Mutual Respect

I posted this article earlier on my Facebook and I had no words….

I think I’ve found some now… as a manager and someone who carries suicidal thoughts on and off often, this weighs on me. I know there are times when there is nothing you can do, or certain things can’t be helped; but I’m also hyper aware how much the way I treat people and the decisions I make every day at work affect the lives of so many others. Not only my crew but their family, their friends, and their loved ones.

It may well be that some of this is inflated. That Angell had other reasons, other things going on in his life. But I’m certain inhumane working conditions didn’t help improve things any. We’re all human after all, we all run into our own struggles, road blocks, challenges, hurdles. And what’s a molehill to one of us is a giant impenetrable wall to others. We’re just different. Workplaces and management should understand that and act accordingly.

I try hard to fight for my crew when I can, the best ways I know how. I’m not always successful, but I put up the battle anyways, because if I don’t, and no one else does…. this happens. Or it could. And even the thought that it COULD is enough to scare me into not letting it. The fact that it DOES and HAS in the past for several people I know breaks my heart.

Taking on a position of management should not be held lightly. No matter the industry, workplace, etc. Peoples’ lives and livelihoods are in your hands.

Sometimes there really is nothing we can do. I’m personally notorious for taking on more responsibility for things than I should (I believe they call that an inflated ego). But if you are a manager, please don’t accept that there is nothing you can as your FIRST premise. Please at least try to fight, for you crew, your employees, your staff. Please listen when they hold you accountable for mistakes you have made. No you’re not inherently evil and you are most likely making the best decisions you can with what you’re given, but if you’re not taking the time to listen then you’re not taking in all the information that you need. Respect each other. Care for each other. Each of our lives are in each others’ hands in some way.

Government

I don’t follow politics. Not really. Not seriously.

Not because it’s depressing. Not simply because I value my sanity. Not because I’m not interested, but simply because it isn’t real.

Some people will be offended by that statement. Some might understand immediately. Some might understand, but perhaps not exactly in the way that I mean. For the latter we may never really know one way or the other, but perhaps I can make an attempt.

Politics has become this game, where every player has a hand behind their back, and each players’ only and unique objective is to either convince, coerce, or simply force, the other player to reveal their hand. No one will admit that the hand they have is actually empty, and the minute someone’s hand is forced out on display we all pounce on it, eat from it, laugh at it’s desolate emptiness, and do everything we can to avoid recognizing that our own and every other players’ hands are also empty.

It’s not real, it’s a popularity contest. It’s a cult of celebrity. We don’t discuss politics any more, not as a concept; we discuss politicians. We discuss players in the game. And even when we debate the actual topics, when we talk about the abstracts of politics; all people focus in on is which party, which person, which personality that affiliates you with. Who is your favourite? Who would you vote for? What chess move are you making in the privacy of the voting booth?

“I don’t want to vote for any of them.”

“But you HAVE to vote! You have to vote or else you’re ignorant. You have to vote because these people are in power and their decisions affect our every day lives. You have to vote because you’re playing the game whether you like it or not.”

We’re playing the game whether we like it or not. We’re all playing. In the same way that we pretend the piece of paper (or plastic nowadays) that dollar bills are printed on have the actual value we write on the note. The way we back our money with itself as if that means something; not that it held any more value when it was backed by gold.

It’s not that I think that I rise above all that, or that I think I can live outside of the game. Although believe me, I would try to if I thought it were possible. I just don’t think that it matters in the way that we act like it does. I just don’t really think we can know who or what we’re voting for anymore. How we’re being manipulated.

Politicians have become celebrities in lieu of being people. Shadow puppets for ideologies. Shells on to which we project our biases and judgements. Regardless of who these people actually are. Who knows if they themselves even know anymore. If any of them would recognize themselves inside a mirror.

They only have the power that we give them. That we vote them in to give. And if we don’t vote, others will, and they’ll vote in the “wrong person”. Whoever that is.

I’m not indifferent or disinterested, I just don’t want to play in the popularity contest. I don’t want to debate which side of the chess board I agree with the most. Where you can’t say a single word or phrase because that’s part of the rhetoric being pushed by “the other side” and in your using it you’ve revealed that “you’ve been brainwashed by THEM.” That ominous wretched THEM.

No. I don’t really care about politics. What I care about are the people I interact with on a regular basis, and the ideas, and philosophies that govern how we live our every day. Don’t try to convince me that any of that holds any real relation to the politics we talk about today.

