Hi, I just wondered if you had any advice. I just hit 24 and still have a few of years to go in my school and I already feel too old. Am I? Also, the school Im at sucks (and rhymes with Fart Lintstitute). Am I utterly screwed over in terms of getting a job somewhere like CN? Should I drop out while I still can? Theres no other schools in my state and I think Im worse than these kids, so Im feeling discouraged. And how do I get into storyboarding? I just recently realized its a path I could take.
There are a lot of different things to cover here so I’ll separate them out:
Are you too old?
You’re not too old. This isn’t like Logan’s Run where once you turn thirty you float around in a room where you explode on the ceiling. If it is, I’m in for a very rude awakening in a few months.
My school is shitty, does that mean I’m shitty and will never get a job?
If you think you will get better at your art by not being in school, then by all means, drop out. There’s no reason to put yourself into debt for something that isn’t helping you. I know lots of people that dropped out of school or went to schools that “sucked” that have great careers in this industry.
I’ve got plenty of complaints about my school from when I attended, but I know that overall it helped me even though it’s a lesser known school. A lesser known school, by the way, that produced Toby Jones, Madeline Queripel, Julia Vickerman, and many others that have good careers in animation in other studios.
There’s an unhelpful meme going around that says you can’t get a job in animation unless you go to CalArts. It’s simply not true. I will give you that if you ask someone where they’re from, the school that the most people have in common is CalArts, but the vast majority of people didn’t go there. What’s more likely, that an industry full of thousands and thousands of people only hires from one school even though they get someone from another school or no school submitting to them with high quality work? Or that someone who makes sub-par work has been submitting to studios for years, but they can’t find a job, they’re starting to get bitter, and they’re looking for someone to blame other than themselves so they choose CalArts? This is understandable, and it can feel immensely frustrating when people seem like they don’t take your work seriously. You have this drive and desire to get in, but people keep telling you no without telling you why, or even worse, not responding at all!
Then, on the internet, you have people like me who say things like “Just keep working at it” and “keep submitting! Draw all the time!” This can be somewhat misleading because we want to remain positive and usually leave out the part where we think “Also this process can take anywhere from 1-10 years or more and, if you get offered a job at all, it will most likely be at a small studio working on something you don’t particularly like or care about, but you’ll at least make money and after a couple years of doing that you might move on to something you like a little more!”
For most people, it takes a long time to get into these big studios. It’s intimidating, scary, frustrating, and unfair. It’s unfair because people who know people in the industry have an advantage over you, but that’s also the case in EVERY industry in the world. However, while it’s an advantage, it’s far from a guarantee. If you know people, they let you know when and where there’s a job opening and can vouch for you, but that’s it. People don’t just hire their friends, no weirdo introverted artist showrunner has as many friends as there are jobs to fill. That vouch still can’t actually get you the job. It’s art. If you can’t draw what you’re being asked to draw, it becomes quickly obvious and it’s really the one thing you have to do, so you either won’t be hired or will be out of a job as soon as they’re able to let you go. There’s simply no time for nepotism, we have a schedule and we need to get shit done.
Hell, after you work at a small studio, you might find you don’t even want to work at a big studio and all of this will be moot!
Should I drop out of school? I’m worse than everyone else.
Here’s some questions you should think about: Why do you think you’re worse than your peers? What qualities does their work have that, in your mind, makes it better? Why is that important to you? How could you get those qualities into your work? What separates you from them? What qualities do you have that they don’t have? Will your artistic education be better if you aren’t in school and are able to do things on your own, or will it be better with instruction and learning from other students around you? Is it possible you’re just burned out because this is an intense field of study? Are you actually answering these questions truthfully?
