Navigating the Future of Media Arts

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/05/17

Matt Galuppo, Chair of Media Arts at the New York Film Academy in Los Angeles, discusses the evolving landscape of animation, visual effects, and game design. He emphasizes the need for passion and adaptability in a rapidly changing industry shaped by AI, shifting studio models, and a growing demand for diverse voices. Galuppo advocates for bottom-up educational leadership, values real-world experience, and sees liberal arts as essential to storytelling. The conversation explores work-life balance, career pivots, and the enduring human element in creative work—offering insights for emerging artists and professionals seeking meaning and longevity in media arts careers.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So today, we’re here with Matt Galuppo. He is the Chair of Media Arts at the New York Film Academy’s Los Angeles campus. He oversees programs in 3D Animation, Visual Effects, and Game Design. His professional background spans major studios and independent projects. His credits include Inception, work for brands like Lexus and Toyota, collaborations with Riot Games and Netflix, and contributions to the Emmy Award-winning series Tab Time.

Galuppo specializes in animation, visual effects, and game development, offering students practical training rooted in current industry practices. He brings expertise in platform-specific workflows, storytelling through visual media, and emerging technologies such as AI. While many of his interviews touch on artificial intelligence, we will focus on broader topics today.

His work in education emphasizes career development, skill mastery, and preparing students to contribute meaningfully to an evolving entertainment landscape. Is all of that correct?

Matt Galuppo: Wow, that’s a great bio—I should use that for my résumé. 

Jacobsen: Today’s thematic question is: How do arts professors guide young creatives in navigating the industry and amplifying diverse voices? A good first step would be understanding the concept of industry standards. In your field, how are industry standards set?

Galuppo: That depends on the context—whether you’re working in games, animation, filmmaking for theatrical releases, or immersive and experiential media. The studio or client typically sets the deliverables through a quality assurance (QA) process. That’s the nuts-and-bolts aspect: ensuring your work passes departmental reviews and meets expectations at each production stage.

The other side is more intangible. Early in your career, you constantly check whether you meet industry standards. That means asking questions—are you using the correct formats? Are your files compliant? If you’re a writer, is your copy aligned with brand and legal requirements?

You’ve probably experienced this as a writer: you compare yourself to others, ask questions, and seek feedback. Eventually, with experience, you push the envelope; over time, you may even help define new standards.

Whether you’re creative or technical, who sets the benchmarks for your work influences you.

Jacobsen: In the AI and startup spaces, there’s a prevalent “work-until-you-drop” culture where balance is often undervalued. I came across a quote today by Venki Ramakrishnan, a 2009 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, who said, “If you’re working nonstop all the time, you will burn out.” Is there any emphasis in your work culture on maintaining a healthy work-life balance?

Galuppo: Notoriously, animation and game design have a big problem with work-life balance. And there’s this added tax you’re expected to pay: you’re working on “cool” things. You’re doing stuff that everyone else wants to do—so you have to work harder to be the one doing it.

As we speak, major companies are starting to crumble. Last year, it was mostly in games; this year, it’s hitting animation and visual effects. Technicolor went under.

Technicolor—the company behind The Wizard of Oz—went under. They had tens of thousands, probably around 15,000 employees. They owned The Mill, MPC, and Mikros Animation.

They owned all these major studios working on incredible projects. And it is not controversial to say that it was probably half mismanagement and half due to a culture that has become unsustainable—especially in terms of how these projects are made and what companies value in the people making them.

Right now, I would say that for students coming up and considering work-life balance, it’s not only about what you do—it’s about who you are.

Places now aren’t just hiring the portfolio; they’re hiring the person, and that part—the person—is not fungible.

You embody this quality as a creative, and all your life experience away from the screen, away from making pixels, contributes to it. That quality is ascending right now.

We’re seeing the old-school mentality—the higher-ups saying, “I know what’s best,” dictating where the line goes and how to execute the art—start to fade.

The hope is that we’ll see the artists themselves valued as individuals. If I were a betting person, I’d place my bet on the ones holding on and adapting. There will be much more thoughtful evaluation moving forward.

