Rambles #9: ...you mean that other thing
Although I've finally started animating this quarter and feeling like I'm finally doing what I've been meant to do, I've also still been taking gen-eds. My goal by the end of my education is to have specialized in 3D computer animation. And generally speaking, the work I mostly do and enjoy doing is all digital. However, as part of my curriculum I am required to take courses involving traditional methods with physical materials and such.
It's frustrating when it happens, but often whenever I show what I'm working on in school to anyone not in the art field (which is the majority of my friends and family) they're often more interested in the more traditional work which of course is the exact opposite of what I'm in school for. For example, a crappy excuse for a sculpture crudely hot-glued together will get twice as many "likes" as a ten second animation that I worked tirelessly for 3 weeks on and am far more proud of.
I don't take it personally, and I try to acknowledge that it's just because it's something more familiar and something people can identify with better (I mean, everyone knows what pencil and paper is, paint, clay, etc.) than something made in Maya or Photoshop.
Digital work is kind of looked at as lazy to non-artists. It's just assumed that buttons are mindlessly pressed. And if they can't see the brush-strokes, then it must just be made by magic. We look at design everyday, but no one thinks about the human being that worked on it or even the mind behind the idea. These things just kind of appear out of thin air. People like to assume that because it was created on the computer, that there was no human quality or skill added to it, when in actuality, that couldn't be any further from the truth.
This same kind of idea of people getting more excited or impressed over "the wrong thing" happens when I work on, say, a drawing for hours, but then make a cute, little doodle in seconds and somehow people are ooh-ing and ah-ing far more over the cute doodle than the work that I spent a quarter of my life working on. I try my best when it comes up to explain why what I do is hard work. I try to talk about how to acknowledge that, particularly in animation, I have to draw every single frame and scrap everything and draw it again when it doesn't look right. Or how timing works and how tedious it is even on the computer. I want people to know that the computer is merely a tool just like a pencil is and that on the grand scheme of things, it really doesn't do any of the work FOR you; there's a reason animated feature films take years to make. And the ironic part is that a lot of people may think that the computer makes it easy, but if they were to sit down with Maya, they would be beyond confused and not even know where to begin or understand it, thus proving the point that it's not easy or lazy because if it were, everyone would be doing it.
It's too exhausting to have to explain it to people and I'm sure that most of the time no one cares enough or has the patience to really hear it.
And also, even if they do come to acknowledge the long hours you spend on it, it still won't change the fact that they may just find the traditionally created things more appealing to their eye. And that part you can't change.
It's weird and unfortunate how these things work, but these are just typical problems of being an artist. This career path is typically unfair in more ways than just these examples, but that's just an artist's life.