Outras Faces

Ela não está pronta pra ser mãe. Pra se casar, pra se comprometer com nada.
Ela ainda quer começar a vida, a carreira. Se encantar com tudo. Se desiludir igual a você, e depois se apaixonar pela vida outra vez. Crescer um pouco mais, sentir o peso da responsabilidade.
Mas ela ainda não chegou lá. Ela ainda precisa de seu tempo. Ela sou eu,

Só que não.

Duas partes unidas pelo corpo, pelo sangue. Irmãs siamesas.  Ou seria algo mais do que o fisico? Diferentes, só que iguais. Seríamos separadas pra sempre?
Será a vida um eterno jogo de reintegração das duas partes?
Ou seria a eterna divisão o seu real propósito?
Se torna difícil saber qual a real realidade; se a dela, ou a da outra.
E o que dizer desse “eu” que escreve das duas? Quem seria essa nova? Quem serei ao falar dela?

Bodies

In the mountains of your body are the forests I explore.

In my sleep and in my dreams, it’s your curves that I adore.

In your mind lay all the dreams, I’d like to see, and taste, and feel.

As for the nightmares we will fight, so they may never become real.

All of My Running

I want to cry for no good reason.

To cry from all my standing still.

It took all my running just to get here, and all my running I have to do still.

There is no motion only the same place. Yet time somehow moves of its own will.

I try my best just to catch it.

How can you live when you’ve lost all of the skill?

Everyone’s Heart Breaks

I gave you all, I gave you everything,

and I’m not sure what’s left. If anything.

There wasn’t much I left for me,

just a few pieces so I could see,

who it is that I was when I looked in the mirror.

I recognized her I just didn’t want to be her.

Now when I see her, I think we’re a little more alike,

but I didn’t know how much was left of her, how much I had left in me to fight. Now I see how much she’s’ worth fighting for.

Without fighting for her, I won’t ever really be me.

Trauma

I wonder at which point healing is done. When is it over? When does the pain stop?

I’ve spent my whole life convincing myself not to be a victim. Never to allow myself to blame my present actions on my past. I wouldn’t be that person, I refused absolutely.

And so when horrible things would happen…. I thought I dealt with them head on. I thought I faced them. I pondered on them, I wrote about them, I racked my brain, went to therapy, talked to others and I overcame.

Then years later something new popped up. Something else. An aspect I had ignored, I thought we’d gone through this already? Isn’t it over yet?

I still wouldn’t hide from it. I would face it again, I have still more to learn. I have still more to get through, I’m still getting it wrong. Where else can I change and grow? What can I do better?

Over and over it came and it went, constant and endless, the same and yet different.

And now I’m tired. Exhausted in fact. And I don’t quite know how to make the pain stop… or if it’s even meant to. Is this just how life is meant to feel? Should it hurt this much? Is it really so painful for everyone else too?

I have to imagine to some extent it is. That it’s why drugs are so pervasive, addiction, all forms of distraction and detraction. In the silence of isolation all of that goes away. And all you can feel is just pain. Piles of salt on a raw exposed wound, to be washed off with vinegar and re-salted daily.

Or is it that life has just gone? All the things that once made it worthwhile. The smiles of others, their smell and their sound. Nature in all of it’s wonder. The daily chaos of the outside, that reminded you that your own isn’t so bad after all, we’re all running the same exercise together. On different levels, in different ways. In isolation those reminders, those distractions are gone. All you can really see is the mess that is you. There is no comfort in the chaos of the masses.

And then you punish yourself further by imagining you’re being too dramatic. There goes that damned emo-depression again. Haven’t we gone over this already haven’t we gone past this? You know how to pull yourself out of it, why is it so hard this time around?

The end of one vicious cycle just seems like the beginning of another, and I can’t quite find that place of peace. And I can’t quite figure out how to end it.

Sensations

Honestly I just wanted the smell and that taste.

The feel of it, and that low bass, drumming in my ear that I won’t ever get to hear again.

But something about it never was the same, never came back the way I thought it might.

I’d be lying if I said it didn’t help though. Surrounding myself with those things that reminded me.

That imbibed, drowned, cuddled and surrounded me in the past, in that old feeling, in those memories.

Thank goodness for the fullness of memories. And for the fact that all of our senses are at least 5.

Yin Yang

We found sanity inside of our insanity,

Love inside all the sterility,

Peace somewhere amidst all this upheavel.

Breathing. Being. And refusing to stop.