Jacobsen: Right. There’s been a trend, particularly among younger Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, and women, of increasing levels of education, qualifications, and work experience—alongside bringing a different set of values to the workplace.

Compared to a small percentage of men, many emphasize work-life balance more. Gen Z appears to be continuing that trend—investing in education and credentials—especially among women, who are looking not just for work but for a balanced life. Suppose you want to retain that kind of talent in the industry. What can employers do to offer meaningful enticements and incentives?

Galuppo: Oh man, it’s a buyer’s market for employers right now. They shouldn’t be too worried.

You’re catching me at an interesting moment. If you’d asked that same question two years ago, there was a shortage of people. Now, there are too many of them. And that’s not because we trained too many—studios are buying less.

The streaming wars are taking a different turn. Creative management is rethinking how it does things.

And to a lesser—but not insignificant—extent, AI is on the horizon. We’ve been using AI tools for a decade, but now it’s arriving in a way we haven’t seen before. There’s been a lot of upheaval, and for better or worse, it’s falling on the individual artist.

So, if you ask, “How can these places entice people like me or others?” The unsatisfactory answer is that they don’t need to right now.

So I’ll reframe the question: how can these places entice the artists needed for a healthy industry? And the answer starts with recognizing the artist as an individual, not just a button-pusher. That perception is beginning to fade—not that artists were ever just button-pushers, but that’s how they’ve often been seen from the top down.

These tools will empower individual artists to contribute significantly to final products. In the past, an artist might only create a few seconds of a tentpole project. Now, they can produce entire sequences, so their creative ownership needs to increase.

To support that, you need them out in the world, experiencing life—so they can bring those experiences back into their work.

It’s a bit cliché, but think of Disney and Pixar’s famous field trips. They’d say, “You’ve spent too much time staring at a screen—we need to get you out diving the Great Barrier Reef,” or “We need you visiting Colombia for Encanto.”

I hope there will be more of that—but not necessarily company-mandated. It should be culturally encouraged.

Jacobsen: You also touched on the role of education—or, more broadly, professional training. Whether someone has a degree directly relevant to the industry or something more tangential, many also build a track record of continuing education—taking edX courses, Coursera, and so on.

Galuppo: Yes, those are two different things. And I might be early with this prediction, but I think liberal arts degrees will resurface.

If you’d asked me this a while ago, I would have said it all comes down to who you are as an artist—what’s in your portfolio and reel. I’d look at your work and say, “Okay, this is who you are.”

But now, you asking me this question is making me rethink it. You mentioned my Inception credit—that’s wild. That was the first thing I ever worked on in Hollywood.

I was a carpenter on it—not a visual effects artist or anything like that. That’s how I started.

Jacobsen: These roles count. I’ve been a janitor and a stall mucker. I’ve dealt with human waste, horse waste—you name it.

Galuppo: Yes, and that counts. I loved being a carpenter. I was a set carpenter for Inception, working for a studio that no longer exists—New Deal Studios.

Jacobsen: I should be including that kind of story in all of these interviews.

Galuppo: Honestly, it’s a good idea. Those experiences matter. It’s an interesting place to start.

Jacobsen: It’d be like interviewing Jensen Huang now and thinking, “Wow, look at him.” Sure, he revolutionized computing 30 years ago, and now it’s all come to fruition—but he talks candidly about starting as a dishwasher. I was a dishwasher, too. I’m sure you were something like that at some point.

Galuppo: I wasn’t a dishwasher—no. But I was the equivalent in a shop. I was the guy who swept everything up, cleaned, organized.

Jacobsen: Right—sweeping the warehouse.

Galuppo: Yes, exactly. I started in shops pretty young.

Jacobsen: Not to say you were any good at it—it’s just that you did it. I can’t say I was great at sweeping warehouses, being a dishwasher, janitor, or shovelling horse manure, but I did it. It paid the bills. 

Galuppo: It was one of those early shops where it was pretty much sweeping. They were trying to teach me to weld and do other things to make me more useful on the side, but mainly, I was cleaning up after the people doing the work.

