I love instructionals for things like this. People just assume everyone is good at cleaning and shame others who aren’t. But it’s really an art to maintaining a clean environment and there is nothing wrong with having a cute helpful chart.
I’ve seen many posts reminiscing about how buckwild Twilight was but somehow nobody seems to have mentioned the matching family jewelry?? that for some reason the movie’s costume designers thought it made sense that all of the kids would casually wear a family crest to school every day and nobody would say anything about it?? as if five weird antisocial adopted teenagers who skip school a lot and are all dating each other doesn’t just SCREAM cult activity??? if Charlie Swan hadn’t wanted to bang Carlisle he would have CPS on that family in a heartbeat, thanks for coming to my tedtalk
maybe that’s their trick? maybe every time they move to a small town they all take turns strutting and casually draping themselves over furniture in front of the chief of police until they figure out which one of them s/he is most attracted to and then that cullen (usually carlisle but sometimes esme. once, memorably, jasper) is responsible for keeping cps off their backs for the next five years. emmett calls it operation fuck the police.
Cracked.com has been a great source of entertainment for me in high school. Their articles are written in a comical way that will make you laugh as much as it makes you learn.
This goes for everybody asking anybody else for a portfolio review or asking any sort of career related questions. There is not one “Art Industry.” Whenever someone refers to this nebulous “art industry” I find myself spending more time explaining that there are a huge slough of things that could mean than I do answering the question.
When I personally refer to “The Industry” what I mean is the animated TV show and feature film industry because that is what I largely work in, alongside being an independent artist. I only do this when I’m speaking in context of my work. But that is only a handful of the studios that exist and only one facet of a very wide variety of industries within the umbrella of “Art”. If it seems like my advice is slanted toward this career path its because it’s the one I’m most familiar with. There are better people to ask for advice working in the editorial illustration industry, for example.
Even saying you want to work in the animation industry is often not specific enough. My advice for someone who wants to become a 3D animator or texture artist is going to be a lot different than my advice for someone who wants to be a visual development artist.
If you want to work in animation, look up the pipeline and start getting familiar with it. I’m going to look up “animated feature film pipeline” and see what comes up. Im looking for something that would apply to a movie like “Moana.”
A quick google search pulled this up for me. Does it look like a confusing mess to you? Start googling each term and finding people who do that job. Look at the kind of work on their websites. Is this something you’re interested in doing?
Or maybe you don’t want to work on 3D computer animated things. Maybe you want to work on a 2D animated TV show.
Cool, now you have a new set of jobs to look up. Find 3 different people who do each thing you’re interested in on twitter and follow them. Go look at their professional websites and really think about if you’re up for and excited to make a portfolio that covers the same ground.
Or maybe you want to work in advertising. Maybe games. Maybe book illustration. Trading card illustration. The more specific you can be when asking questions, the better advice you’re going to get.
ALSO. The better you can target the right people to be asking questions to, the better answer’s you’re going to get.
If you ask me about children’s book illustration I’m gonna throw my hands up and point to someone else. It just isn’t my specialty. You can find 15 better people to ask by just looking for popular children’s books that are currently out and emailing the people who illustrated them (polite, concise, non-assuming, with direct questions).
Movies and games have credits. Start familiarizing yourself with the people who made the things you enjoy and you’ll get a much better sense of what you need to focus on. You’ll be able to tailor your portfolio and your questions much more specifically toward things that actually matter. You’ll also be able to get much better at pulling up useful information on the internet for yourself. Finding better search terms to use is going to advance your ability to discover information faster than anything else. Following people who are deep in the industry you want to be a part of (particularly on twitter) is going to give you access to that language and terminology that will help you ask more targeted questions.
I really don’t want to come off as being too forceful. I just genuinely thing that learning to find the information you need, getting REALLY GOOD at narrowing search terms and diving deep into the depth of knowledge the internet has to offer… might be the most important thing you can learn. I know it was for me.
Ok, so RECAP
Stage 1: Figure out the broad industry you’re asking about. Off the top of my head… TV animation, Feature animation, animation for advertising, video games, tabletop games, trading card games, editorial illustration and other publishing, book covers, children’s book illustration, comics and graphic novels.
Stage 2: If the industry you’re interested in has a pipeline, learn the pipeline. Target the specific job or job’s you’re interested in, and learn as much about them as possible. Find artists who do these jobs. Spend time scouring the internet for as much information on these jobs as you can. Find their professional websites. Find their imdb pages. Scroll back on their instagrams and see where they were 5 years ago.
Stage 3: Now you’re ready to go ask some targeted questions. Find the right person to ask. Ive written a lot about how to structure emails like this before so Ill leave it for now at “be polite, be concise, expect nothing”. One great question to ask is “Do you know of any other great artists who do the same job as you that I can follow?” The answer is almost always yes, and you’ll be opened up to a whole new list of industry artists, many of whom may not have a huge social media presence of their in-person friends of the initial person you asked. Someone who is not being emailed constantly may be a great person to ask longer, more in-depth questions to. Ask people what industry language was confusing at first that you should learn if you want to get better at gathering information about the field. Ask what tools and resources industry artists in that field are using regularly. Remember that you aren’t owed a response. If you are kind and gracious, you will likely get some responses.
Stage 4: Take the information you gain from the answers you receive and launch a new round of information gathering.
If you can get this process down, you can go from zero knowledge on a subject to a fairly acute understanding of it in under a month.
The information is out there! You have the ability to learn this process. Go forth and succeed.
PS I am not saying you need to choose one thing and target that and only do that forever. Just target one thing at a time until you’re familiar enough with it to decide if it’s something you want to pursue right now or not. People often do all kinds of things, but saying you want to be a generalist is highly unhelpful especially if you don’t even know what they means in the context of a studio environment. Do yourself a favor and learn specifics first.
concept: after a few meetings, miles’ dad finally realizes that spiderman is like. a kid. and not even like a college kid, an actual, legitimate, “thinks dropping his voice actually disguises it” child. after his freak out (he went up against king pin but he’s so small?? rio he said he loved me he’s a baby-) he becomes very determined To Stop Spiderman (From Hurting Himself), but since the kid’s so slippery he mostly just… dads at him from the sidelines, yells encouragements and backs him up in fights and asks him if he’s okay afterwards between lectures on vigilantism and also do your parents know where you are young man? and at some point the double parenting starts to confuse miles and he accidentally calls him dad to his face while in the spiderman suit without even noticing. but jefferson notices and is like. Ah. My Child Now. and Operation: Stop Spiderman turns into Operation: Adopt Spiderman. so anyway he’s currently trying to figure out how to ask miles if he’d be okay with having a brother and miles is currently trying to figure out how to tell his own father that he can’t actually adopt him