If your work is at least like a 6.5 out of 10 in quality, then all you need is two of these three things:
1) You turn your stuff in on time
2) You’re easy to work with
3) You make incredible work
Neil Gaiman wrote those as a venn diagram and he’s absolutely right. I would say living in the area where you want to be employed also helps, but if you’re good enough, they’ll find a way. Someone who makes great work will always be more obvious to employers and, right out of school, those people tend to get hired first because it’s the easiest quality to look for. However, if that person doesn’t have either of those other two qualities, that person will quickly lose credibility. I would rather hire a workhorse who makes ok art, but I like working with them and they do it on time, than someone who makes the most incredible artwork ever but they never turn their stuff in and they’re an asshole.
Now all that up there is probably reading as a bit of a downer. It’s okay though, everything has its downers and its uppers. That’s why the whole world is so crazy, it’s meds are all mixed up.
You CAN do it. You can. Seriously. People work in TV. Los Angeles isn’t some mythical, faraway land that’s somehow better than where you live. We’re all just a bunch of flawed people, really mediocre people, that have somehow tricked other people into giving us money to make whatever art we want. You can join the rest of us con artists and we’ll accept you as one of our own and we can all trick everyone together.
What is the path for storyboarding?
There are a million and one ways to get into it. It’s more of a branching spider web than a path. I know a lot of people who got into it through comics. If a show runner can quickly read a comic you’ve made, then they know a lot about you: your writing style, your drawing style, your sense of humor, and the fact that you can finish what you start.
Toby got hired because JG said on twitter that he was looking for new board artists. Toby was making comics in his free time, responded to him via Facebook, and sent him some of his comics. That’s how Toby got the job and he immediately moved from Minneapolis to LA to take it.
My path:
Before I started school I wanted to do 3D animation, so I went to art school. While there, I found out that I liked 2D animation even more, so I focused on that. It was really hard because while I found I liked the look and idea of 2D more, I didn’t like drawing variations on practically the same thing over and over again for days just to make 4 seconds of animation. There were definitely other animators and artists who were better than me.
I considered dropping out at the end of my junior year. I laid down in the hallway of my apartment and cried while staring at the ceiling and ants crawled all over body (we had an ant problem). I didn’t know if I wanted to keep going through college or drop out. My parents said I sounded burned out. They recommended doing something completely, totally different, that has nothing to do with art or my career over the summer. My mom said she got a job in Yellowstone for a summer when she was in college, so I decided to give that a shot.
So I did! I became a housekeeper in Grant Village in Yellowstone. It was transformative. I met new friends who did things that weren’t related to art, I found new stories from new people, new ways to think. I even met some Chinese people who introduced me to the idea that it’s super easy to get an english teaching job in China if you’re a native speaker, a job I’d never even heard of until they mentioned it.
When it came time to answer whether I wanted to go back to school, my brain had had enough time to recuperate over the summer from doing completely different work. I felt healed and had a lot more insight as to what my life needed. I answered those questions up there and decided that yes, I did still want to finish school.
So I finished, but still felt burned out and decided to move to China to be an English teacher. I did that for 3 years, even though all my friends told me not to and said I was crazy. I agreed somewhat, but it felt like something I needed to do. I had no idea how I was ever going to get back into working in art.
While I was there I learned more about music production, made two albums, and made an animated music video. When I decided to move back to LA, I sent out some feelers to people and Toby, who had been my freshman year roommate in college, said they were looking for people on Regular Show. This was for a job position called “storyboarder/writer” and I’d never heard of that job before. They sent me the test, I took it, he showed JG some of my work (including the music video I had made while in China). JG decided to take the chance on hiring some random English teacher from China that he’d never met or even interviewed over the phone.
That is my path to storyboarding. You can try taking that same path, but as you can see, it all requires a bit of serendipity and preparation for when that serendipity happens.
Wow that was a lot of stuff. Why do you write so much? Jeez, summarize it.
Because I work in TV and I have to edit myself down all the time so THIS IS MY FREE SPACE OKAY??
You don’t have to go to the most amazing school in the world. You don’t have to be the most incredible artist in the world. You don’t have to know people. You DO have to have drive and decent art. You CAN do it, you just have be realistic about who you are and what you need in order to get there.
I got another ask from someone who is also 24 and facing a similar issue, so I thought I would reblog this post for those who might need it.