Demo reel editing can be full of surprises: follow your best with your third-best; your logo might hurt more than help; and music can be terribly tricky.

If you are an animator, visual effects or motion graphics artist, editor, actor—you’ll need to make your demo reel to showcase your best work.

Inspiration doesn’t require bad art, but nothing gets me firing on all cylinders like the desire to make something that sucks not suck.

There are many ways to further your career. One often overlooked goldmine is the glut of “downtime” most artists are already intimately familiar with.

What makes fair use such a slippery concept is that it can only be proven by going to court, and most people can’t afford to take the issue that far.

I was a rage-against-the-machine kind of anti-techie until then. I bought a cell phone the next day.

You don’t need a bunch of imbeciles around you. You don’t need a bunch of uncompromising geniuses, either.

I am unfit for the 9-5, but exceptional at the unstable, abstract and adventurous. I am an artist!

A good starting place is to develop a logline, your one-sentence summary of the idea. This is a hell of a lot harder than it sounds.

Lately I’ve been working on two small projects at once: music for an iPhone game and an indie movie trailer. In both, I’m returning to a mainstay in my music writing: layers.

If you’re still rocking a flip phone, just stick to the magazines. Because a flip phone is the mark of shame and sadness.

If I knew, as a musician, that my label was turning down offers for free work or adventure when I had nothing else to do on a Tuesday night, I would have been furious.

Write the damn thing as if it were your great American novel.

I take on these experimental projects knowing full well that I’ll probably have a net loss monetarily.

The point here isn’t to talk about how awesome we are, but to stress how we have come to value a collaborative vision built around our own dark obsessions.

“You Americans! You always have to push so many events into a little time period!”