So cramming this maquette for finals has brought something to my attention that I always kind of knew and experienced to a certain degree, but as of yet never as potent as on this project. This post is particularly for those who have artists or creative types in their lives and have some kind of desire to better understand the way they think.
The vast majority of the work on the Kangaroo was done after the hour of 10 o’clock at night. This was not planned or scheduled. For a couple days, I had other work to cobble together earlier in the night, but this has been my primary project for the past few days, but I always ended up really getting down to work once Paige and the animals were already asleep. I got to thinking about this really earlier today when Paige and I were planning on going running, but she called her mom “real quick” to talk about something “real quick” and ended up talking for over an hour. Someone with a math project or a paper due the next day, would probably have waited 10 or 15 minutes and then just started chiseling away at their work in the meantime, but looking back, I think all I did while waiting was general emailing, blog-checking, and the like. When Paige was done, I said, “Hey! Cool! Let’s do this, I got stuff to do later,” and she was all of a sudden concerned that she had wasted my time and asked whether or not I had been working that whole time. I told her that I hadn’t. I hadn’t been working on the maquette because I knew that at any moment, I would be interrupted.
Artists cannot stand this, and this is part of the disconnect that inevitably happens in traditional office situations between suits and creatives. The suits need to do suity-type things like have meetings. They love meetings. More than the actual meetings, though, they love to plan meetings, schedule them, give out assignments, and put them in their smartphones. Artists loathe meetings because artists literally never take anything away from them. You could have a 3-hour meeting and everyone in the company would leave pumped and/or informed and/or energized except for the artists unless they had drawn some really neat caricatures in their sketchbooks or something. Meetings are utterly lost on artists and we only attend because the suits hint at scary things happening if they don’t go.
What’s worse than actually attending meetings for artists, though, is scheduling them. If you employ any number of artists and you schedule a meeting for 11am, your artists will produce next to no work for an entire half of the day. They will arrive at work at 8 or 9 or whenever, and remember with disappointment that there is a meeting at 11. They will then open their art-programs, and check the emails, blogs, each other, and maybe organize some files or look at their recent work until the meeting time because there is no time between 9 and 11 to enter, engage with, and exit the creative process. The meeting will last an hour, and then the artists will all go to lunch together to discuss how stupid the meeting was as well as how awesome Looney Tunes are. They will then return to work at 1pm, and possibly get some work done. A 1-hour meeting destroys most of their work day. Suits do not understand this, and as soon as they hear about it, they start to resent and rail against it.
The mere idea that a distraction or interruption is coming is an interruption. Creative types have to engage in their work often times in very specific and personal ways, that it blocks out much of the world around them. Some need music to engage. Others need movies or shows to engage. Some need complete silence. Some engage better at home, others outside. Some cannot stand to create at a desk that is too tall, too short, too shallow or on computers with one too little monitors, too small of monitors, or not the right mouse or tablet. Some require active conversation to produce their best work. Others need OTHER PEOPLE engaging in active conversation around them to work best. Call it their “muse” if you want to be melodramatic, but if you, they, or someone else wants them to produce their own work, they MUST be allowed to construct around themselves the environment they NEED.
This is why many studios and developers allow their art teams to decorate their cubicles and workstations as they see fit. In most of the animation departments at Pixar, there are empty rooms where artists can go in and literally build whatever they want to work in. Houses, stone castles, tropical tiki bars, caves, whatever. Movies that win Oscars and made not by people in cube farms in shirts and ties, but by kids in shorts and t-shirts, working in blanket forts. This is why work dress codes make me laugh on the outside and weep on the inside. You are really going to force your creative team to wear ties when they will never ever interface with “customers” or clients simply because that’s what your 200-level business class told you was “professional”?
So Paige was only slightly baffled at my seeming time-wasting, but only a little as she kinda knows the drill by now, but it was a weird question to me. Why wasn’t I working? Because an hour isn’t long enough to engage in a project like this. An hour is long enough to doodle in a sketchbook, maybe. But to make effective and acceptable progress on a major project? Not even close. So the next time your artist-spouse pleads with you to take $90 and go see 3 movies at the theater with the kids, or make you jealous because while you’re at work all day, they’re at home with movies playing all day, remember that artists need what artists need, and nothing ever EVER. “just takes [them] 15 minutes” as so many deadbeat clients insist.
