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You want others to be happy, practice compassion. You want to be happy, practice compassion.
Dalai Lama
(via songofthemorning)
What are studios looking for? How can I get into a good animation school? What should I be studying?
I get a lot of these types of questions now and again, and I never know how to answer them. I can’t be sure of what studios are looking for, I don’t control admissions policies to schools, and I have little idea what makes for a current and relevant curriculum. There are a lot of variables in your bid for a career in animation, and it’s kind of impossible to control most of them. You must be crazy to want this job!
I find it helpful to focus on the things I can control. Among those things are your study habits and how you spend your personal time. It’s good to work hard and have goals—without them we would get nowhere. Study hard and make decisive strides towards achieving your art goals. But in the heat of that pursuit, don’t forget to go out and live your life!
If you spend any amount of time looking at artists online, you’ve probably figured out by now that there are about a million dudes and dudettes in internetville who draw better than you (I relive this realization daily). Once your have done your best to rise to their level, the only tool you have to compete with these crazy talents is your background, your personal character—is you!
Consider developing your whole self with the same raw focus and intensity that you develop a particular skill set. Get focused. Go out, have adventures. Run, jump, skin your knee, fall in love, root loudly for the away team at a baseball game, barely escape a crash of stampeding rhinos, live to see another day. Experience things big and small. Go for a walk. The world is full of wonders.
I know this advice is not particularly animation-specific, but maybe that’s for the best. At any rate, it is something I feel strongly about. Animation is great, and there are few things that I enjoy doing more than drawing and storytelling. But in order to have stories to tell, first you have to live them.
Be good, and see you soon!
PS, if you were looking for advice on draftsmanship you should probably be reading this.
Woah. I have no interest in animation but this is still really relevant and inspiring.
(:
wow I didn’t know there was a word for that xP
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People will kill you over time, and how they’ll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases, like “be realistic.
Dylan Moran (via severs)
(via lovingyourlifeintherain)
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I feel like we’re all here on this planet, and intimacy is important. I can’t bear small talk, it’s awful. I want to get beyond that thing of discussing how the weather is a bit better today than it was yesterday, and how this is a nice restaurant. I want to get to what are the problems, what’s really going on. Are you in love? Are you in a lot of pain? What’s really going on in your life? I’m interested in that area, whether it’s on stage or in real life.
Simon Amstell (via tenthousandangels)
(via lovingyourlifeintherain)
Message to a graduate – the inimitable Grant Snyder brings his brand of comic irreverence to the seasonal standby of commencement addresses and their cliches.
But not all graduation speeches are created equal: Here are some of history’s most timelessly uplifting and thought-provoking speakers: Greil Marcus, Ann Patchett, Jacqueline Novogratz, Neil Gaiman, David Foster Wallace, Ellen DeGeneres, Aaron Sorkin, Barack Obama, Ray Bradbury, J. K. Rowling, Steve Jobs, Robert Krulwich, Meryl Streep, and Jeff Bezos.
(via tommyledger)
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I have been a dad for 6 years, a mom for 12, and for a time in between I was both, or neither, like some parental version of the schnoodle or the cockapoo.
[…]
I understand the reluctance many people have to play down the importance of gender, or for that matter, biology, in parenting; a world in which male and female are not fixed poles but points in a spectrum is a world that feels unstable, unreal. And yet to accept the wondrous scope of gender is to affirm the potential of life, in all its messy beauty. Motherhood and fatherhood are not binaries. And that, I’d argue, is a good thing.
[…]
All of this gives me great hope for the future of the American family, for our open-mindedness and the great potential of our sons and daughters. But just as I begin to become overly optimistic, I remember seeing some television show featuring transsexual women and their children, back in the 1970s.
My grandmother was watching it. “Oh for God’s sake,” she said, sucking on her Kent filter king, “those people aren’t women.”
“They’re not?” I said. She had no idea that I was a woman like the ones she was dismissing. How could she have known? I was just a boy then.
“Of course not,” said Gammie.
“They have children,” I pointed out. “And breasts. And — you know. Vaginas.”
She shot me a look. Ladies of her generation didn’t say vagina or vote for Democrats.
“That’s not what makes someone a mother,” she said.
“Really? What does?”
Gammie took a long drag on her cigarette.
“Suffering,” she said.
For mothers and fathers alike, there are times when the line between suffering and joy can be as vague as the line, for transgender people, between masculine and feminine. But surely it is those moments we feel everything at once — maleness, femaleness, melancholy, ecstasy — that make us most human.
Absolutely beautiful essay on what makes a mother by Jennifer Finney Boylan, who used to be James Finney Boylan. Pair with the New Yorker’s heart-warming celebration of gender diversity this Mother’s Day.
Boylan’s fantastic recent book, Stuck in the Middle with You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders, is a must-read.
(via explore-blog)
(via explore-blog)
You know, I’ve seen a lot of Disney Mom “Happy Mother’s Day!” posts going around, but all of them I’ve seen neglected one very important Disney “mom.”
So props to Nani, who - for all her shortcomings - genuinely loved her sister and only wanted the best for her. She had to be a mom because she had no choice, and she did her best… her level best. Even if she got frustrated, even if she got scared.
And in the end? She made it work.
(via essereluminoso)
