With a rebellious spirit and restless hunt to defy conventions, GMUNK fractures boundaries and unleashes real-time visual revolutions that leave audiences awestruck.

GMUNK blurs the lines between traditional motion graphics and interactive media, playing constantly with new possibilities of optics, robotics and beauty. Fusing refraction and psychedelic aesthetics, GMUNK’s audacious works earned him a well-deserved reputation as a visionary in the industry. In GMUNK’s world, rules are mere illusions and creativity takes on a whole new dimension. 

Tell us about your background as an artist. Was it something you always wanted to do?
I was a very creative kid. I was always writing stories, illustrating books, coming up with characters. So I was always very creative thinking of new worlds, and then I was also a very good swimmer and scuba diver. So I was always competing between marine biology and art filmmaking. When I went to college I started over in an Oceanography major and then quickly got into real science and said “I would design this charts based on our research for them to look awesome”, and my teacher told me that I should take a Graphic Design class, cause no scientist is gonna take the time to design their charts and graphs. So I went into Graphic Design and decided to double major it with Film. I wanted to use all the old editors and video tools out there in the 90’s. 

Once I started studying that in college, it was all over, it's the only thing different I ever did since 1999. I forgot everything about science and the ocean, I was always interested in waves and physics and still am, and that interest has made its way to my animation and simulation work. I love simulating the ocean, and a lot of my work has water in it. Your passions never go away, they’re always integrated in what you’re doing. 

What are your biggest artistic inspirations?
I’m obsessed with refraction, like everything in my life is refraction. Refracting silhouettes, objects, glass and water. 

How would you describe your style?
Over the years when you do something for so long you become really diverse cause you get bored of things sometimes, and then you branch out. I would say the constant in every work of mine is a mood and an aesthetic, then the execution is always different. 

I think there’s a lot of a psychedelic aesthetic, also optics. Either it’s atmosphere, or glass, or warping, or like some sort of glass refraction at its core. In my live action work, in my CG, there’s a constant there, and also in the music feeling. 

Really thinking about the viewing experience, and experiencing the work, and the thought process, I think about that a lot. And that has to do with pacing, and that comes from my background  in animating. The still image to me has its own set of suggestions, but once things go into motion with music, that’s where I’m at my best. 

How do you choose which projects you want to get involved with?
I just look at the brief. I’ve always wanted to be an individual my whole career, to exist as a solo, but I also have a family of collaborators who I always work with, and sometimes I choose a project if it’s just a fun opportunity to collaborate with friends. Sometimes I just think of the collaborators and prioritize so we can get together. But normally I look at the full body of my work and look for opportunities to keep diversifying.

It’s about the experience and the process. Like is it gonna be fun? Can I collaborate with my favourite people? Am I gonna learn something? I love collaborating with agencies, I love forming that relationship and the journey of it. We’re so blessed to make a living on just being creative. It's such an adventure! I think I’m a creative adventure seeker! 


What have been the toughest obstacles to overcome?
The OFFF titles last year was a huge idea with no budget at all, so it was a challenge to pull off this massive idea. Pulling favours, compromising. It teaches you a lot about indie filmmaking. It was a really challenging process also because of the science fiction, cause it’s all about gloss and super futuristic. So I learned a lot about that. 

I think anything where I look at the final result and say, “Oh, I wish I did this, I wish I did that”… and live with that, it's always the thing that fires me up the most. It makes me never make the same mistake twice.

Is there a particular project you're most proud of?
What I’m most proud about is always the process of the projects. So the journey of Tron Legacy and making those holograms was definitely the most educational year of my career and the outcome made me extremely glad. Working on Windows 10 Hero Desktop Image, and thinking of the amount of people who saw that is mind-blowing. Telestron which is a robotic light installation that brought the audience into an experience of the diurnal cycle: sunrise, noon, sunset, and midnight. The projection-mapped sculpture for ADM Exhibition in Hangzhou was definitely an amazing adventure. Some of the digital art, doing the film Decima  for the OFFF Festival in Barcelona was one of the most educational and difficult experiences of making that in the middle of COVID, so I’m super proud of that too. The Totem, the projection map sculpture we just finished in Toronto late last year, was a really satisfying achievement with a really small budget and team, but the impact was amazing. 

