Apparently I'm meant to be giving some thought to my future in this course. Well, I'm not actually graduating yet, but I have been thinking about it a lot recently.
We were asked to define our industry. Like, specifically. Well I dunno. Is that a "what do I want to be when I grow up" question? If I had to go into specifics, well, the list includes character animator for film, 2D and/or 3D, game/film concept artist, book illustrator. Doing indie films and taking the funding and festival route is very appealing, but, you know, I need to buy my parents a house and everything, so something that pays a little better is a priority. I've also always wanted to make my own picture book and do comic strips in newspapers, but that's a different story.
And how is Professional Portfolio (this animation) going to help me? To be honest, I don't think it will, in itself. Besides the fact that it's a 2D hand drawn animation of the type that I don't think there's any jobs around Sydney for (correct me if I'm wrong), I also gave up on drawing concept art for it, so I have nothing to show in that area.
Overall though, the main issue is that the quality is nowhere near "professional". My animation doesn't work -mainly coz I'm a bad director. I would feel uncomfortable trying to promote it as a work. The only direct good that can come of it is that I have some traditional animation to buffer my animation showreel, which only consists of 18 seconds of 3D animation due to lack of practice/everything else being below standard.
I've been following this super long thread on DLF lately, mainly featuring a great deal of Aussie unemployment in the CG area. The way the debate has been leaning, the problem seems to be the high Aussie dollar, and thus outsourcing digital labour to cheaper Asian countries. There's veterans in the field saying they can't find a job.
Now that's really daunting for the student, naturally. But the way I see it, sure it is probably a lot harder to find work nowadays, however, I do believe there's always a market for quality. So in terms of Packaging vs. Content, quality content wins it for me. Speaking personally again though, I can't even do the whole selling your product business. They tell you not to undersell yourself, but I lack in the self esteem department (yes I am completely aware). I accept that, only it means that, for me, content is everything. It has to be outstanding. It's outstanding or nothing.
I'm not too concerned that my work is not going to be outstanding. I have an extra year after all, to build up a volume of work. I think I will focus on 3D and still image though, to better my job prospects. And then an honours year if I can't find work or if I manage to get a scholarship or something.
Also, a while back I attended a SIGGRAPH talk by Andrew Silke. Now he was really, really cool (he created the Generi rig!) and everything he said was super inspiring, but there was one thing that really stuck. He showed us this video, which basically sums up where I'm at:
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