like 200 or so degree-level films. It was biology, physics, some chemistry. And then we've got into statistics and mathematics. Now, I will say that statistics and mathematics are slightly harder to visualize because they do rely very much on the equations themselves.

MR: Yeah.

AP: But interestingly, my son is, he's into math and science, you know, I dunno why. I dunno.

MR: Not sure how that happened.

AP: I don't know it happened. He talks to me, I'm like, you're talking in—I can't understand the word he says, but anyway, he's very much into seeing a hand just draw equation is how he learns. You know, those symbols mean stuff to him. So we kind of lent into that, which was have the hand come on and literally draw those equations, like it would be drawn on a whiteboard and it seems to be perfect for them, you know, and then you can put some little storytelling notes around it, and some vignettes and things. But mostly with those ones, the sort of physics equation, the math equation, you just draw them as they are taught. And that seems to work.

MR: Interesting. These 200 films, they were kind of overviews about the topic and then the ideas was then you would do some kind of activity that was deeper or practice, or were they quite detailed?

AP: They Initially were on their education platform and then they kind of got rolled out to YouTube. I'll give you the links, people can check them out if they want afterwards. But yeah, they would be things like what is photosynthesis, for example? Or how do cells work? And then you would have an animation. All the kind of stuff inside a cell. Some of the physics stuffs were like gravity, just yeah, the sort of basic physics electronic components or, you know, all of that sort of stuff.

MR: Kind of conceptual learning in a way. Like you're getting the concept of it, and if you have a good foundation, it makes everything else easier.

AP: It would be the groundwork for it. But we were really happy to see that over the course of a year, you know, while we were doing these films that I think they were viewed more than a hundred thousand times.

MR: Wow.

AP: No, actually no. It's 1.4 million times.

MR: Wow.

AP: And 100,000 subscribers.

MR: Wow. That's having an impact.

AP: It does prove that this stuff, A, is engaging and it does work. You know, back in the day when I first when the RSA started to get popular, I was skeptical 'cause I was thinking, why is this working? And so, we got approached by a psychology professor called Professor Richard Wiseman. And he phoned us up one day and we ended up doing some research about these things. So he ran a test, a talking head video versus an animation.

So we set up an experiment and it ended up being that, you know, our work, few, thankfully ended up being more shareable, more entertaining and more memorable. You know, these are the three components to be tested for. I can send you the link. I did a little case study video and Richard talks about this, so I can send you the actual research. But yeah, we are keen on—you know, it's not just a style thing. We want to make sure this stuff actually works and it's does work—

MR: It work very effective, actually. It's effective, yeah.

AP: Yeah.

MR: Huh. Wow. That's really interesting.

AP: I can give you all those links, definitely.

MR: Yeah. We can put 'em in the show notes for sure. There might be some fans here that will definitely wanna see the educational ones. We'll dig up. I'll have to reach out to you separately and like, it would be fun to see the first one if it's on YouTube and—

AP: Then, oh yeah, definitely. Yeah.

MR: You know, like pick sort of something in the middle and something now and sort of see the progression. That would be interesting to see.

AP: So the documentary I'm making, because I was interested in just how things start and then how things end 'cause we don't make RSA films anymore. They stopped doing them, but if you look at the last one I did compared to like the first one, it just worlds apart.

MR: Yeah, I bet.

AP: So I can give you the first one. I'll give you the last one.

MR: Yeah. Then people when they're done listening here, they can go watch those videos and do the comparison because they're only a couple minutes long. So you can see them both pretty quickly.

**AP:**Well, they got shorter actually. I think. The first ones are actually 10 minutes and then they kind of cut them down then called the mini mates instead of animates. And they kind of ended up being five minutes long. People's attention spans got less.

MR: Shrinking.

AP: It's ironic though, isn't it? Now everyone's like listening to podcasts for over an hour.

MR: Yeah, I think that what I'm learning is YouTube, especially people put it on in the background and go, you know, wash the dishes or something like that and let it run in the background, so.

AP: Yeah.

MR: Someone's probably doing that right now with us.

AP: Are we going out live at the moment then?

MR: No, this is all recording. It'll be released later. Yeah.

AP: Yeah. You're gonna chop it up a bit.

