Ugliness and Beauty

It’s time to activate it…

Bites The Dust! now this entire post will be reversed!

the key to major success lately seems to be: be born in california or nearby, go to calarts, get into the industry. other options come when you can afford to move to california. the industry is VERY quiet in every other part of the country. i live in new york city, possibly the most famous city in the country, and there is next to no work to be found here. yeah there are outliers like Natasha Allegri and Rebecca Sugar, but the majority are from CA.

Pen Ward? CalArts. Craig McCracken? CalArts. Alex Hirsch? CalArts. Lauren Faust? CalArts. Thurop van Orman. Patrick McHale. Paul Rudish. Chris Buck. Aaron Springer. Butch Hartmann. John Lasseter. Jorge Gutierrez. Pete Browngardt. Arlene Klasky. Genndy Tartakovsy. Rob Renzetti. Tim Burton. JG Quintel. 

ALL Calarts alumni.

To make a further point: just about EVERY SINGLE ORIGINAL SHOW running on Cartoon Network right now has a CalArts alum as the showrunner, the only exceptions being Steven Universe and Gumball. Now you might be asking: why’s this a problem?? these people are brilliant. they make great shows, they’re creative geniuses. and i agree. and that’s part of the problem.

we got to see their work out of sheer luck. the luck that they could be born in california OR uproot themselves to move there, that they could afford to go to calarts, where the tuition is over 40,000 a year and growing. that they had friends who could offer them work in california.

consider all the people we’re missing out on. i haven’t even graduated yet and i’m already seeing TONS of my colleagues and peers who had starry eyed dreams of just being a PART of the animation process–doing inbetweens, storyboarding, designing characters–give up when they realized they couldnt get to california.

it is, to say the least, hard to uproot yourself and move across the country with 50,000 dollars in student loans on your back and no job that pays more than minimum wage, with no guaranteed apartment waiting for you. 

the most talented animation visionary in the world could be giving up right now, because they were born in pennsylvania and their household makes less than 40,000 a year. CalArts is not the problem. But the fact that CalArts seems to be the ONLY school you can hope to go to make it–and every other option being outliers or exceptions—is a BIG problem. we’re losing tons of potential talent like this and its an issue. the industry needs to branch out, it needs to learn to accomodate people who dont live in LA. 

this probably sounds whiny, but i’m tired of seeing amazingly talented people with brilliant ideas give up because they cant move away from everything they know, up to their ears in debt, hoping for the small chance of getting to draw keyframes for nickelodeon.

i saw that image when it was new, and i felt my dreams dying. i was VERY lucky to have not only the money but also the ambition to give up everything i knew in new jersey and move to san francisco, california - a state to which i had never before been - in order to rekindle my passion and dream of being in the animation industry with the academy of art because HAHAHA as if i could get into calarts (i told myself). and i had done that a year before this image came out.

i have no idea what makes calarts SO GOOD that its alumni dominate the animation industry, and have a significant impact on film in general (tim burton, anyone?). i know it’s “the school that disney built” and that it’s good, but i don’t know why. and it’s so unfair. i know and see talented and hard working people in the art school i attended in the past, the art school i attend now, and the people i follow and admire online.

can you make it as a freelancer working remotely from wherever you are? sure. is it even more difficult? yes. companies are going to hire someone who can work there in person, eliminating a lot of the hurdles that would be extra to keep up with someone working from who knows how far away. and what do you have to offer that someone in person doesn’t? you have to be super special to make them willing to accommodate that.

I was a wreck in every way back then, so when I met Penn I was nervous as hell. He was super nice though!! Asked me about my background, where did I go to school again? CalArts?

I told him no, I went to LCAD. ‘Never heard of it.’ And that was the end of the conversation. It was like I was invisible. I have never experienced anything like that before.

I’m not saying this was a universal experience amongst the interns. Quite a few of us came from different schools, and two others besides me were from LCAD as well. And another showrunner I met (a lovely person finishing up Flapjack) was kinder to me than I think I even deserved. I’ll never forget that experience.