VFXhack

We’ve all heard the overquoted story from about how it took Thomas Edison 10 million tries to get the lightbulb right or how Dyson went through thousands of prototypes before he settled on the perfect design for a vaccum. But, behind these cliches lies more than a nugget of truth, especially in regards to he world of Visual Effects. I have found that no two shows (or two shots for that matter) are exactly the same. And with the pace of innovation racing ahead so rapidly, what’s state of the art in VFX today won’t hold up tomorrow. Is there anything us work-a-day guys and gals of the VFX community can do to keep pace? Well, I’m happy to tell you that the answer is yes. One of the keys to creating a great visual effects sequence is to fail early and fail often. This is a hard pill to swallow for some of you out there. Getting a ahead in this business means always being the guy or gal with the answers. When a Director asks, “How the heck are we gonna do this?” nobody wants to answer “I don’t know. Lemme think about it”. Humility in the VFX world is in short supply and huge egos tend to be greatly rewarded. The fact is, failure is a big part of the VFX (or any artistic) process. And how you handle failure in a work environment is a far better test of your character than success.

Go Big or Go Home-

Fear of failure can lead to being overly cautious in shot design or worse indecision and inaction. If you fear failure, you will never learn anything. Sometimes starting a project can feel like standing on the edge of a giant, bottomless pit of sadness and despair. Although your doubts may not be unfounded, at a certain point ya’ gotta just say to your self “Screw it” and jump in head first. Nobody ever got the glory by sitting on the sidelines saying “See I told you it would be too hard”. So climb aboard that failboat and sail on with a smile on your face.

It Is, What It Is-

One of the things that defines a successful person is the ability to see things for what they are, not what you want them to be. The only way to make your failures work for you is being honest with yourself about what didn’t turn out right in your shot and how it went off course. Cast a critical eye to the work you’ve done. If you were the client, what would you have said about the work you put forward? Don’t get stuck making excuses or qualifying your work. Specifically, identify how you screwed up and what you are going to do differently the next time around.

A Glutton For Punishment-

To really learn from failure you must do it again and again. Just think of it this way, if every time you fail is opportunity to never step in the same pile of VFX doodoo again. Some of you may be afraid to walk around the office with canine poopy on your shoes. Admitting that you screwed up might feel a bit strange in this alpha dog eat alpha dog world. But look at it this way, artists that set themselves up as perfect run the risk of not knowing when something really bad is staring them right in the face (Jar-Jar Binks anyone?).

Basic Failure Safety-

It’s probably not a good idea to continuously fail at important stuff like making a delivery or remembering not to fish a burning bagel out the toaster with a metal fork while it’s still on. Try to create a safe failspace for yourself on each project. Animatics or concept sketches have great failure potential. What you need is sandbox where you can try out creative options without sinking the entire project. Starting out a job with many failures can result in the cream rising to the top early. Just make sure that you’re a quick study and turn your mound of crap into a diamond in short order. Otherwise, you won’t be the guy who learned from his failures and became great, you’ll just be a plain old failure.

LINK to some inspiring Fails over at Failblog

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 6:35 am and is filed under career, howto, tips, vfx, visual effects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.