And I swear this story has a point. The technical director of that shop graduated from Caltech with a master’s degree in liquid and thermodynamics. He was a smart guy. How did he end up in a scene shop? He said it was after the Cold War.

He told me, “Oh, they didn’t need engineers anymore. All the defence contracts dried up. There was a glut of engineers. The only place I could get a job was in the arts.” And now we’re about to hit a point where it will be, “Oh, I don’t need as many sophisticated tools, operators and craftsmen—I need people who understand the humanities and the liberal arts.”

Jacobsen: That’s a good point.

Galuppo: Yes, we can flesh that out.

Jacobsen: The first thing that comes to mind is that you can have sophisticated script-building technology based on prompts, maybe even some visual storyboarding that gets built and filled out. But you might still need the humanities to build a proper story—even with the assistance of those technologies. Is that what you’re getting at?

Galuppo: Yes, and it will go even weirder than that.

Something that wasn’t mentioned earlier—my most recent work is as an animation and visual effects supervisor for TCL, the world’s largest television manufacturer.

I work for part of their research group, and we’ve been developing many tools and AI-driven content. One thing we arrived at quickly is: if there’s not a human core, why are people watching it?

Audiences don’t care otherwise. Early on, everyone planted their flag with, “This needs to be written by a human.” The knowledge that it comes from a human core matters to viewers. Not only does it need to be written by a human—the voice, at the very least, must be fully human—hopefully more.

We’re now experiencing that we should accelerate other parts of the process, not the spontaneity of an actor’s performance.

Because what I’m connecting with is the actor—and I say this as someone with an animation background. I do feel the human hand behind animated characters.

More people work on animated characters than on one actor’s live performance.

So, we’re seeing that there are certain third rails of art that you cannot touch. You need to leave them human, or audiences will disengage.

That’s what we’ve been seeing from the AI perspective—whether it’s scriptwriting, as you mentioned, or moment-to-moment performance.

Can AI get there? I don’t know. It’s moving faster than I thought, and I’ve been 100% professionally immersed in it, leading and building teams around it.

And still, I don’t have a clear answer.

But I do think that if there’s going to be something that holds value, it’s going to be the “unapplicable” part—the study of the humanities and the liberal arts.

I could be wrong. I could be wrong.

Jacobsen: Could you imagine a near-medium future where an entire industry—not necessarily tied to any one country like Hollywood or Bollywood—is almost entirely built and operated by artificial intelligence? Like a “Robollywood” or something?

Galuppo: Oh, whoa, that’s funny. The AI part—that’s interesting. I was assuming you meant something like virtual studios. All these virtual studios are popping up, so will an “AI studio” exist? However, AI studios would be connected only by their use of generative technologies.

I might use something more specific than “AI” here. I will separate large language models from this answer because I’m not as expert in them as I am in generative tools.

Will there be—man, do tax incentives still exist in that world? If tax incentives exist, I can’t imagine studios not figuring out how to exploit them.

So, there’s a local draw using Canada, New Mexico, or Louisiana—places with these different incentives. Whatever you can do virtually, you can do better on location when there’s a tax incentive. And this has been around for decades.

So, in a strange way, governments are stopping the industry from becoming fully virtual and disconnected because it provides such a boost—sometimes up to 40%—that significantly increases production capacity.

Unless those incentives disappear, I do not see the system becoming completely virtual, decentralized, and location-agnostic.

Jacobsen: Those are less like tax incentives and more like financial subsidies.

Galuppo: Yes, financial subsidies—absolutely.

Jacobsen: For non-virtual work.

Galuppo: Yes. But you still get the subsidy if you put your workers in those regions. So you’re incentivized to move beyond virtual. Now, it is a lot to fly people out, which is what many companies still do. They fly the artists in, house them, and still make it work.

Jacobsen: Deployment and delivery.

Galuppo: Yes, exactly.

I’ll add that —this might work in reverse.

I was working with someone—we were talking about this earlier—a Belarusian by way of Poland. He made an amazing music video using generative technologies.

It was in Belarusian, which he told me is spoken natively by about 10 million people. He made it for a local artist and said, “There’s no way this would be useful or marketable in a mainstream global way.”

