“I don’t think this is good enough to get paid for”

Bad news?

Graphics Animator, this is what I aimed to be growing up. I wanted to animate short films, movies, games too…and I worked hard for that. I got a chance early in my life to pursue a real job, and I got a dose of a reality check.

Let me paint a picture here. I was self-taught. I choose the wrong university major, I watched more graphics-animated movies than anyone around me, my first PC had no Windows still (version 3.1 I guess), I got a PC monitor that shows colours in 1995, and my first attempt to learn Adobe products was Photoshop 5.0 and After Effect 4.0. My breakthrough in the discovery process was learning Macromedia Flash. I literally saw the software (we didn’t call anything an app back then) during an internship I did, when the developer was building an intro for a website. I went home, bought myself a pirated copy (it was physically impossible to buy a legit one), and did a full night, until sun-rise, trying to figure it out. That sense of astonishment, a moment of achievement, realizing what can be possible now…. all because I figured out how the software works, and that it was a digital implementation of a flipbook (How amazing!). I was ready, I got everything. From that point, it was all about content creation. I remember my first ever content was a movie trailer, an absolute pile of garbage, made of animated text and still photos. Finding media on the internet back then wasn’t easy, and add to that a dial-up modem with a whopping speed of 56 kbit/s.

Fast forward 2001–2 I had just moved to the US, and I had no PC or a laptop still,. I knew Adobe came out with a whole new version of Photoshop, and I wanted to learn AutoDesk 3D and start designing models to get into this whole 3D and all. I bought two books, big fatty ones; one for each software. I spent few months consuming those books, no laptop still or a desktop PC. It was theoretical only :). I got a chance at a job because of those books by the way. It was that chance at the job where I was told the devastating news:

“I’m sorry, I don’t think this is good enough to get paid for”

Now, this was the short version of that devastating news. It was really one of the monumental milestones in my life. It taught me more about myself, my skills, my talents, and most importantly my determination to follow through with what excites me. I was lucky because I had good mentors, good people around, and I happen to listen more than I talk :).

I still think animation is a beautiful thing, but animation as a profession was not for me, and probably still not. Animation wasn’t why I wanted to do it, as I discovered. It was more of a tool, for the lack of other tools at the time, a tool to tell stories, and express a thought or an idea. It was a way to have a conversation, show a solution, display an idea, discuss a thought…It was about storytelling. Boy have I found more tools 😎.