MR: The only time I've cut these is when someone sneezes or coughs or something, or says something wrong and said, "Oh, I need to do that again." Otherwise, it's just pretty much we turn on the mic and the camera and we roll and we just let it be what it is. This community's, you know, they love all of it, so we don't need a lot of editing, which is great.

AP: All right.

MR: Makes my life easier.

AP: It certainly does.

MR: So typically in these podcasts we talk about tools that you like. So you mentioned one already, which is that whiteboard paint, which I'm gonna research that and put a link in.

AP: Yeah.

MR: Are there any favorite like whiteboard markers that you used? Are there brand that you like and any other tools that you think might be interesting for people?

AP: Yeah, so when I did the RSA animates—do you have a company called Staples in America?

MR: Yes. Yep. It's a office supply company. Mm-hmm.

AP: Yes. Office supply company. So I used to go to Staples and they used to do black markers and red markers, like in a 12 pack or a 10 pack or something.

MR: Yeah. Their own brand, right? Their house brand.

AP: Yeah. Their own brand. And that's all I used. Why I liked them was when they were new, they had a really thin bit of the chisel nib, which you could get really fine stuff going on. Obviously, they splay out over time.

MR: Yeah. They get soft.

AP: And it's interesting, when I first started because the camera was over my shoulder and it wasn't a particularly high-resolution camera when we started, couldn't pick up a lot. We used red and black because they were picked up on the camera flip. And when you look at all the people that were copying the RSA animates, they would be red and black, right?

MR: Uh-huh.

AP: It wasn't a style choice. It was just literally because they were the things that showed up on camera

MR: The limitation, yeah.

AP: But it's interesting how it kind of permeates in into the kind of methodology that it ends up being. That's the style. Well, that was only because the greens and the blues didn't show up.

MR: Interesting.

AP: So yeah, the Staples markers, the Staples whiteboards were great.

MR: Okay. That's a surprising one. I wouldn't have guessed that, but that's pretty interesting.

AP: Yeah, they're not fancy at all. They were just like—

MR: I'm a big fan of Office Supply stuff.

AP: I could buy them in bulk. I think that was the thing. And they would run out pretty quickly, you know, 'cause I would be—not like the usual whiteboard. You know, some of these pens probably last years in some people's offices, but with me, I would get a new box for every animate I did.

MR: Wow. Okay. Staples markers. That's nice.

AP: I dunno if they've kind of gone bust in this country, I think. So I think you could probably get them in America if you want to go old school and make some old school RSA animates, go down to Staples and get the red and black.

MR: I'm gonna go take a look now.

AP: Obviously, we've gone digital, so I just draw on Photoshop. I love Photoshop.

MR: You mentioned Cintiq. A few people use those.

AP: Yeah. I've got a Cintiq. I've got a 16-inch and I've got a little travel one. It's a 13-inch that I sometimes use.

MR: There's a lot of people on here that are more iPad people they may not have experienced. Cintiq is basically a—it's a monitor that you can draw on with a dedicated pen that's got pressure controls and such.

AP: It's like an iPad without the computer in it.

MR: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

AP: The Wacom people that make the Cintiq, the pressure sensitivity is really quite good.

MR: Yes. Yeah.

AP: I had an iPad, but I could never bridge the gap. I'm an old folk, so I know my way around Photoshop. I could never—well, I only use—

MR: You've perfected your system.

AP: Well, I only use like one thing really in Photoshop. If I do work, it's pretty much drawing with a black marker pen.

MR: Basic nib.

AP: You know, it's a Photoshop brush, but I've made it, and it's got the precious sensitivity and it feels like a pen for me.

MR: Mm. Interesting.

AP: I don't tend to use all the fancy stuff and cross thatchy brushes and, you know, I just like black pen. There you go, draw.

MR: Keep it simple.

AP: It's old school.

MR: Yeah, exactly. I think, you know, when it comes down to it and you're under pressure, having those solid things can often be a huge benefit. You mentioned sketchbooks. Are there any sketchbooks? Do you carry a sketchbook around and do doodles and such like that? Or when you're done with work, do you kinda leave it behind and you just, you know, you'd rather have a tea and read a book? I dunno.

AP: My sketchbooks are actually—I always am impressed by people that can do really nice sketchbooks, you know? And they're kind of works of art in themselves, whereas mine is a utility device.

MR: Yeah. I think I'm like you in that way. Yeah.

