You see, animation, film, and anything related to making something move on screen is hardly ever just a job. It's a lifestyle. You can send someone home from work to rest, and while they're at home, they may just sit there and edit their own work related to the exact same media. Or while they're resting, they watch other movies and get inspirations for future projects. It's in our blood. We speak in Adobe program terms, and any normal person just stops listening when you start to mention words like "CGI" and "b-roll." It translates into a foreign language that only people in your field understand.
In fact, I recently found myself with family during the Christmas holiday, and it was ultimately frustrating to me, because we all studied different professions. My mother being a minister, my brother a preservation architect, and me a filmmaker/animator. The frustrating part was that I'm not interested in old buildings, my brother's agnostic and therefore not interested in religion, and my mother has a hard time with technology. Learning to deal with frustration is key really. So, how do you communicate with the outside world after a while if you've been so specifically educated that you can no longer think in the same context as the rest of society. You talk about things you all can relate to. For my family that usually equates to food and the weather.
Food is a topic so neutral that just about anyone can talk about it and still appreciate either the thought of tasting it, or the mechanics behind making it. And then there's the weather. In our family, the weather becomes a good topic because we all live in different climates. My mom lives in tornado alley with a climate that's the normal, blazing hot in the summer and frigid in the winter. I live just a couple states further East in a climate that gets a lot of rain and remains fairly mild in the winter, but very warm in the summer. And my brother lives much further North where it gets extremely cold in the winter and only mildly warm in the summer. So, it makes sense that weather would be a good conversation topic for us. But at the end of the day, if you're an animator or a filmmaker, because your profession is visual, your family is going to want to view your work. So, I suppose the lesson of this story is that even though other people may not understand your secret coded language, animators and filmmakers still have the privilege of being able to let other people enjoy their profession through their creations.
~Celia
Food is a topic so neutral that just about anyone can talk about it and still appreciate either the thought of tasting it, or the mechanics behind making it. And then there's the weather. In our family, the weather becomes a good topic because we all live in different climates. My mom lives in tornado alley with a climate that's the normal, blazing hot in the summer and frigid in the winter. I live just a couple states further East in a climate that gets a lot of rain and remains fairly mild in the winter, but very warm in the summer. And my brother lives much further North where it gets extremely cold in the winter and only mildly warm in the summer. So, it makes sense that weather would be a good conversation topic for us. But at the end of the day, if you're an animator or a filmmaker, because your profession is visual, your family is going to want to view your work. So, I suppose the lesson of this story is that even though other people may not understand your secret coded language, animators and filmmakers still have the privilege of being able to let other people enjoy their profession through their creations.
~Celia
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