Jared Owen

Jared Owen is a popular YouTuber and 3D animator.

He has more than 2 million subscribers on his YouTube channel by the name Jared Owen.

Introduction-

Jared Owen grew up in Meridian, Idaho, United States.

He has an older brother.

Jared studied for a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Brigham Young University-Idaho in Rexburg, Idaho.

Love for animation & coding-

At a young age, Jared fell in love with animation and used to make flip books and simple animations on the computer.

He wanted to grow up to become an animator and work for The Walt Disney Company.

At that time, Jared used to watch animated films like The Road to El Dorado, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Recess: School’s Out and Treasure Planet and used to get inspired by the list of animators in the movies’ end credits.

And was confident that after growing up, he too would get credited as an animator in the animation films.

Towards high school, his father and elder brother taught Jared coding and as he found it interesting, he got hold of it.

His love for maths and problem-solving greatly helped him in coding.

Discovering Blender-

Once, while preparing a presentation on open-source software in college, Jared stumbled upon Blender, a free and open-source graphics software.

Thanks to his love for animation, he downloaded Blender and started learning it but his jam-packed college schedule didn’t allow him to completely learn Blender and so, he was forced to pause learning it.

Starting his YouTube channel-

On 13 April 2010, while studying in college, Jared started his YouTube channel by the name Jared Owen.

In between some semesters, he learnt Blender and with that knowledge, he produced his first YouTube video inspired by Star Wars podracers.

The video is titled- Podrace Scene and was published on 6 September 2011.

Career & learning animation-

After graduating, Jared landed a coding job at National Instruments in Austin, Texas and here, he got a little free time in the evenings so he resumed learning Blender.

Initially, he started dedicating a couple of hours in the evenings and weekends to learn Blender but as this interfered with his work-life balance, he started getting up early in the morning and started learning Blender daily for a couple of hours before going to work.

During that time, Jared followed many YouTube channels to learn Blender namely-

• Blender
• Blender Community
• Blender Guru
• CG Boost
• BornCG
• Gleb Alexandrov
• CG Geek
• tutor4u
• CG Masters
• CG Cookie
• MrSorbias
• Remington Creative
• Olav3D Tutorials
• Ducky 3D
• Wayward Art Company
• FlippedNormals
• BlenderDiplom.

Putting the work into his YouTube channel & his first viral video-

After learning Blender to a decent extent, Jared thought of sharing his creativity by producing YouTube videos.

He decided to produce videos on working mechanisms of various things and produced his first video with this theme titled- How big is the Solar System? on 1 April 2015.

This video became viral and is the first ever viral video of his channel.

As of September 2022, this video has accrued a whopping 23 million views.

Inspiration to work on YouTube-

After researching, Jared learnt about the YouTube Partner Program (YPP) and signed up for it.

It took him a while to earn a penny from his channel and thanks to this, he realised that if he could earn a penny from his channel, he could also earn decently by working hard on his channel.

After this realisation, Jared started working hard and started regularly posting videos onto his channel.

Quitting his job to become a full-time YouTuber-

It takes Jared around 50 hours to create simple animations and more than a hundred hours to produce complex 3D animations.

Initially, due to his full-time job, he was able to dedicate only a couple of hours randomly to his channel and eventually, his YouTube channel achieved a little success.

Thanks to this, Jared started receiving work opportunities and he also started getting contacted for licensing of his videos and as he agreed to license his videos to others’, he unlocked another earning source.

During that time, his AdSense earnings also started improving.

So, Jared quit his software engineer job and became a full-time YouTuber.

Just prior to this, he sold his home and moved to a rented place so that he could have a huge cash cushion.

Jared also read a few business books in order to better understand the business side of YouTube and his most favourite business book has been The $100 Startup.

A successful YouTuber-

Now, Jared is a successful YouTuber.

As of September 2022, he has 2.37M subscribers on his YouTube channel.

Jared earns from a variety of sources like advertisements on his YouTube videos, affiliate marketing, receiving sponsorships and he also receives donations through Patreon and PayPal.

An interesting research process-

Occasionally, Jared follows a hands-on approach to better understand the working mechanisms of things, so that he can better explain in his videos.

For example, once he went to a lock shop and requested the shop personnel to cut open the lock for him, so that he could better understand its working mechanism and with this, he produced a YouTube video.

Once, Jared also visited church and with the help of his wife, observed piano closely and later, produced videos on the working mechanism of piano.

He also takes apart different objects especially in hardware stores and toy stores.

For most of his videos, Jared uses the publicly available information and enters that data into Blender, traces it and makes his own layout.

Also, as a part of research, he does a lot of Googling, reads patents, watches YouTube videos and documentaries and contacts and interacts with experts.

Jared outsources a part of research to his family members.

Using Python for his videos-

Python is his favourite programming language and he uses it in Blender to produce animation.

Jared also uses drivers and Blender add-ons to produce animation.

In addition to animating the working mechanism of various things, he also occasionally does science fiction.

Jared uses Audacity for editing audio and uses the Razer Naga X Wired gaming mouse and the EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti graphics card.

Personal life-

Jared is married and has a child.

He hails from Boise, Idaho and his hobbies are reading, playing piano and bike riding.

Jared loves engineering and outer space and Apollo 13 is his favourite movie.

So, how are you inspired by the success story of Jared Owen?

Share with me in the comment section below.