It’s not always easy.
We all know that feeling: Everything you do seems to be exceptionally hard. You animate a sequence again and again, you do that rendering over and over and can’t get to make it look right. You stay up until 3 a.m., trying to make the perspective in that drawing look acceptable and go to bed frustrated and exhausted. That’s also the time when everything slows down: minutes turn into hours and after what seems like a fifteen hour day, you just didn’t get ANYTHING done. It’s the time when you check your email every few minutes, when you go through all those art galleries and designer blogs and tutorial websites that you bookmarked, seeking for inspiration. Which, of course, frustrates you even more, because all you accomplish is losing time and getting even less work done.
Those phases come, and all creatives know them.
I wanted to share with you a special letter.
I found this blogpost by Austin Madison, an animator working at Pixar, where he shows a hand-written document (and how rare is that, anyway!) that he did for “The Animator Letters Project“. (Please check it out, it’s fantastic.)
He writes about exactly this problem, that I wanted to do a post about for weeks now. He puts so eloquently in two pages what would probably take me fivethousand words to say, so I just want to share that with you.
Whether you are in one of those phases or not, please read it and remember it when you need to be reminded that it’s all worth it. : )