What is it thats starts the trip to where you are going? Is it the first step out your door? Or is it when you begin planning for the trip itself? For the most part I have always felt it started when you walked out the door. No planning, no patience, just leaving and hoping for the best. An adventure.
There are many benefits to this kind of thinking. Mainly the impulsitivity of it all seems to makes you feel free and untethered. And it does, but there is always a cost for this. Not every time, but enough to make most people stop and think. For me it comes late, but either way it’s time. One needs to plan a bit if they want to grow and become more than who or what they are now. This does not mean that I need to stop being impulsive altogether. Just that necessity has made it a priority to take the time to plan ahead more, even if it’s a little bit at first.
To expand this train of thought, I want to elaborate on how I create anything I do. From a simple illustration to an animation or a piece of film. This way you will understand how this impulsive nature has impeded my growth as an artist. I get an idea for my work from all places, in the shower, on the pot, in a car, and even when I am writing this. From there I just start building without any thought of how I will do it. The only thing that matters is creating whatever it is in whatever way I can. At first this is an easy task, everything always goes so well. I have been here before, it’s home. I know the tools, the processes. Here I am a pro. But later, as I get past this part, things get a bit harder. And anymore I seem to get here within a few minutes not hours or days. This is where my concepts and ideas do not jive well with my current toolsets or procedures. At times I can hack my way through this and get past all of the hoopla that is this growing and learning crap. But 99% of the time I get bored or frustrated and look for a way out. It’s about here that my brain rolls out a plethora of new festering ideas that just have to be addressed right now. Every one of these “ideas” has an amazing escape plan, I get out and am free again to do whatever I want. Screw this project, it’s killing my mood man. Time to go. Then 30 minutes later I am writing this blog instead of storyboarding a new animated short. And I am quite sure I will be moving on from this to write a scene from that movie idea I had 2 years ago. The process continues and I will be back here in another 2 hours to work on this for another 3 minutes…
Ok, so it was only 25 minutes, Sons of Anarchy was on and I had to watch that instead of drawing pictures of monsters that I talked about previously. Where was I… Oh, right..
Don’t get me wrong, sometimes in that 1% window I can knock out some pretty damn cool work that takes about 3 months to do, it’s still f___ing cool. But they are all hacks and illusions that are viewable for sure, but they are not great. And let me be honest here, I need to be great. I cannot and will not settle for anything less.
And now we come to it. The core issue here. The one that I think all creative people struggle with, hell I think everyone does. Discipline, hard work, and most importantly planning. When you work for someone or even a company it’s easy, you’re not really left with a choice if you want to earn an income. However on your own work, you never have to. You can just not do it. But the truth is, you must, or you will always just be a dreamer and nothing more. And I will not tolerate that in myself. I have learned far too damn much to let it all go because it’s too hard.
So this is my pledge, to myself more than anything, soon you will see a whole new side to me and a different kind of work. The stories will be more in depth, the characters will be more detailed and fleshed out. And shortly after that I will show you what I can do with film. It will blow you away, I can assure you of it. Gone are the old way of doing things. Now is the time to be great. And to do that I need to get back to work and stop talking about it. Expect less Facebook or Twitter updates then there are now. And trust me, this will be the last blog entry in a long while.
Great things are coming, and I aim to be the one that delivers them to you.
Sincerely,
paulbrianthomas
