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THE MYTH OF THE "STARVING ARTIST"
The term "starving artist" is so ingrained in our society that we automatically believe it to be so. I am left to wonder, however, how much of that belief is self perpetuating. If we tell ourselves that the life of an artist is a hard life, full of poverty and defeat, something many who would choose art are probably told quite often by friends and family, then we come to expect that to be our reality. Expectation is like faith. If we expect that to be our life then we are programming such a thing into our subconcious minds from where it will seek validation. The result is that we may miss incredible opportunities all around us because we become only able to see that which we expect.
 What do I mean by "see"? I'll give you an example. When I used to walk to work everyday, my main focus was not getting hit by a car more than getting a car. There are, afterall, plenty of bad drivers to be found in L.A.. Still, when I finally decided to get a car, and more specifically to get a Ford Mustang, I suddenly started to see Mustangs everywhere. Everytime I turned around there was another Mustang. Now the reality is that those Mustangs were always there. I simply didn't see them because that was not my focus.
To this very day, even though I now drive the Mustang I wanted, I still see them everywhere. The subconcious mind is at the back of everything we do and if we allow wrong thoughts to exist there it will affect how we carry ourselves. It will affect every email we write, every conversation we have and even how we see opportunity. Right thoughts on the other hand can change everything. They can be that "something" that an important person sees in your eye that makes them want to suport you or work with you. The tone of your email, without your concious effort, can affect someone such that they recommend you to be interviewed for a major magazine. One line spoken in a conversation my so stick with someone that down the road, when they spot an opportunity, they remember you and pass it on. Like those Mustangs I see, opportunities are all around us. We just have to be in the mindset to see them.
We need only do a bit of searching to find real information that shatters the myth of the starving artist. Artists like Rafaello or Peter Paul Rubens did what they loved and were highly successful in their time. Perhaps closer to our interests, artists like Luis Royo, whose art is depicted at the top of this article, Boris Vallejo and Simon Beasley made big money painting covers for comics, magazines and all manner of science fiction and fantasy novels. Frank Frazetta would get as much as $30,000 for a single Conan cover. Now a kneejerk reaction would be to say, "Oh well these are special cases!' and to a degree they are, but many artists make plenty of money in what is known as "art licensing".
At major trade shows like Surtex, artists are brought together with manufacturers and marketers to license their art for use in a variety of products and advertising. According to ChangingCourse.com, in their writing about artists Bonnie Druschel and Michael Woodward, they say, "Product sales from Bonnie’s first licensing agreement were $800,000 of which Bonnie earned 10% or $80,000. Over the past 30 years, artist, licensing guru, and course developer Michael Woodward has licensed over $600 million in retail goods." If his royalty is around 10% you get the idea.
Woodward describes art licensing as “the business of leasing a copyrighted or trademarked art work by means of contractual agreement (a license), for a specified product, promotion, or service for a specific time period, in an agreed upon territory, for an agreed upon fee or royalty.” You need only visit a Target or Sears and notice the plethora images on various products. Every product featuring a design on it was created by an artist – many of whom are independent and have licensed their art to the manufacturer. A tradeshow like Surtex is the equivalent of what a show like MIPCOM would be to us as animators. Every year there are small studios making cool cartoons that we'll probably never see, who take them to MIPCOM and sell or license them for millions of dollars accumulatively in as many as 60 territories, none of which happen to be in the U.S.. I work in an industry full of artists, many of which make healthy six figure salaries working on their favorite movies and video games, and many are doing exactly what they want to do. There's plenty of money to be made in art and plenty of opportunity everywhere.
Hard times and difficulty can come on anyone in any profession. It has nothing to do with art. There's nothing hard about what I do. When you do what you love it is effortless. Have you ever been in the zone? When you're in the zone, time seems to stop, everything flows with ease and before you know it, it's 3:00 AM and you've missed a meal or two, but at the same time, you have results on screen that truly encompass your pure joy. You can look at images which you have created and easily visualize the future of a completed project. Of course, after missing a couple of meals, you just might feel like you're starving! ;)
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FOLLOW YOUR BLISS
I had something of a revelation... during my time here today. You might say this was life transforming. You see, yesterday and earlier today I was looking through some of my old blog posts from about four years ago, getting more ideas for my book, and I came across something. Back then, on November 5th 2002, I wrote:
A year ago, to this very day, I was laid off from the last studio job I had doing computer game work. Since that time I finally decided to push forward wholeheartedly into the realm of independent animation. I released Understanding Chaos and Shadowskin on DVD, promoted them through various avenues. I did many interviews and a few magazine articles. I was even invited on a trip to China and Japan to promote both my work, Lightwave 3D, and Aura Video Paint, my favorite software. I moved to LA where I started interacting in different circles and becoming a bit more known. I also hooked up with PBSO and began the J4A project. It hasn't been the smoothest ride I'll tell you, but I'd take it over that studio job any day!
Just over two years later, in my 2004 year end review, I wrote:
I am going back to work. I believe it is a necessary part of the way of Chaos and essential to doing a long term project.
