The all-nighter is not a badge: Gareth O'Brien on craft without the crunch

For a long time the creative industries carried a particular kind of pride: the all-nighter as proof of commitment, the burned-out studio at 3am as evidence that someone cared enough to suffer. A generation of designers and animators treated it as the cost of entry. Gareth O'Brien, Executive Creative Director of the global motion-design studio Buck, and the person who opened and now leads its Sydney studio, has been one of the more candid voices saying that romance is over, and that we should be glad it is.

He put it plainly: the all-nighter "is not a badge people are aspiring to any more, just the opposite in fact." Small sentence, large argument. O'Brien made the remark on the Pro Video Podcast back in 2018, and the rest of the industry has largely caught up to him since. He wasn't reaching for a wellbeing slogan. He was talking about what a creative studio is actually for, and what it owes the people inside it.

From Wellington to a New York collective

O'Brien is a New Zealander. He trained in design at Massey University in Wellington and worked in the city for a few years before making the move that defines so many design careers, the leap to New York. He joined Buck's New York studio in 2007, when the company was still a relatively young collective rather than the multi-city operation it would become. In 2010 the Art Directors Club named him one of its Young Guns, the long-running award for creatives under thirty, which put him among the field's most-watched emerging talents.

At Buck he built a reputation as a maker first, an associate creative director whose strongest work ran through 2D design, animation, stop motion and puppetry. Buck describes itself as "an integrated collective of designers, artists and storytellers who believe in the power of collaboration," and that bias toward the collective over the lone auteur is the thread O'Brien has carried through everything since. The studio he would go on to lead is built on it.

Coming home to open Sydney

In 2015 O'Brien came back to the southern hemisphere to open Buck's Sydney studio, the company's first in the Asia-Pacific region, and a measure of how far the New York start-up had travelled. He was, by then, a Buck veteran of close to a decade, and the brief was less about exporting a brand than transplanting a culture. Announcing the move, the trade press quoted the studio's view that "the humour down under suits us particularly well," and alongside executive producer Erica Ford, O'Brien hand-picked the early local hires rather than parachuting in a ready-made team.

It worked. The Sydney studio grew, to a team of around forty, by the One Club's account, and picked up the kind of recognition the industry takes seriously: ADC, D&AD, AGDA, AEAF and Best Awards among them. O'Brien rose to Executive Creative Director, the role he holds today, and became a regular on stages and lecterns across Australia and New Zealand, where the studio's run made him an obvious voice on how creative teams should be built and run.

The personal side of the work

It is in his thinking about studio culture that O'Brien is most distinctive, and most quotable. Where a lot of the conversation about creative work fixates on the output, he keeps coming back to what he has called "the importance of the personal side of the motion industry." His own arc, as he tells it, runs a familiar route: the shift from a social life built around the firm to becoming, in his phrase, "a family man." With that came a problem he has been unusually willing to name.

"The all-nighter is not a badge people are aspiring to any more, just the opposite in fact."

He has talked openly about the difficulty of "only seeing your kids at bedtime", the quiet arithmetic of a job that, left unchecked, eats the hours that matter most. His own counter-measure is almost mundane: get to work early, he has said, so he can get home early enough to see his children before the day is gone. A small discipline, but it stands in for a bigger conviction, that a creative leader's first job is to design a working life that doesn't consume the people living it, themselves included.

None of this comes at the expense of the craft, and O'Brien is careful not to let it read that way. Buck's reputation rests on work made with real ambition, passion projects that, by his own admission, sometimes delivered "way more than the budget really afforded." The point was never to care less. It was to stop treating exhaustion as the price of caring, and to build a studio where excellence and a life outside it can sit together. The grind, in his telling, was always a false economy.

An argument that aged into the mainstream

What makes O'Brien worth listening to now is that he got there early. When he first talked about the fading allure of the all-nighter, the industry's default still ran the other way. The years since, remote and distributed teams, a broad reckoning with burnout across the creative sector, have dragged the centre of gravity toward roughly the position he was describing. The clearest statement of his thinking is a few years old; the trend it spotted has only steepened.

He keeps putting the view in front of the next generation. O'Brien is billed among the presenters at The Outlook's TO26 Firebrand, the latest forum where he'll make the case for craft built on something steadier than crunch. Fitting venue for an argument he has been refining for years: that the work is better, and lasts longer, when the people making it are allowed to have a life.

The all-nighter, in O'Brien's reading, was never really a badge of honour. It was a habit the industry mistook for a value. Pulling the two apart, keep the ambition, drop the martyrdom, may turn out to be one of the quieter, more durable things a creative leader can do. He has spent the better part of two decades doing exactly that, on two continents, one studio at a time.