How Unlogged Overtime Hurts the Animation Industry

I can’t tell you how many times I have had this debate with people. No matter what studio you work at; we all know there are always those artists who will work insane hours through the entirety of a production to meet unrealistic expectations. If you work in the animation industry and are reading this, that artist is probably you, or else it WAS you at some point in your career. All I can say it: Whoever you are, if you are working past the hours that any production is asking you to do – STOP. PLEASE.

I mean that across the board; whether you are working in VFX, 2D, Television, Feature, whatever. Every minute that you work beyond the hours you are paid is not only devaluing the labour of everyone else in the industry; it is devaluing your own. When people complain art is too often paid for with “exposure” and “recognition”; this is why that happens. Because inevitably artists are always willing to put in the extra hours to create a product they’re proud to put their name to. To present something that they’re proud of aesthetically… only to have it picked apart by the “client” and transformed into something completely different. But there’s always the hope… that maybe this one… this one time…

I understand why a lot of artists do it. Your reel and/or portfolio are your calling card; you want your reels to represent your best work, all of your skill, all that you’re capable of. The reality of a production schedule is that you’re normally not able to fit your “best” work inside the ‘x’ day turnaround you’ve been given and “oh by the way can you also fix these 5 things from the last shot/sequence/episode/prop/BG and still hit quota?”

Unlogged hours means you can work around that. They mean you can work a little harder on this shot/sequence/episode etc and MAYBE get less notes in the next pass. It means you can hone in your skills a little, push a little further, and get better and faster for the next show/movie/gig. They mean you can make things a little smoother moving forward for your team, or the artists down the line. After all, you’re the one willing to put in the work, it’s not hurting anybody, right?

It gets even worse for leads and Supervisors who are expected to make any type of quota. So much of your day is divided between helping different members of your team that there’s almost no time for you to meet your actual quota yourself, even at half. Or else you’re so concerned about hitting that quota that you’re only giving your team half the attention they really need and it’s keeping you, and them, for really pulling up their game, improving in a meaningful sense.

The truth is, as well meaning as your intentions and your actions might be; you are not helping. In fact you’re hurting everyone down the line way more than you think. I couldn’t tell you how many conversations I have had with people where they mentioned what kind of quota they were able to achieve on the last show, and why should this show be any different? As a production staff member, it’s really hard to argue against those numbers.

Yes, you can always take into account the complexity of a show vs. another, or a couple of added factors. Smart people can see into the multiple variables that go into any show and pull them apart to prove why a certain deadline or quota is or isn’t attainable. But as artists or supervisors, when you’re complaining about why schedules aren’t feasible or attainable – Your unlogged hours of overtime are what is setting that bar. Every. Single. Time.

Budgets are built based on an average amount of quota that’s achieved based off of previously comparable shows, films, etc. If you know anything about averages, you are well aware of how outliers can pull and average well up or down. So here’s the wake up call: your unlogged hours are what is creating those outliers. Every time you produce a much higher quota than the rest of your team because you’ve worked more than a 40 hour work week, you’re contributing to the next show/movie etc. having that much tighter of a schedule than the last one, because producers will (justifiably) use that average to consider how much an “average artist” is able to output a week or a day.

This isn’t to knock down overachievers. If you can truly fit an obscene amount of work into a 40 hour work week; more power to you! There are rare cases of people who really are just that good, but those rare cases are just that: RARE. Impostor syndrome is a real thing, it’s not uncommon for a lot of artists to feel like they are under-performing, and so, those “harmless” extra hours are really just their way of “catching up to everyone else”. Except that when everyone else is just “catching up” what standards are we ACTUALLY trying to catch up to?

The same goes for the production staff enforcing these schedules. Our jobs are hard and demanding, there are a lot of things we CAN’T fix or control, but if an artist says they need overtime or extra time to complete a task, it’s up to us to stand up for them. We need to figure out how we can work together to achieve it or we need to be willing to talk to people above us and give them a wake up call as to what they’re really asking for. We have all heard it a thousand times before, and we HAVE to be willing to let go of either quality, time, or money to make these schedules work. As a whole crew we need to talk to each other, push and pull and negotiate to where we can meet in the middle and find that ugly compromise where we’re all equally unhappy. Or even better; the pretty one where we’re all equally happy!

I love my job. I love this industry. In all its nightmarish hellish madness. But there are so many things that need to come together and fit just right in order for a production to work. This is a big one. It’s a little part that every single one of us can do to stop feeding the “unrealistic schedule” monster.

I know plenty of people might disagree with me on this one. So let’s chat. What have I missed?