Full Sail Stories

At a young age, Mikey Zoppo fell in love with 3D art, graphic design, and motion graphics and decided to make it his career. He graduated from Full Sail University with his bachelor’s in Digital Arts & Design in 2010. Now he’s the Creative Director and Co-Founder of Blueteam, a motion graphics studio that creates compelling content for clients like Google, IBM, Across the Pond, and more.

Growing up in North Carolina, Mikey was a creative kid who loved theater, art, drawing, and woodworking. He became interested in motion graphics when he was in high school and saw a video of a couple of kids having a lightsaber battle out in the woods. Mikey was inspired by the visual effects of the lightsabers, so he taught himself how to use Adobe After Effects and started doing some freelance work to get experience.

When considering his next steps, Mikey heard about Full Sail from his theater teacher and decided to move to Orlando and study Digital Arts & Design there. During the program, he learned the fundamentals of design, color theory, typography, page layout, and more.

After graduation, Mikey worked at a design, print, and fabrication shop in downtown Orlando doing projects for clients like Walt Disney World and the Orlando Magic. Eventually, Mikey moved back to North Carolina and freelanced for various clients, then worked at an agency creating videos with motion graphics and animations for B2B clients.

After five years at the agency, Mikey decided to start his own business, Blueteam, with his business partner Zan Gantt. Since 2019, Blueteam has delivered budget-friendly motion design assets to clients in tech, healthcare, finance, events, gaming, and film.

“One of the big things that we’re [helping our clients with] is motion systems,” says Mikey. “Brands have brand guidelines that define how [their static assets] look, feel, communicate, and sound to an audience. So motion systems [also have guidelines], but it’s how a brand looks, feels, and communicates using motion assets across its entire suite of connection points, whether that’s social media, on their website, or for live events. So we’re developing these cohesive languages and entire systems for brands that can live across their entire ecosystem of creative assets.”

Some of Mikey’s favorite work has been creating assets to protect conserved land and threatened animals. For several years, Blueteam worked with environmental firms and used drones to create 3D renderings for litigation cases involving 123 acres of land in the southeast US where endangered species live. Ultimately, the environmental firms won the cases, and the land and animals are still being protected.

“That project meant the most to us,” Mikey shares. “We are actually making a little bit of a difference in the world, protecting some rare and endangered species and protecting a lot of wildlife and land.”