a sad truth

[egypturnash]

I've been realizing something, these past few months. Years, even.

Animation just doesn't pay worth a damn. Doing it right is a tremendous amount of work. Even doing it quick and dirty is a tremendous amount of work.

I still love doing hand-drawn animation. I still have no interest in moving to 3D animation, for all its potential to cut the work down. But I get a much better return on the time spent for still images.

The penny really dropped for me this week. I'd decided to back out of a website intro I was negotiating for - they were reluctantly coming around to my initial price offer, but I was really getting this sensation that they'd be expecting the sun, moon, and stars for a fair wage for a week's hard work on my part. And that they might end up deciding it wasn't what they wanted, leaving me with a week spent for no payment.

And today, I got some follow-up email on a little simple, quick illustration gig I'd done the other month: they want more, with the same terms as before. It'll be less money than the animation piece I turned down, overall - but when I balance it against the amount of time I project it taking, and the amount of stress it'd involve, this is a much better use of my time. I won't be lying around uselessly for a week and a half afterwards; I can do one of these pieces as a warm-up for a day spent on Absinthe.

I love the magic of animation. I love the moment of watching my drawings come to life. But I'm getting too damn old to pour that much of myself into anyone else's ideas, unless they're really aligned with my own^*. And all the cheats I have to use mean I barely see that magic moment any more. It's just not worth the time and stress. Illustration doesn't pay so great right now either but at least it's over quickly.

(I am, of course, lucky that I have this option due to the tolerance of my boyfriends. If I was living alone I'd be stuck on a high-stress treadmill of grabbing any work I could. And slowly going crazy.)

* I still want to do an animated music video to one of doctorpinkerton's shorter tracks someday, for instance!

Comments

[coyoteseven.livejournal.com]

I envy your support structure.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

Me too. Honestly it sometimes makes me a little crazy. I see lots of people who have a family that supported someone's artistic inclinations and now they have some way of living as well as I do without having to work a normal 9-5 job and it just kills me.

I work passionately on my artwork whenever I can but in truth, I'm spending 10hrs a day at work and another 1hr eating/showering/dressing/etc and then another hr of daily crap that has to be done. Dishes, laundry, that sort of thing. So that's half the day gone. Take out another 8hrs for sleep and that leaves me with a precious 4 hours to work on my art, animation, writing, and guitar practice. This all, of course, assuming that everything flows perfectly during the day... Which it never does.

I'm at least lucky in that I like my job and it pays well but there's still this knowledge in the back of my mind that I can't ever just let go. I can't take a week solid working on an art project because I'm inspired. Instead, I take my inspirations at work and write them down in a little book and leave them to fade and die in the hours before I can go home and try to feed them. Ideas flow faster than the time I have and more and more ideas pile into the book which grows heavy with the stench of decay. Its like a box of dead puppies I keep under my bed.

The thing that makes it all so much worse is that I wasn't allowed to study art as a child, when I was young and my brain would have quickly absorbed the dexterity and hand-eye coordination required. My parents expressly forbid it. So now, in that precious little time I have, I have to try to make up for the lost years of practice and I have to work twice as hard to accomplish half as much. It's only now, after five years of persistence that I'm even beginning to be able to render things on the page that bear even the slightest resemblance to what was in my mind.

So yeah. I agree. It must be nice. I don't even make enough to be one of those dilettantes who can bury their envy in shiny new toys. Life just sucks sometimes. *sigh* On the other hand, maybe I shouldn't bitch too much. A friend took me with her to Symbiosis last weekend and my partner had saved up all summer so we were able to go to Disneyland with her family and split the cost. There are people a lot worse off than I. :/

[doctorpinkerton.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, really? COOL! (that rough board for 'Bucket o' Blood' is still on my desktop...)

Funny how your realization walks hand in hand with the realities of the industry itself. I feel a large measure of personal sympathy in not seeking a normal job in the music biz; it's just a bad era for it. You and I were born a few decades too late, methink...

[paka.livejournal.com]

Well, that's the thing, isn't it? All art is a labor of love. Even some of the highest paid stuff isn't really adequate compensation for everything you sink in it. Art is always going to have that little bit extra because of the artist's passion for making stuff...

... and that intersects in a very bad way with the capitalist's passion for making as much money as possible off as little investment as possible.