"I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
- Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken"
I guess, technically speaking, I'm not at the crossroads at this very minute, but, inevitably, the future I have planned for is coming fast, and I have to make a decision.
I had a lunch with a storyboard artist who's now working at Sony, who has a very impressive list of animation credentials behind him, and he was telling me all sorts of great advice: be humble, have an in-depth plan for the future, take a step back and figure out if you're where you want to be -- or at least if you're on the path to where you want to be, dream big, collect memories and collect friends. He explained to me that, of all the good decisions he made in his career, they were all because he specifically decided not to go with the flow.
When he first started, he landed a job doing something he was pretty much appalled at having to do; he hated it, it made him wonder where could the animation industry possibly go if that was all animators were ever doing ... so when he heard that England was the place to be for the future of animation, he hopped on a plane to England, found a job doing commercials, and eventually worked his way onto Roger Rabbit. It's an impressive, engaging story, actually, and a lot of fun to hear about the good ol' days of hand-drawn animation where it was all about working your butt off to animate well and then staying in touch with people, which meant they would eventually contact you when they needed to staff up for a new production.
When he asked what I am doing with my time now, and my plan for the future is, I answered him honestly: right now, I've got my job as a personal assistant; I'm looking at taking classes at Gnomon for the next year to brush up on my skills; and then I'm looking at applying to graduate schools to specifically study previsualization/pre-viz, as opposed to general animation, which I did back at LMU.
Immediately, he told me: grad school is not the place to go. Instead, I should be out in the industry, working connections, pounding the dirt to get myself out there.
Okay ... I've done that for a year.
This whole past year, I've gone with the flow; I've worked my reel, I've reworked it, I've reworked it again, I've gotten frustrated at jobs that aren't good for anyone's mental health, I've sent out more cover letters and resumes than I can count, and still -- nothing.
If going against the flow, if making a specific decision to go where there will be work, opportunities, and a goddamn change from what I'm currently stuck in means going off to dreaded animation grad school ... well, it almost sounds like a good idea.
When did it become a problem to want to become a Master at something? (is it just the title that's throwing everyone off?? maybe they should consider rechristening programs as "Continued Learning" or something; i sure as hell don't think i'll ever truly be a master at the ever-changing world of VFX, but i sure hope i'll eventually be really, really good at it, and maybe be able to contribute to it in some way.) Why is it that graduate school is something so ... looked down upon in the animation industry?
I mean, in some aspects, I get it -- this whole industry is based around apprenticing and interning, but both of those things are dependent on either being in school or a recent graduate. I'm no longer in school, and I'm not going to be a recent graduate forever. This is becoming a catch-22, where, eventually, no decision I make is going to be the right one. So shouldn't I make some decisive move towards something? Right now, that something is classes at Gnomon, which isn't a big deal, considering it's just down the road and I'll still be in LA, and I'll (hopefully) still be making connections with people in the industry, but everyone seems to have a humongous issue with graduate school.
I'm not going to this program with the grandiose idea that I'm going to come out and automatically get the best job at every place I apply to; I'm going to this program with the intention of sharpening my skills, networking my butt off, and interning as often as I can so that, maybe, just maybe, I'll have the skills to get into an entry-level position in a career that I'm actually interested in and enjoy for most of the hours I'm stuck working at a desk. Let's be real, I didn't get that in undergrad, but that's also because I didn't know what I wanted for three out of four years.
I dunno ... With the fact that my skill set is not up to par, and I'm not getting gainful employment anywhere, that just seems to scream at me that I'm not up to par yet. With all these visual effects/animation schools churning out quality graduates left and right, who am I to ask a company to take me on when I don't have all the necessary skills? To me, graduate school is where I should go to make sure that, upon graduation, I have a firm grasp on the programs I need to know and I'm fully versed in film language.
I've been rejected for a year already; I know that's not a terribly long time, but I'd rather not keep on doing the same thing over and over again until I'm creatively spent and feel the necessity to give up because I'm just wasting resources. I've gotten used to all the rejection, of watching the calendar dates fly by, re-emailing, re-emailing, and still not get a response. At this point, it's honestly a little more than terrifying to think about trying to go back to school full time, to think about potentially getting rejected (all over again) ...
*sigh* who knows! Maybe I'm just yelling all this out there to try to convince myself that it's a good idea, but honestly, I'm probably gonna drop off the face of the earth come November, 'cause of job reel editing, and grad school application writing/application reel editing ... I mean, Plan A will always be to get that first job, but Plan B, hanging out right next to it, is gonna be graduate school.
The crossroads are waiting for me. And, honestly, it's not really that much of a crossroads; if I get a job offer while I'm in school, I'd drop everything to go to work. Signing up for graduate school isn't about stalling for time; it's about honing my skills so that they're ready for the future. Believe me when I say it: I want to work, but I just have to come to terms with the very fact that, right now, I'm not good enough. So that's the plan: go to grad school, work hard -- get to be good enough. I'm not asking for a magic button; I'm asking for more time to be better.
Who woulda thunk -- an Asian girl somehow getting herself into an industry where going to grad school is the road less traveled. Ah, the irony!
--Tiffany
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