So, rather than this being a universal cultural product that spreads through the “Mimasphere,” I think these tools allow people to become hyper-specific with their local cultures in ways they never could before.

So that’s my non-tax incentive answer.

My tax incentive answer remains: I do not see them going away.

Jacobsen: If this landscape diversifies to the point where a lot of the basic drudgery can at least be assisted—if not done outright—by automated systems, algorithms, and the like, then it could flatten the talent landscape.

It could allow many more people to enter the field. Could there be various forms of incentive to bring in a wider palette of people from different backgrounds? Educationally, through more diverse knowledge networks—people trained in ways not traditionally recognized in the field?

Galuppo: I love the words. Well, “the specific is universal,” as the saying goes. So, being diverse and more specific helps tremendously from any artist’s point of view.

Sometimes, when a lot of people are working on something, there’s a temptation to make it universal. But lowering the barrier to entry for these tools helps.

Weirdly, lowering the barrier to entry to these tools has shown us that suddenly, yes, you don’t need to know how to roto because AI will be much better at rotoscoping.

You don’t need to know how to paint out individual objects because these AI tools—machine learning tools—are much better at that, too.

So, what’s considered valuable is shifting.

Now the question becomes: what is valuable?

Is it your worldview?

Is it your upbringing?

Is it what you identify with?

Is it all those fundamental things that make you human?

Is that what’s valuable? Or is it something else that we don’t yet recognize as valuable?

Are we heading toward a world where logistics managers become the next Scorsese because they’re so good at pipeline management that they can direct an entire team of AI creative agents?

I do not know.

I do not think managing AI agents—or having what some people call enough—I’ve heard this argument: that taste will be the new differentiator. We’ll have an ocean of AI-generated content, and someone with good taste will know which ones are worth keeping.

But it’s beyond taste.

I believe that vision still matters—the kind that comes from lived experience and learning.

If I understand your question correctly, you’re asking if there are things outside the humanities that could make someone a great storyteller.

And the answer is yes.

Using Moneyball as an example, it took someone trained in economics to uncover that story and make it compelling.

So, by lowering the threshold for participation in the visual arts, we’re allowing people with more technical backgrounds to enter the space and tell stories that they find meaningful and that others find meaningful, too.

So yes. Yes. I hadn’t thought about it that way before, but absolutely.

Jacobsen: We can frame traditional questions about diversity within the intellectual framework of the current administrative era.

So, let’s say you’re considering an applicant or a prospective colleague who is trans or who may identify as bisexual, lesbian, gay, or intersex. That is part of how they present and live—meeting or exceeding the program’s standards.

From a cultural standpoint in the workspace, what practices or leadership habits have you found helpful for colleagues or new entrants to feel more accepted and fully realize—not just optimize—their potential?

Because that is how you get the full charge of their talents and knowledge.

Galuppo: Wow, man. Great question.

I’m going to start with professors—answering from that perspective—and then circle back to applicants or students.

I would boil it down to leadership. I’m a big proponent of bottom-up leadership, empowering professors to lead.

I believe in offering everyone leadership opportunities. And sometimes, that is not always offered or expected, particularly in the groups you mentioned.

I’m thinking of one professor in particular. When we gave them a leadership opportunity, something amazing happened.

I give every professor, in various ways, leadership opportunities by asking, “Hey, if you were king of the forest, how would you do this? Is there something you want to take ownership of? Is there something there?”

And that’s important with anyone who shows a spark of something.

But in terms of how you define diversity, I’m thinking of a couple of professors in particular—if they’re given a leadership opportunity, it’s the best way to ignite a fire in them, to get the most out of them, and for them to give the most back to the students—and to everything.

It’s counterintuitive to say, “Hey, as a leader, delegate leadership, too.”

But yes—and they’ll do things in ways you never would have imagined. They’ll run meetings differently. And it’s exciting to see. So that’s what we’ve been doing.

That’s my quick answer for professors who show great merit, especially those who may come from different backgrounds. I might not be the most effective leader for every group, so let’s see how others lead, support that, and take the best ideas to roll out across the board.