AP: How do I get my thinking down so that it's recorded, it's scratchy. They're the next step to get me to the level. And then I'll take it into some other medium. Or they're not the thing itself. They're just the delivery of my ideas to some plane where I can remember them. But you know, you can go on Instagram and Pinterest, you just see these beautifully rendered things. I mean, if you look at someone like Peter Duran, you know, his sketch notes are Just really bloody neat. And you think, I haven't got time. I literally haven't got time for that. I've got time for Peter's work, but I haven't got time to do that myself. I'm not as disciplined

MR: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I think of somebody like Danny Gregory, if you've seen his work, his stuff is really amazing. This interesting story about—I should see if I can get Danny Gregory on. He started quite late, I think he was under stress or something, and he started drawing as a way to relax himself or something like that. And now his whole business is teaching people how to draw, so.

AP: That's cool.

MR: He is an interesting guy.

AP: That reminds me of the Kurt Vonnegut book, Bluebeard. Have you read Bluebeard about Kurt Vonnegut?

MR: I've read Vonnegut, but not that one.

AP: There's a character in it called Dan Gregory.

MR: Really?

AP: And he's an illustrator and I think he's based on—who's the guy that used to do all the kind of covers for the kind of Americana, you know, kids in getting haircuts and—

MR: Oh, that was—I was just thinking about it.

AP: Rockwell.

MR: I know who you're talking about. Rockwell. Norman Rockwell.

AP: Norman Rockwell. So Dan Gregory was based on Norman Rockwell, but I think it's quite nice. But I think it's quite funny that you're talking about Daniel Gregory as an artist.

MR: As an actual real person.

AP: That was his story.

MR: Yeah. Yeah.

AP: It's not real.

MR: Interesting.

AP: Sketchbooks, so I use Moleskines and actually, I like Leuchtturm.

MR: That's a German brand competitor to Moleskine. I like those too.

AP: Yeah. I like the kind of little wallet thing in the back. I quite like just copy paper sometimes. Just sheets of paper just to make notes notes on.

MR: Not very pretentious at all. Yeah.

AP: No, not at all.

MR: A funny story is when I started teaching workshops, I had this idea that I had to give away fancy Moleskines and pens and it quickly became clear that people were very intimidated if they didn't know how to drop by these fancy tools. So I almost immediately switched to a—I would buy a ream of printer paper and a box of flare black pens. That was it. And I would pass 'em out. They were cheap. The great thing about printer paper is if you don't like it, you crumple it up and recycle it and take another sheet. They cost you, you know, a fraction of a cent, right. So there wasno pressure to make anything beautiful with copy paper.

AP: I used to have a little sign on my desk, Mike, that said, "I will not be afraid to make bad art."

MR: Hmm.

AP: Because I think that in a way, if you have, you know, sometimes these tools, as you say, they inhibit your thinking. If you're too precious about them and you don't want to make your precious little sketchbook rubbish with your imp crappy drawing.

MR: Imperfect.

AP: Yeah. Imperfect. Then you tend to be petrified by it and don't do it. You know, I keep all my crappy little sketches because I think they're just a nice sort of imprint of my brain over time, you know? And sometimes there's things in there I think, oh, that's a good idea. I forgot about that.

MR: Yeah. I do the same. One of the things I mentioned is I'm a blue-collar guy, grew up that way. Everything, I need to have a practical angle. So one of the things I do in the podcast is ask guests to think about what are three things that you would encourage somebody with if they were sort of stuck or they just need some inspiration. They can be practical things, it could be mindset things, but just three tips that you could give them. What would that be?

AP: The way that I visually think through ideas sometimes, or problems, or try and solve problems is, I call it thinking visual German. Because the German language is constructed with a lot of compound words, right?

MR: Right.

AP: They just tend to like string them along until it's a 40-letter word.

MR: Yeah, exactly.

AP: It means the same thing. It's like they bootstrap them together. And I think that if you do that in a visual way with concepts, it often helps you get around problems. You know, if you think about having, I dunno, a photocopier, a double decker bus for example. You know, put those two together. What does that look like and what problem is it solving? You can draw this kind of weird machine. It's a bus that copies things or I don't know.

When you are applying these in kind of visual thinking terms or in storytelling terms, A, they're memorable 'cause they're weird. But they also help you start to think about the connections between things and then the reasoning why you've done that. So I love visual German in a way of just put juxtaposition is good and putting stuff together just to see what happens. Putting one thing near another and watching what the chemical reaction is.

