I have impossibly high hopes for the video I’ve been working on since mid-August. Sure, it’s going slowly, but only in relative terms. Animation is a slow burner of a creative process. I find that I am much faster at writing an essay or a chapter of a novel than I am at producing 2 minutes of animation from scratch. And that’s before we talk about voice talent, sound, music, all of which are not my department at all, and for which I depend on others.
But working with a musician and sound engineer, with an actor, and on a world-famous text [which shall be revealed in due course] is an absolute privilege. I am, in fact, slightly taken aback by how prolific this year has been, from a creative perspective. I have done so much, and I continue to do so much, and I believe that it’s all down not simply to choosing FOCUS as my word of the year [discussed on here at length] but particularly because I no longer work in a job that sucks all intelligence and life out of me.
Try as I may, I know that my previous projects, those stops and starts, those impossibly slow days of progress were actually marred by how frazzled my brain was. When you work in tech [or in whatever, frankly] and you work every single waking hour God sends… good luck creating candles. Or videos. Or painting. Or whatever your creative poison is.
I am always encouraging of whoever is still in a job that only partially serves; after all, I always say that hey, TS Eliot was actually working at Lloyds and Conan Doyle was a surgeon and so on and so forth. But how unfulfilled must have they been in order to squeeze the living daylights out of the end of their working days, when they could finally sit down and write, undisturbed, for however short a time.
I never truly managed it. I always ended up beating myself up for having a highly stressfully, busy, and unfulfilling job, intellectually speaking, whilst trying AND failing to pursue my creativity. There is so much to life that a job does not provide and if I could go back in time [which I actually wouldn’t want to do as such], there is no way I would fritter my early adult years working in IT. How different would my life be if I had listened to my heart when I was younger. One should not live in regret but regret should certainly teach a lesson so that it does not just point the finger but, actually, it points the way.