Now both of those were concious choices. I'm not going to say that either one was right or wrong at the time. In fact, I would say they were both right based on what I believed. It is in fact belief that is the central issue here.
We have to really be careful what we allow ourselves to come to believe. As independent animators we are often faced with doing the impossible by industry standards and we need to always remember that those standards are not our own. Who was it who decided that a lone artist could not make a quality animated film, and when was this decided? People whose minds are stuck in the industry will tell you with conviction it can't be done and give you many convincing reasons why this is so, but we have to remember that this is their experience and not ours. As it is written in The Richest Man in Babylon, you wouldn't take advice on fine jewelry from a brick maker.
I am thankful that I started out with but a goal and, though I saw no way to achieve it, I also saw no barriers against it. I hadn't yet worked at the studios. I hadn't yet worked on "real films". I hadn't yet encountered the egos, the attitudes, the crushed spirits and broken dreams that so pervade the industry. I wanted to do it and so I did it. Even so, as time went on my beliefs fell into corruption. I learned a lot being in the industry. I read books by masters of the trade and veterans in animation and this was good, but it also took something away. I started to believe I had to use certain tools. I started to believe I had to follow certain processes. I stared to believe I had to live up to certain expectations. I started to even believe I had to travel a certain road, or that there was some purpose I had to fulfill or things just wouldn't go right.
When the revelation hit me, I had never before seen so clearly. I didn't just see clearly at this moment. It was like traveling through the Stargate, but into my mind and into my history and I saw clearly so far back. I could see the importance of each turning point. I could see the meaning in each lesson learned. I could see what I gained and what I traded away. I could finally see my purpose.
Joseph Campbell, famed and venerated author of The Masks of God, once said, "Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls." I can see now that when I did that, so many doors did open. I traveled halfway around the world to speak in China and Japan. I stood in Production I.G., my favorite studio, and watched one of the greatest anime films ever done in the making. I saw raw drawings of characters like Batou and Major Kusanagi on the desk of an artist so great as Hiroyuki Okiura. I wrote articles for major magazines and did many interviews. I got a deal with a major publisher. I got to stand in stores like Best Buy, Suncoast or Borders and see my products on the shelves. Those doors did open.
I have come to realize that if you truly want to create, you are tasked with nothing else but to follow your bliss. It would be like a crime for you to do less. As an artist or creator, you have something to say and to not get that message out would be a shame. There are things that exist in everyone's life that one can let be an excuse not to go after the dream, but its only a pale shadow of an excuse. If we really want to be free, we have to be free, right now, waiting for nothing. If we really want to create animation, we have to just start creating it and believe, even know, that we are on the right path and that the film will be done because the doors will open and the obstacles will fall out of the way. Nothing should stand in the way of your dream. Everything doesn't have to be perfect right now. You don't have to have the perfect computer. You don't have to have the best software. You don't have to have a dream team of artists. You don't have to have anything but your desire and your belief that it will happen. Just start down that road. You will be surprised how many things just move out of your way.
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A COMPETITIVE WORLD
There's a competitive world out there. People compete for jobs and compete for advancement in their companies or even in office politics. We hear terms like "cut-throat" or "dog-eat-dog" thrown around constantly. The question we really need to ask ourselves is "Do we really have to compete in it?" For people who can see all the tools available to us today and put the puzzle pieces together, the answer is a definite NO.
There is a creative way of thinking. As creatives we are not limited to competing for what's available to everyone else. As creatives we natually create and that even means creating our own opportunities where none may have existed previously. This could be as simple as creating a website and publishing your stories online in ebook form because publishers couldn't see the value in it, or it could be taking all the incredible tools out there and putting them together to make a studio quality animation by yourself because no one was going to hand it to you.
We live in an age of electronic media where all the monopolistic middlemen who used to decide what gets made and what gets seen are no longer necessary. If we have something to say we can create it and if need be, create an avenue to get it directly to our audience. People are everywhere looking for something new and those fixed minds of the competitive world, whether they make movies, video games, animated TV series or music are so busy worried about what the competition is doing or worried solely about that dollar that they can't dare to create something new and innovative. They certainly can't experiment when they have to spend millions out-doing the other guy and out marketing him too. In the creative world, though, time is on our side, because we can create the answers to our media dreams.
Bittorrent in a masterpiece of creativity. Youtube is creativity at is finest. All the blogs, podcasts, online social networks, Second Life, everyone is finding their way to just do it, or just say it while the big guys are spending outrageous ammounts worried about DRM. I guess now they are even competing against the consumer. Yet a small guy can spend six months making an innovative puzzle game and release it with no protection, as shareware and make hundred of thousands of dollars, by himself.
What is it that people are missing? What is that they are missing when they compete for top positions in some animation or computer game school, so that they can further compete for a job so they can become the guy who animated the smoke on layer 39 of a complex shot in yet another talking animal film or first person shooter? This wasn't the dream when they started out. What is it that companies are missing when they "Command & Repackage" a game that's been around for years or put new skins and updated graphics on the same old sports game and dare to call it something new for 2007? I doubt this was the vision of the people who started that company in a garage somewhere. Do they even continue to have a vision?