MR: I like that.

AP: So, that's one, visual German. I think a lot of people procrastinate. And so half of the challenge is just draw something. Even if it's to write a title or do a circle and then write something in it and then mind map it. Just break the seal of the paper or break the seal of the whiteboard, or just make your mark is the other thing I would suggest to do. Because I think there's some psychological studies that say that procrastination can only—this sounds really obvious. Like procrastination can only be beat by doing something. So if you just take the step to do it, then you win, right?

MR: Yeah.

AP: You end up like, oh, I've done it. Oh, what was I procrastinating about? So there's that. So in a visual way, just don't procrastinate, just draw, create.

MR: Do something. Yeah. Just to get moving.

AP: Do do something. Yeah. And what's the other thing. What the other thing is, I'm not one of those people that, you know, it's like learn to draw and all that nonsense. Yeah. Okay, fine. That's a facility and if you wanna do that, go for it. And there are courses and things to do. So I would just not be too precious about it. So find solutions that work for you. I love collage. I'm a collagist. I love making collage because my whole visual thinking career, including the RSA animates, are literally collages. And I think life's a collage. We have a collage of experiences that we manifest, which creates our life. So like putting one thing against another is collage, right? It's juxtaposition.

So don't be too precious with stuff. Find what works for you. Don't procrastinate about it and just do it. So there are solutions out there. If you just draw matchstick people, you know? Draw boxes, whatever it is to get your ideas down. Something will happen over time. You'll look at my early RSA animate films and they're really, really ropey because I didn't know what I was doing. I was learning on the fly. If you look at the last one, and we can put the links in the show notes, you'll see the difference. It's miles apart. I think that for people listening to this, just don't worry about that. Don't worry about being perfect, just do it and you'll get better and you'll find a way that becomes you. Like what you said to me, pretty cool, Mike. You said, "Oh, you've definitely got a style."

MR: Oh, yeah.

AP: Which is interesting for me 'cause I never think I do have a style, but that style has only happened over me just doing stuff, right?

MR: Practicing. Yeah.

AP: Yeah. So I can't remember what those three things were there. So visual, German visual, just do it, don't procrastinate and find a way. Don't worry too much about how you do it.

MR: Great.

AP: So they're quite practical, aren't they?

MR: Yeah.

AP: They're not really arty should be more arty than that.

MR: But they can play in anyway, right?

AP: Yeah. And you don't have to be a visual thinker to do that, right?

MR: No.

AP: If you're writing a book, you can do it.

MR: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for making time for us. What is the best place, if someone wants to see your work or visit your company, where should they go?

AP: Website is first port of call, www.wearecognitive.com. I have a podcast called The Visual Flaneur, which I'm starting to talk to all of the people that I've animated their RSA films. So I've interviewed all those guys, so you'll be able to hear from the horse's mouth about stuff there. If you wanna see my collage work, I've got an Instagram. I could put that the show notes.

MR: Yeah, we can get that for sure.

AP: Yeah, so mostly through our website and YouTube.

MR: Cool.

AP: And you know, you're seeing the really talented people that work at Cognitive, not just my work.

MR: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and then we'll look forward to the documentary that you're working on. So, you have to let me know when that comes out and we'll share that with people so they can watch.

AP: Yeah. Yeah. So, the podcast is actually, I'm building the documentary piecemeal, I'm putting it out as podcast in a way to organize my thinking.

MR: Got it.

AP: Rather than trying to eat the elephant all at once at the end.

MR: Yeah. Bits at a time. And then at the end you kind of make sense of it all and think it just like the process, tight. Find the story and reveal it.

AP: Exactly. I'm, yeah, doing it organically.

MR: Cool. Well, that's the way that works for you. So it makes sense to me. Cool. Well, thanks so much for all the amazing inspiration that you've given the world in doing your animation, and now you're building a company and team and they're doing the same. That's a pretty cool thing. So thanks for doing that for us. I appreciate you, and you definitely have a style. I think people will back me up on that one. And hopefully we can maybe meet up in the UK when I'm over, so.

AP: Yeah, I'll definitely make time to come up to Birmingham, and that sounds like a whole lot of fun.

MR: Sounds good. Well, thanks, everyone. Everyone who's watching or listening, that's another episode. Till the next one, talk to you soon.