Improvements and Anxiety

Things are improving. Next week I will finally start on a proper project, and ad for the Scottish postcode lottery. Haven't quite understood the concept of this lottery, apparently if your postcode is selected everyone within it wins a truckload of money.

Anyway the ad will have a lot of gold dust flying around, and a female presenter.

On the job seeking side of things, I have heard some no's from applications I did, the normal thing, but the amount of jobs available seems to have increased in the past weeks which seems to be excellent news.

The reason I put anxiety in the title is that it's something I have been thinking about. In the CG industry there is a lot of it flying around. One would expect creative and upbeat atmospheres at work places, but no.. they are all very competitive and anxiety ridden. This is wrong for such a young profession.

One sees al the trendy dudes hanging around, but it it all fake, when one gets closer what one sees is a lot of insecurity, politics and competition. The atire to work in this industry is the cool dude one, but one should not fall for these appearances. There is normally a cold war going on.

Where is the fun? Why should people in such a cool industry think like stock market brokers? Is this attitude something the employers seek to keep productivity high?

And then there is the deification of programming skills. Nowadays if you are not fluent in programming it is very hard to find a job. This is extremely irritating and wrong. Until recenlty I was proud to survive and know very little about MEL scripting. Now it is something I have to hide!

The industry values the non-creative bookworm artists. Visit any studio and you'll see the same: the creativity is dealt by a select group of politically savy people, who most of the time play safe to maintain their status quo and artists are mostly valued for their knowledge of computer programming, not their artistic talent.

It is because of this that everything one sees looks the basically the same. With such a technological potential to do creative stuff it is dissapointing to see that things have become so uniform. Being a CG Artist is now a technical job, even in animation it is like that.

OK, I am not naive and understand that productions cost millions, that there must be a return for this investmet and for this to happen one has to organize things, but hey.. can you imagine if football teams started to hire players on the basis of their technical knowledge of the game? Goals would never happen.

The tools have taken over. When will human creativity and talent claim it's space back?