It’s a typical bottom-up leadership model, but people don’t always think to apply it to diversity.

For applicants—and NYFA in general—we pride ourselves on providing value-added education.

Across my career and various shows, I’ve been a big believer in my students—not just NYFA students but students everywhere I’ve taught. I’ve brought them onto shows.

Throughout my career, I’ve hired about 20 NYFA students. On Tab Time, which you mentioned earlier, my lead animator and technical director were NYFA students.

How do you find, support, or elevate diverse voices in less diverse fields?

Visual effects certainly have issues with that.

I wish we had a better entry-point solution than saying, “Let everyone in and teach.”

But again—it’s the professors who make it work.

Early in my career, I spoke with one of the few women who was a visual effects or previsualization supervisor. This was in a prior phase of my career.

She told me how few women were in previsualization, and that’s why she took the lead position—she said, “I’m doing this to show people that women in previsualization can lead.”

So, when it comes to applicants, I believe it starts with hiring professors who match the necessary talent and reflect what students need to see—so they can see themselves in the industry’s future.

That takes much work. You have to make sure the faculty reflects the student population in terms of identity and has the skills because, at the end of the day, this is a highly competitive industry. It takes much extra work in recruiting.

And my son’s not American. In the U.S., I’ve noticed this strange push-pull between divisive and unifying language.

Jacobsen: The unifying frame is that every American is concerned about merit. How do they define it? That’s where the division lies. So—anyway, what else can I ask about? 

Galuppo: If you were to look at the industry now, there are enough artists to fulfill the work needed. That wasn’t the case a couple of years ago.

So now the question is: who are the artists clinging on?

What’s the edge that allows someone to stay in? And honestly—I don’t know.

Jacobsen: I would hope it’s about who you are. That unifying versus divisive framing was interesting—I’d have to think more about that.

 I know one thing that does not cling on to your staying power: being a Vulcan.

Galuppo: Ha! Yes. I was going to say—that this will be a Star Trek moment. 

Jacobsen: So, to move us along, what are the trends shaping the future of animation and VFX education?

Galuppo: Oh, man. I struggle with this all the time. I’ll keep it short because AI-generated tools are the big boogeyman in the room.

And how long or interesting can I be on that since I’ve spent so much time on it already? It’s everything I said before.

But again, the great unknowns are this: pipelines are reinventing themselves.

The idea of “tentpole” projects is fading.

Some people are saying it’s going to be like the 1970s again—smaller t, with ams doing really interesting stuff.

Others say TV is dying off, especially as the streaming wars shape it.

I don’t know if TV will come back or if we’ll move more toward feature films.

Instead of seeing ten $100 million blockbusters, we might start seeing twenty or thirty $50 million or $10 million projects.

The audience decides what’s interesting. Still, studios must put work in front of audiences to make it interesting.

I’m thinking of things like ReelShorts and DramaBox—these mobile-first platforms.

They’re making billions in revenue. They’ve replaced the Hallmark Channel with romantic comedies.

They’re not what a cinephile would call “well executed,” but they’re performing incredibly well, which shows that audiences are hungry for content.

You need to pay attention, tell stories they care about, and help them see themselves reflected in those stories.

So, I’m interested to see how that evolves.

Rather than seeing emerging technologies as the enemy, maybe we can recognize that some outdated practices needed to be shaken up—and AI became the excuse.

It took these developments to trigger real change.

Jacobsen: Nevertheless, there are still places where nuance is difficult to replicate with technology. I’ve tried the show From—have you heard of it?

Galuppo: No. 

Jacobsen: It won an award for best horror series or something like that. One of the actors is from the Matrix films—not one of the leads, but a notable character. Harold Perrineau. He’s 61 now—he was much younger in the Matrix days. He played Link.

Now, in From, he plays a character named Boyd. It’s a mystery-box show—you get clues and fragments but don’t know what’s going on until the end. It’s like Lost. You can try plugging in various data points, and yes, an LLM or another analytical tool could help—but they’re structured in a way where you still can’t fully decode it.