What are your thoughts on the rapid advancement of AI? Are all our creative jobs at risk?
I think it's just a tool and in the right hands, amazing things can be made. The problem with it is that anybody can be an artist instantly. So I think there will be a period of time where you see so much AI because everyone is making stuff, and it's great, cause it's a great tool, but I feel like it needs direction, a concept, a purpose, and a usage. It's exciting. I’m not scared at all. I think it's gonna dramatically change many industries, but tools always existed to change the industry. For example, Photoshop changed the photography industry, also Lightroom. PC Paint like these earlier drawing tools, changed computer graphics, you know? I think it's just another evolution, but man it's powerful! 

What I’m excited about is that it behaves in a really psychedelic way and I love that! Because I’ve always seen things and wanted to create things that I had no idea how to make, and I feel that now I’m seeing things with stabled diffusion and warped diffusion that are allowing me to make some of my experiences a reality and that’s fucking awesome. That’s exciting because it becomes personal. There’s a message behind it all, so I’m really inspired by it. But I’m careful to use it as a tool to a means to an end of a higher concept. A bigger idea. I think it's gonna disrupt so many industries, and so many things are gonna become animated. As a reference tool, it is really next level. I look at it in the next 5 to 10 years the way we work is gonna be radically different, and that’s cool. It's something new, something we all dedicated our life to. But high concepts will always win. Storytelling will always win. I think certain things, like music or writing, need a human touch, so I don’t see it replacing musicians, or writers, or filmmakers. But the illustration market and CGI are gonna be hugely disrupted, but then the craftsmen are gonna be highly appreciated.  It’s just an evolution I think. The next decade is gonna be really interesting!

Anything exciting happening in the near future?
I had my first baby a year and a half ago and that has changed me more than anything because my connection to my parents is so much stronger, my creativity, and inspiration. There’s so much tenderness and purity to life right now with a baby, so I feel that has made me so much more mindful of my time. I’m very excited to be a father.

With projects coming up, it’s a lot of commissions and live-action. There’s a big virtual production project that’s probably the next big thing. But also there are exhibitions coming up, and a lot of curiosity. I'm very interested in how the mind works. Kinda like a tribal, deeply human, psychedelic way. So there’s gonna be a lot of spiritual quests that I’m gonna go on. I’m interested in themes like life, death, re-birth, and enlightenment. I’m very inspired by meditation with psychedelic practices. I’m learning how powerful the human mind is. There's so much outside the realm of reality that we don’t experience, so I’m looking to take myself places outside the default state of awareness. So that is gonna fuel some really interesting creative. 

I’ve been meditating since last October and it has changed the way I think, the way I stress, how I understand thoughts and pay no attention to it. It's just a wave in the ocean. It's just transitory. I don’t have to react or attach to it. Taking control of my thoughts and understanding what they are leads to so much peace and that peace lets me focus on the things that I should focus on, rather than focus on things that don’t matter. 

So yeah, focusing on mental health. 

What advice would you give aspiring artists to follow in your footsteps?
Do not compare yourself to anybody else. Take inspiration from everybody. Everyone has their own path and you shouldn’t compare yourself directly to anybody. Just look at the success and the output of other people and use it as fuel to keep creating and growing. Because there’s no competition on anything, that’ll just lead to suffering. 

It’s hard because we’re so connected to social media. I even had to limit my phone time to 8 minutes and that’s it. I choose to live in my own little bubble, versus blindly scroll everything. Cause I feel it's not real, and if you start looking at that stuff it can do more harm than good in a way. If I’m looking for a reference, I’ll find a reference, rather than scrolling on the couch for 3 hours.

Carefully curate the world you live in and understand how to take care of your body and mind.