Jess is co-owner and Creative Director of LyricVids.com. Alongside her life partner Anthony, this creative power couple have created a platform with a small team of talented animators and illustrators that serves artists and record labels all around the world. In addition to leading the creative vision of the company, Jess also directs the animation and production process of each video. She truly is the backbone of all of our projects, inspiring each of us every day with the amazing art she creates. “I’ve grown so much as an artist in the past seven years with LyricVids, learning new software and techniques, and expanding my creative capacity beyond what I thought was possible. I finally understand the Maya Angelou quote, ‘You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have,’ and truly feel like all these projects have unlocked a part of my brain, allowing me to become my best creative self. I can’t wait to see what the rest of this decade brings.”
With the explosive success that LyricVids has garnered, Jess has recently been compelled to share her story and her experience as a woman in the music industry. Beginning with a few media appearances, Jess has shed further light on what it’s like to be a proud female entrepreneur and what it takes to build your own company from the ground up.
In March 2022 and just in time for International Women’s Day, Jess appeared on CBC Radio’s Afternoon Drive with well known Canadian personality and host, Chris dela Torre. CBC Reporter and producer Josiah Sinanan leads the interview to dive into the world of LyricVids and what it means to be such an uprising force in the music industry. When asked about the company and what a lyric video is, Jess explains “We’re an animation studio that specifically services the music industry. For people who have has never seen a lyric video before, sometimes you’ll go on Youtube and you’ll see those simple karaoke versions and I think those are out there in the ether. Fans make them for their favourite songs and stuff, but basically what we do is we tailor that lyric video more towards our clients. We tailor that based on their brand, on the song’s vibe, on the impact that they want to deliver to someone when they’re listening to that song. It’s almost like a whole visual experience that goes along with listening to the song“. When asked about her creative process in making the videos she says “Record label clients will contact us with the song and/or the album art – sometimes they have a few notes for us and a direction they want to go but very often they just send us the song and are like “What do you think?”. Our creative process is to sit down, listen to the song, discuss it, we usually pull up the artist’s social media – what is this artist’s vibe? – what are they all about?“.
Jess explains how proud she is that LyricVids boasts a 50% female workplace. “When I was young , I always knew I wanted to do something creative. There wasn’t many avenues, there wasn’t many options for me – so when I got out of school I thought “makeup artist?”. I kind of felt there weren’t that many options shown to girls for when they go out into the work force – show young girls, to show young creatives that there is different types of ways you can use that creativity in different jobs, especially with the rise of the internet and the ever growing need for content creators. There’s so many different creative avenues that you can go down and being the founder of LyricVids, I think that it’s really important to teach young girls that if you feel creative and you feel that you have an idea and there’s not really a job out there for it – you can sometimes just create it. You just need to find that hole in the market and you can kind of do your own thing and build it from the ground up.“
When Josiah asks what she is most looking forward to with the company’s future Jess says, “I’d really like LyricVids to keep working with the caliber of artists that we’re currently working with. It was really awesome to work with John Legend and Ed Sheeran this year. I’d really love to get some of those other top artists under our belt. Whenever we hire someone and bring them on board, we always ask them “what’s your favourite artist?” and when they tell us we say “okay maybe we can work on that” maybe we can get that label into our world and end up working with all of our staff’s favourite artists.“
Check out Jess’ interview with CBC Radio on our YouTube Channel Here: