About

Howdy, I’m James! I’m a Director and Creative Director, currently figuring out what my next career adventure will be. I’ve got a diverse history of creating everything from websites to NFTs to films and commercials to interactive experiences (both virtual and physical). Feel free to reach out jamesfdick@gmail.com.

What I Believe:

I love collaborating with awesome people and seeing a vision through from concept to delivery. I direct content, build teams, and develop effective processes to achieve this. The source that connects all of my endeavors is a passion for content that lives in that much discussed intersection of art and technology.

It’s not just the software or innovations that inspire me; it’s the reimagining of the creative process that they enable. AI, real time rendering, web3, mobile phones, collaboration tools, the litany of content creators across platforms with specific aesthetics; these are just several reasons that the traditional relationship between content and creative needs to be rethought.

As a creative director, I strive to embed craft content expertise throughout the creative process. This could mean a VR expert on a strategy team, a tik-toker in the concepting phase, a motion designer as a brand designer, or an animation director working alongside a visual designer.

I work with the purpose that each piece of content, be it a 6 second social post or 60 second tv spot, programmatic advertising or interactive activation needs to be thoughtfully considered by the individual content’s goals. Each piece of content is unique and the approach to the teams we build and the process of making must meet those goals.

Who I Am

On a more human level, a bit about me (this is where i ramble). Im a product of the mid-80s, a father of two who started on this journey as a boy in the 90s with ms-paint and an AOL cd-rom. 

As the pressures of a middle-class 10 year old boy in the midwest got the better of me, I turned to shock-rock music and the internet as an escape.

I taught myself html with the singular purpose of making an online shrine to marilyn manson, which quickly led to a passion for digital arts. Book in hand, I dove into the world of visual FX with Lightwave 3D. Simultaneously the arrival of Flash (or really, Macromedia Shockwave) introduced me to interactivity and procedural animation. 

By high school I had created several profitable affiliate-marketing led websites centered around ethnobotanicals and cheating in life (which landed me several magazine articles in prominent news sources of the era: Maxim! Y&M! to name a few). This nearly landed me in… business school, but I thankfully remembered that initial passion for the arts and decided to fully focus on Visual FX and film making.

After graduating (top of my class!) from the computer art department at SVA, I began work at oscar-winning vfx studio Framestore. There I had the privilege of helping develop the Geico Gecko, creating the global commercials automated rigging system, and working with a number of pretty amazing directors as Visual FX supervisor. 

It was Framestore’s burgeoning VR department that first gave me the taste of content to come. Game of Thrones VR and Field Trip to Mars Bus were a few projects that showed how finally, interactivity and visual effects had successfully come from those roots I knew of lightwave and flash to open up new worlds of content.

My desire to both innovate content and re-think the creative process led me to joining R/GA, for more on that, see top of the page.

In my personal life, I’m a very proud husband and father of three. I live in Bedstuy Brooklyn where I am able to expose my children to the beautiful diversity of life, soak in all the live-music that the world has to offer, and photograph some amazingness. I also enjoy giving some of my knowledge back (and taking plenty of knowledge in the process) by teaching a thesis animation course at SVA.

Awards