Getting it/Going On...

Well things may be looking up!

I can remember brooding so hard in year 2...doubting.

I wasn't even half way there and I had managed to convince myself that I couldn't measure up to the people around me, let alone what the Game Industry wanted of me.

I guess I can put it down to one thing: Opinion:

Tepid Feedback: I guess not everybody is going to feel as passionate as you do about your work. No-one else can see how much you have busted your ass to improve, how many hours you put into that piece of work, how although it's not perfect; that piece of work that you've slaved over is a marked improvement on what you've been producing.

I really wish I'd had that perspective when I was getting clumsy feedback from various visitors. They see so much work that they become numb to who they trample. One visitor was so negative about the sketchbook that I showed him after a presentation that I almost stopped painting completely!! I was beside myself. It didn't matter how much people told me my stuff was good, I couldn't get that one review out of my head!

The other day I was showing work to a visitor and if I hadn't heard anything more I would have been convinced that he had gone away completely underwhelmed. The next day Mike told me that the visitor had advised that me and some of my cohorts should apply for CodeMasters...soon!

Shitty Death!!

If I had never heard that, I think I would have looked back on that meeting as yet another of the former scenarios above. So now I'm stoked! I could never have conceived of this happening at the end of the course from my vantage point in the second year.

The reason for that is that I had neglected to take into account somebody's opinion:

I'd assumed one thing;
the other was true.

Contemporaries: Game Art, not surprisingly is rife with competition. It's a course based around creating competitive games; of course it'll attract competitive people!

I've never really done well around competitive people. I love a bit of harmless banter around some games, but I could never get my head around the mentality that requires that they be actively 'winning' in all aspects of their life.

Since when do you 'win' at art!?

However if you are around that mentality enough it could start to wear you down.

I was a bald tyre by the second year.

Some people had just convinced me (indirectly) that being great at gameart was unobtainable simply because they saw themselves as number one and that made me feel second rate just by being exposed to their lofty opinion of themselves on a day to day basis.

You can't change an ego maniac, it's just their way of dealing with life and their personal way of motivating themselves to try harder. And good for them if it works. A lot of them are Hares.

If you set your philosophy to being competitive then you run the possibility defaulting to Loser just because you decided that you were running a race.

We tortoises get there in the end. I just never saw art as something that you had to 'win'.

The Ministry of Misinformation: What I realise now is that Gameart is an imprecise science, full of quick fixes and patch jobs and definitely with more than one way of doing things. When I started the course I was polarised by one way of doing things because it was the way that I thought it should be done.

Luckily I had a chance encounter with a tutorial that was COMPLETELY PIVOTAL to the way that I create and understand game art and I duly doled out the tutorial to anybody who wanted it. But nobody else was ever as excited about the DVD as I was.

I guess it was just important to me because it resonated with the style of art I wanted to produce and answered the problems that I was having with making it at that time.

What I now know, and what I learned from that tutorial is that you should never stop evolving your way of working. It sounds like bible bashing but it is so important to find that path of least resistance in your workflow and the only way to do that is to keep searching out new tutorials and new softwares to enhance the quality and speed up the rate at which you can produce your work. If you and I are competing for a job and we can produce a comparable standard of work, it'll come down to who can churn it out quicker.

Accentuating the Positive: A lot of the above is what I learned to avoid but this is what I wish I'd paid more attention to!! All the time I was hating on my work I'd stopped listening to the people who were sympathetic to my cause and who were largely, genuinely supportive of what I had produced during the former years. I just became so bummed out by unlucky circumstances, bad equipment etc that I didn't feel that they were seeing it in a balanced way or that they were just trying to cheer me up! But they were trying to keep me on the right track and help me through darker days and for that I'm extremely grateful.

If their opinions hadn't have been successful I may well have made the biggest mistake of my life and run away from the intimidating lack of prospects in the worst case scenario that I'd constructed in my head.

Epilogue: I was really, really, REEEAALLLY uncertain of my abilities at the end of the second year, so uncertain that I had almost decided to jump ship on the 3rd year and pursue a completely different career.

However I was convinced by my friends to stick out the last year to see what would happen but I was pushing forward with my application for the other career at the same time. Whilst all this was going on, I had decided out of simplicity to keep the proceedings a secret from the teachers.

Imagine if I had told them, they might have thought I'd checked out and maybe they might have checked out on me. If they had done that then I don't think I would have had some of the opportunities that have come my way since then.

So in light of that, you could say that it was the one time my uncertainty had worked in my favour!

The bottom line is that for all the doubting and uncertainty the gulf between knowing nothing and knowing everything is filled with opinion and not that many are anywhere close to the knowing end of the spectrum.

You just have to wait til the end of the race to see who wins.