So, people can design shows that maintain that core human element of surprise, even in the face of increasingly sophisticated analytical systems. There’s still room in entertainment for awe, shock, and surprise.

Galuppo: That’s promising. It’s from MGM, of all places. As you can probably tell, I have two young kids, so I’m not allowed to watch anything other than children’s programming. But this one looks really cool. I’m going to have to check it out. I’ll get back to you about it.

Jacobsen: They’ve done three seasons, and we still don’t know what’s happening.

Galuppo:  So—it’s like Lost?

Jacobsen: Yep. The creators of Lost made it. John Griffin is the main creator.

Other actors and actresses in the show include Catalina Sandino Moreno, Eion Bailey, David Alpay, Elizabeth Saunders, Shaun Majumder, Scott McCord, Ricky He, Chloe Van Landschoot, Pegah Ghafoori, Corteon Moore, Hannah Cheramy, and others. Avery Conrad is a British Columbian actor, so she’s close to our cohort—one of ours, one British Columbian. Anyway, From is a fascinating show.

So, there’s going to be a lot of guesswork, and eventually, we’ll see these little swirls—whirlpools, really—where the river of progress kind of loops in on itself. At those points, we may find highly productive areas of human activity that automated systems cannot pierce or solve. Like these mystery-box shows.

Galuppo: Yes. It’s interesting to see this done by a major studio. But this quality level is achievable independently very soon. So we could see a lot more experimentation, which is exciting. Experimentation will go through the roof soon. I’ll check that show out.

Jacobsen: Any final words on getting the next cohort of new graduates interested in this field—or those retraining from a different career, either because they’re no longer interested in what they were doing or because, frankly, they ran out of work?

Galuppo: Absolutely. I’ll tell you what I tell a lot of people interested in the field right now: It’s a great time—if you’re passionate about it.

What’s about to happen is that the people who entered this industry because they wanted a “stable job that’s kind of fun”or something halfway between two worlds—I don’t think it’s for them anymore.

You need to be extremely passionate about this. That said, if there was ever a time for a young artist to enter the field, it’s now. The rules are being rewritten. Almost nothing people said in the past still holds.

If you’re young and interested, have stories to tell, or want to be part of something, now is the time. The playing field is being levelled. You don’t have to line up behind people like we all had to for the past two decades.

So yes, it’s a little chaotic—but it’s also full of opportunity. For those considering a career pivot, it depends on where you’re coming from. Would I recommend a career change into this space? It depends.

Now is a good time if you’re young and this is your dream. You can capitalize on the moment and see things with a fresh perspective—ways that are hard to see if you’ve already been shaped by a different system. For the career pivot crowd, it depends on your background and where you want to go.

I’ve spent most of my career below the line. I’ve directed a few things—for Comedy Central, Syfy, Netflix—but that’s not where the bulk of my income or work has been. It’s been telling other people’s stories. And right now, how people help tell other people’s stories is changing—fast.

It’s exciting if you’re young and just jumping in—but it can be a bit scarier if you’re mid-career and looking to pivot. That being said, storytelling and the fundamentals of how stories are told—I do not see that changing. It hasn’t changed much in a century. Honestly, you could argue that it has not changed in centuries. I would be surprised if it changed now.

CG, visual effects, and everything related has only existed for forty—maybe thirty—years, at most. So yes, it’s more volatile. Game design has been around since the ’70s, and if you’ve been in the scene long enough, you’ve seen the full arc: team triumphs.

Jacobsen: It’s like old teen dramas to even the rare but tragic teen implosions. “Romeo, Romeo—where art thou Romeo?” But Marvel “What if…” with zombies. 

Galuppo: That structure hasn’t changed much either. Honestly, even Shakespeare may have been parodying and poking fun at the tropes of his time. So, in that sense, nothing has changed.

That’s my nuance between the two worlds: it’s exciting if you’re young, but if you’re considering a career pivot, you must be more cautious about where you’re stepping. It depends on what you’re stepping into.

Jacobsen: Excellent. Matt, it was nice to meet you.

Galuppo: Thanks, Scott.

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