There are days when I love having this crock pot full of creative juice curdling in my cranium. Lots of days. It’s just empirically great being able to immediately play God and bring corporeal forms and systems about, based solely on an idea in my head. Truly, how frustrating it must be for non-creatives, who doubtless have many cool ideas on a regular basis, but no way at all to make them actually happen by their own hands and hearts.
Don’t feel too weepy for them, since 90% [citation needed, lolz] of all artwork created on Earth is done at the behest of these non-creative oxygen thieves!
Welcome to the demonic realm of the CREATIVE INDUSTRY! Potentially interesting ideas are malnourished by the minds of mediocrity and micro-management, design-by-committee, and vanquished utterly on the oozing altar of the boardroom table.
OK, it’s not ALL that bad. I’ve actually had a few pretty fun art jobs. The only really terrible part of the corporate creative process is the inescapable lack of communication between the people in charge of idea-making and the production departments. Indeed, the best places I have worked left the ideas up to the artists themselves. Sometimes it worked out great, and sometimes the art team was given TOO much leeway and the product was an unorganized (albeit totally fun), unmarketable mess.
Most of the time however, the process was unyieldingly mired by some suit whose brain was, for lack of better vocabulary, a black fucking hole.
The vice president for a company at which I worked was one of the worst examples: a Mercedes-driving non-creative who actually believed she was creative. She painted all her ugly cartoon characters all over the walls and insisted that her style was the best and we all had to draw & animate everything exactly like this or our souls would be forever hexed and we would be banished to Azathoth for 5,000 years.
Anyway, she would have “awesome ideas,” and force the art teams into fulfilling them armed with nothing but a comically rudimentary brain-fart, and a whole lot of guesswork.
“I want like a walrus character with purple eyelids, but it has to be cute. And wise. And kind of quirky and avuncular. Give him a British accent! He likes sweets!”
Her art team would spend the rest of the afternoon submitting everything from napkin sketches to full-on character reference specs and color charts.
“No, no, that’s not the image in my head. I get paid the big bucks to think of these images, and it’s your job to interpret them and they come out right. And OOH! Make him have a British accent.”
“You already mentioned that at lunch.”
“OH MY GOD I’m already hungry again. What do you guys think of these new shoes? Aren’t they awesome?”
There are a lot of people out there who ended up making or inheriting a lot of money, starting a company, and hiring unfortunate drones to whore out their decade or so of creative experience by producing creative things based on the thoughts coming out of someone else’s brain. As my art career unfolded (and ultimately crumbled to dust), I got to work with a lot of really amazing artists. Some of these unique individuals actually went on to do great things at great companies. Others started their own company, for better or worse, getting to make other people try to interpret their ideas (with a bit more success, since the ideas were originating from a creative mind for a change). The rest of us stumble around in a pitch black, ethereal plane of endless torture called the freelance market, wondering when our next meal might happen.
Right now I’m working (on and off) with one of these artistic chums, freelance animating mouth & eye movements on characters for entertainment-based YouTube videos. It’s pretty unrewarding except for the money, which can likely be the only true reward anyway when making art to someone else’s standards. I do the lipsyncing, my buddy assembles the scenes, someone else cobbles together everything to make the episode, and someone out there (I have no idea who) distributes the work to the actual fifth and final layer: the two 28-year-old kids who actually own the YouTube channel and rake in scads of free advertising revenue without doing a damn lick of work. OK, well, fine, they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars advertising their channel, but that’s not a terribly impressive creative process.
My friend and I talk a lot about what the hell we are doing actually working this job, and why can’t we just start our own YouTube channel and do our own thing. Hell, we’ve been doing this forever and have dozens and dozens of videos we could stick on there. We could get all our other art friends to put stuff up there too! Yeah!
There are a few things stopping this from happening:
1) Hundreds of thousands of dollars to invest in advertising
That’s basically it. By “a few things,” I actually meant “hundreds of thousands.”
Sure, we could just start out with a couple flicks uploaded every so often, and get the word out to friends and family, and hope something might “go viral.” But trusting in that hope is a challenge when you have spent over a decade in a pitch black, ethereal plane of endless torture.
It also doesn’t help when you actually HAVE done things seen by millions of people, but somehow you are still a sorry broke-ass whose favorite pair of pants are actually pajamas with a three-inch hole in the crotch.
There is also another mental challenge that has grown firm roots in my skullhouse: creating for the sake of creating is no longer a sufficient reward. That Mercedes-driving vice president once denied me a raise after six months of animating over 2,000 drawings of a little dragon character (complete with purple eyelids, unless I’m mistaken), because, as she put it, “it’s something you would have done in your free time anyway.” And God damn it, as unfair as that was, it wasn’t all that far from the truth, because I was 26 years old and absolutely loved animating. I was enjoying the pinnacle of a volcanically productive phase of personal creativity.
But that was two decades ago, and I don’t spend ANY time animating or doodling for fun any more. I don’t exactly miss it, either. I won’t say that I’m no longer particularly creative, because according to my nightmares, I truly still am.
However, after a couple decades creating things for other people, I’ve almost forgotten how to create anything for myself, just for the pleasure of admiring the finished work. My last few Newgrounds.com animations weren’t even done for myself as much as they were done in the hopes of appeasing fans, which is arguably harder than trying to appease a boss or a client. Right now, regarding artistic shenanigans being done *strictly* for fun, this blog is just about it, and this is only the second damn entry in it. I’ve just gotten used to making things for the fulfillment of other people’s ideas. Like Morgan Freeman’s “Red” character in “The Shawshank Redemption,” I have become “institutionalized.”
This condition certainly took some getting used to while attempting to maintain a “happy” life. It has been a long road creating things for non-creative people, and the process has always been the same:
1) Person in charge has idea
2) Person describes idea the best they can
3) I interpret idea with art
4) Art does not match idea
5) Person tells me to change it, but isn't an artist, so they can't tell me how
6) I keep coming up with interpretations that don't match idea
7) Everyone dies in a fire
Basically, if you are an artist, have an idea, and you like it, then you can be “happy” working on it. But chances are, if you are interpreting someone else's idea, you only have two possible outcomes:
1) Your idea is not theirs, hence will not get approval (99.99999% of the time)
2) Your idea matches theirs perfectly, but you will loathe the work, hate your job, burn out, quit, drive your RAV4 into a telephone pole on a rainy night, and you’ll never ski ever again, but at least you can blog about it ten years later
So the bottom line is... the creative industry digests the weak. Every time you do work for someone else, it is insufferably frustrating, because you will either miss the mark entirely and have to start over (or burn out), or just plain hate it, because you aren't creating what you want to create (and burn out).
Assuming you aren’t “institutionalized” and actually give a crap about doing something for yourself anyway.
OK, one last metaphor...
Don’t you enjoy taking a nice, satisfying dump? I sure do! And when it’s all done, and you’re committing it to plumbing, you just can’t help but admire it as it gracefully dances down the tubes. The form, the texture. Striking! God knows nobody else wants to look at it, but goddamn it, I for one am proud of my shit!
Now... here's another question. How would you feel about having someone else's shit come out of your body?
Even if the other person thinks you did a great job, it's a pretty revolting goddamn way to live.
So just remember, if you work in the creative industry, make sure not to give up your own artistic passions. It may be complete shit, but it is yours; it is the product of your own God-given brainhole and none other.
And the whole world is your toilet.
