Innovation Essay
I would like to believe, shooting to be an animator, the next Stan Lee, is my claim to being an innovator. However, with further thought, is it innovating if someone has already done it (Stan Lee that is)? I used to think to myself, “am I the only one going to this school who wants to go into animation?” My eyes were opened when the girl who sat next to me in my directing class just so happens to also want to be an animator, you can even make an argument she is better or more successful at it than I am right now at it.
Therefore, does anything make me an “innovator”? I’d like to think it is not what I put out that makes me an innovator, but how I did it. For context, Stan Lee didn’t invent superheroes, comics, or powers, but yet no one would say “Stan Lee is/was not an innovator” Everyone knows Marvel, but Marvel did not come before DC. If I polled 100 people and asked them “who created Marvel?” 99% if not 100% would say Stan Lee, but that is false. The two most influential people in Marvel’s history, arguably, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko went on to work for DC at separate times, and Stan Lee did it twice! Stan Lee’s name isn’t even Stan Lee. What I am getting at is that, to me, innovating doesn’t necessarily mean first.
The impact I want to make on the world is to show that it’s never too late to try things. I didn’t jump into animating until a year and a half ago. I always was interested, and wanted to try, but I just didn’t know how to. When I graduated High School, I didn’t know what I wanted to be. Like 2 years into college, I didn’t know what I wanted to be. When that light switched in my head, and I thought what would make me happy that is achievable, animating shot right into my head.
I changed my major, I started paying for Adobe so I could animate, I bought animating equipment, I wanted to turn it from a hobby of casually drawing to a passion for animating. Even though it is catching up with me that I should have decided earlier what I wanted to be, I am at least happy and optimistic with where this could lead me. I’d rather run out of money and not get my degree, than have my degree in something I wasn’t passionate about. I am not sure if I will be able to graduate because I technically wasted two years of grants and VA time, but at least it lead me to here.
From here I see myself working on this grind. I want to get my degree, but if I run out funds, then that will have to be put on ice. I’ll get another job, I’ll animate, and go on from there. Hopefully, if I do run out of funds and the COF, animating will become a more financial gain than it currently is, and I can come back and get that degree. From what I experienced over this year and a half is that networking and showcasing are the most important objectives to moving on. Had I not mentioned I am striving to be an animator, who knows if my team leads would have chosen me to be part of their team. Being on that team lead to me meeting our client, which then lead to a job opportunity to animate! At that point, I had not even been animating for a year yet.
Although my dream isn’t to be some great YouTuber, YouTube is a great way to see what engages people, all social media is. What I have recently seen is, in this great battle for content creators, the most important thing is content. Quality is undoubtably more important than quantity, but if you only have one video a week and another person has four videos a week, the other person is more likely to have more people see his content. I think it is a fake it till make it scenario. The more animations I put out, the higher my “fan” base grows, which gives me a looser and looser schedule or “leash”, which then gives more time to work on projects, which means I can get back to making episodes or movies of what I wanted to make in the first place. For example, I was working on my Marvel or DC, and it was doing alright, but it took more time, more voice actors, more volunteers, just more everything really. However, when I put that to the side so I could make quicker things, I noticed my channel was growing at a faster rate. I didn’t envision myself as “that guy who animates old sports clips” or “that guy who is making animated sports talk shows”, I envisioned myself as the Black and Asian Stan Lee. With that being said, I do enjoy making those other shows, and I would never have done them had my universe not started so slow. One day I hope to be able to make all those shows, be able to monetize them, and then be able to say, “forget monetizing to the max”, let me earn what I can, with as little advertisement as I can!