These large companies and suits and dinosaurs of old are going to miss the opportunities of the future. They'll be right in front of them but they'll miss them entirely while they try to squeeze every last drop out of the old system and out of consumers' wallets. The opportunities of the future will be ours. When sites like Lulu.com or Metacafe become household names, it will be the content of the creatives on there. The big machine may snatch up a few creatives now and present a flase dream of "making it", but more and more the guys on ground are turning them down. We can see more than they can now.
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MINDSET OF SUCCESS
For the last couple of weeks, though I have been moving forward creating characters and ideas for my feature project, my focus has been somewhere else. My focus has been on my mind. Creating a feature project or an OVA seres is more than just going through a series of technical steps to build shots, and make shots into sequences and make sequences into a completed movie. There is a mindset which mst drive the entire effort if it is to succeed.
Albert Einstein once said, "Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions." You have to see your movie before you begin. You should watch it just as though you were sitting in a theatre staring at the big screen in all its glory. Seeing the movie can come about in differnet ways for different artists. Some may need to flesh out an outline or treatment. Some may need a complete script in hand. Others may want storyboards or even a storyreel. In my case, I want to see the movie in my mind.
Watching scenes from the movie in my mind builds an excitement, turns on a fire of motivation that makes it necessary to get those images out onto the screen. It is the emotion associated with it, more than the images themself, which brings power to project and its possibility for completion. For the past couple of weeks I have been doing a lot of reading about that very mindset and its application in all aspects of life. I have reading about visualization and the creation of powerful mental images, images which are really felt, that lead to the perfect execution of plans. I am getting into that mindset that removes all technical barriers from the creation of images. I am in getting in that mindset which lets me know that because I see the images in my head, I can know of a surety that they will soon be on the screen.
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Scott Kirsner Predicts the Future
Yesterday I watched Mike Curtis' video of a Sundance 2007 panel on "Rights Licensing in the New Era of Distribution" which was moderated by Scott Kirsner of Cinematech. Kirsner is also the author of "The Future of Web Video" which details the current and potential landscape of money making possibilities for content creators on the Internet. The book, which I consider an absolute "must read" for indie content creators, is extremely detailed and timely, but it may not, from the onset, appear to paint the picture indies want to see.
There are no pots at the end of the rainbow to be found in the numerous interviews and detailed analyses of video delivery services. While there are, written therein, some success stories such as the "Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos" videos earning as much as $25,000 from pay per click advertising, it should be noted that a television program that could garner as many views as those videos would be worth hundreds of thousands if not exceeding a million dollars. The panel at Sundance, though, shows that much of what is written in the book is already coming true.
One thing that is clear from both the book and the panel is that no one has all the answers. Everyone is still trying to figure out the best methods to help advertisers find their viewers and help reward creators for works that gain large audiences. One thing that was very positive at this panel was that there was considerable focus on the indie. While we may see some large organizations catering only to the Disney's and ABC's of the media world, there are those in power who wish to to truly democratize the content market and let content stand on its own merit. This led me to look at sites like efilmonline.com and metacafe.
Efilm Online is basically like an Ebay for independent film. You could put up a film at whatever level of completion, even as "looking for investment", and buyers surf the market looking for projects. Their front page boasts the sale of a documentary "Rats and Bullies" which has a top bid of $675,000. As a creator, you pay a monthly fee to list your products which will then be on their market available to buyers worldwide.
Metacafe serves videos directly on the web, similar to Youtube, but they share revenue with the creators who sign up for their Producer's Rewards program, which is free. Basically, if you get 20,000 views, you get $100, and from that point you continue to earn $5 for every 1000 views. If you get 2,000,000 views, you earn $10,000. Granted, it's not cable TV, where a show like Stargate has less than a million viewers but charges over $100,000 for a single ad slot, but I can say that there are people on Metacafe who are earning enough to make a living from their work. One of their top producers has earned over $20,000 in the last three months doing quick little massage video clips. There is a video about candles that just want up today that has already earned $338 dollars. Most of the videos seem to be crazy stunts and how-to clips, so can an original animated show do well there? One simply has to try it and find out.
"The Future of Web Video" certainly looks brighter than I originally thought upon my first reading of the book. It's only a matter of time before these different sites, covered in detailed Kirsner's book, figure out the ideal formula. We may find that these sites are just what the digital doctor ordered.
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What do I mean by "see"? I'll give you an example. When I used to walk to work everyday, my main focus was not getting hit by a car more than getting a car. There are, afterall, plenty of bad drivers to be found in L.A.. Still, when I finally decided to get a car, and more specifically to get a Ford Mustang, I suddenly started to see Mustangs everywhere. Everytime I turned around there was another Mustang. Now the reality is that those Mustangs were always there. I simply didn't see them because that was not my focus.
