In this blog I will be talking a bit about my meme content, and giving some insight into the backend work it took to make it.
Welcome back readers. Here's a blog that I feel many of you can empathize with. Having artist's block is not fun, so I thought it'd be good to discuss what we as artists and creatives can do to alleviate the stress of artist's block. I decided to write this blog now because it's something I've suffered from for many years. As I got older and married my craft, it has happened much less. Getting stuck isn't fun, so I hope my experience and thoughts can help you get it off whatever rut you're in.
Welcome folks! Hope all is going well. There’s a lot on my mind and I’m fired up, so I want to dive right into things today.
Burnout was a big subject for me in 2019. It was so severe, I essentially had to restructure large aspects of my life to begin the healing process. Falling into old and toxic feedback loops is the last thing I wanted to do, so I have done as much as I can to grow and learn (and I still am growing and learning, for as long as I can breathe). I don’t want to get into the specifics of what those changes are, but I’ll flesh out that information in a future blog.
So to get back on topic: in recent times, I’ve been getting really fired up about what’s on the horizon. This includes the time I will be taking to overhaul “Frame of Mind”. Over the past few years, and especially while producing “Frame of Mind”, I lost the desire to make the best short films that I could make. This was by design, due to me assuming that if I pushed myself in that way, I would burn myself out (oh the irony). I saw “Frame of Mind” as a sprint, not a marathon, but in working that way, I simply lost interest in the project as it was turning out. The original plan was becoming a dud, and after 2 years, I realized that “Frame of Mind” wasn’t turning out into what I wanted it to be.
Don’t get me wrong, I am happy with the stories I’ve told and how I’ve told them, but they were just good. They weren’t great, amazing, incredible iconic or memorable, and that got me angry. I was angry because I purposefully made it a point to tame my own ambition. This ultimately is what led to the boredom I and apathy I had while also sparking a deep seated feeling of disappointment for not living up to my potential. I had to sit with this feeling for a while to really narrow down what was happening to me. Just because you get these feelings doesn’t mean you know where or why they’re coming to you at that moment.
Eventually I was able to pinpoint what it was that was bothering me, which is that I had lost my ambition. Once I realized exactly what it was, I slowly was able to realize this and eventually I had settled on making these films far less frequently, to give them the time they needed so they can really grip and entertain viewers. This also includes my overhaul of my pipeline that I will be making next year. In fact, once I started realizing I need to be more ambitious with my stories, I immediately realized that I need to be just as ambitious with updating my pipeline. That’s the plan for 2020, to be able to bring my pipeline up to speed so I can handle the production of these much larger stories, and I haven’t felt this excited about a project for a long time.
While I don’t know what the next story I want to tell will be, or when it will drop, I do know that I will be going all out with it. I don’t mean just animation either, I mean everything. I want people to be in awe when they see my projects and to get a feeling of magic and wonder. I want to inspire people with cartoons in the same way cartoons inspired in my childhood. Just thinking about it has my hyped beyond measure, and I can’t wait to get into it!
