I’ve been thinking recently about how difficult it gets to preserve enough energy during the week to be able to pursue your creative goals.
Depending on where you land in the industry in the beginning, you can stray from the path of self-expression. This is ok if self-expression and developing creative visions never was your intent, and you are in animation only for the love of the craft/science itself.
I remember when I didn’t care about the final result of something I created, just felt the NEED to express ideas I was passionate about (like martial arts and fighting, dystopias, the rural world, masculinity…). Even if I didn’t have the drawing skills, or the ”industry wisdom” to reach a huge amount of people, I kept drawing pages/writing.
You see, is a paradox. I’m a firm believer that only by experiencing things out of the realm of arts and translating them to other people, artists become capable of producing meaningful work. But as an adult, the time you consume to actually LIVE those things you want to talk about in your work, is the only time you have left after 8 hours of intense work, plus all kinds of tasks. The balance is incredibly hard. I don’t want to destroy my body and my mind in the process of creating. I don’t think that has to be the case.
I thought that maybe I would grow out of it, and I would settle with a familiar enough job and lose the drive of producing my own art. Far from the truth. I still feel the bug inside of me.
Express yourselves while you can, people. I’ll keep trying, one digital pencil stroke at a time.
I made this short animation experiment earlier today. Basic rigging, some comp in Toon Boom Harmony. I hope to have the time to make a short film soon.