In my case, though, it means snow. A lot of snow, in fact; some say it’s the most Seattle has had for years. Others say that the Stig took a massive dump over the skies of Redmond and Bellevue. All I know is…walking in this shit sucks balls.

It also happens to be Chinese New Year in approximately 48 hours; unfortunate for my Singaporean neighbours (glossing over the fact that they live about an hour out from my place), who have been without power for the past few days. That’s quite a shitty way to spend what is, traditionally, the most festive period of the year for our culture. While people may enjoy the brief respite that comes with having school shutter its doors for essentially, an entire week, somehow the weight on my mind has not abated in the least. Perhaps it has something to do with this:

So that has been both a joy and a bane to me for the past few months; working with a student game team, providing them ideas, assets both conceptual and physical, troubleshooting and troubles combined. And yet, after these few months, all I’ve managed to achieve is leave them hanging with flimsy excuses, with a lack of artistic talent, and a myriad of technical issues that still demand attention which I cannot afford to give, assuming I want to ensure that my other class assignments receive the attention that they deserve.

Somehow, even though I’m working without obligation as I always have been, in an environment where my peers are my equal or better (with regard only to my team, of course), with the best hardware that money can possibly buy, something’s changed. The problem is, I know exactly what it is, and I know it’s the same issue I’ve had for a few months now: drive. Perhaps it’s what my former colleagues felt near the end-life of the doomed project that I was working with them on, and only now, with the scars that they’ve incurred, am I beginning to experience it as well.

Of course, admitting something like this is probably the death knell for anyone even remotely connected to a creative industry. But right now, even with all my practice, my ability to perform under the pressure that is so typically associated with this industry’s pipeline has been severely curtailed. I’ve become obsessed with deadlines, with producing work as fast as possible while futilely trying to bring them to a presentable level. I’ve lost the creative touch that went into every idea of mine.  Struggling to come up with concepts, with ideas, is a concept that has always been foreign to me, but I’m starting to experience its effects first-hand, and even entertaining its cursory notions are terrifying.

Reasons for this? Probably several, none of which really matter that much from an objective perspective. But one core question, of course, still remains. I had originally planned to get a main job as perhaps an animator, or a modeler/generalist, while working with a small team on the side on our own indie projects, eventually striking a gold mine and earning enough to oust Ser Enzo as the new MD of Ferrari. But right now, looking at my skillset, and looking at the years ahead of me, the worry about even achieving the first goal is forming an ever-increasingly dark cloud over my judgement.

And the consequences related to that would indeed, be more dreadful than anything that 12FMD could ever have offered.

Ironic, then, that with the whitest and most serene of landscapes to surround myself with, that such turmoil is brewing. But at least I have power. And warm jackets.

My final transition out of being a sophomore and becoming a junior, anyway. Not becoming a real artiste; that’s probably going to require a little more than just the passage of time.

The three weeks of break that I’ve had were, I admit, not particularly spent in the most productive fashion. For the first time in my life, I’d been a little jaded by the sheer gravity of my own work, and had no choice but to succumb to the mental degradation that it incurred upon my soul.

In other words, I slept a lot.Most of it, of course, had to do with other issues that probably can’t ever be exposed publicly, which is an odd situation for me; I’ve never had to worry about such politics before until now. But I suppose it’s all part of life.

In any case, I’ve spent the last week-and-a-half trying to busy myself with work, learning and overall productivity: a surefire cure for most cases of Artist’s Block, as someone has probably already coined. Because of my terrible association with painting in colour, I’ve tried a new exercise that I probably should have been doing a long time ago: instead of just doing a few sketches every day, I’m now focusing exclusively on colour keys.

Just two samples of 20 – 25 minute masterpieces, as I’m sure you’ll agree. Hopefully this ends up being something that I can sustain for more than a few weeks. Especially since the reason I’m only showing two is that the rest of them are decidedly untenable for human eyes.

I’ve also been working with one of my friends on a small little side project, which I really shouldn’t say too much about, because I never complete these things on schedule anyway. But I will post a WIP from it,  and here it is:

Someone asked me, upon seeing this, what his name was. “Judge,” I replied. “You will call him Judge, and nothing else.”

He didn’t ask why. Probably for the best, in any case, as looking at my school schedule has me wondering how on earth I’m going to actually get any of this done during the school semester. But of course; I’m an overachiever, after all.

We’ll see.

It’s not always a bad thing, like Americans would have you otherwise believe. Disappointment is what pushes oneself to improve. So does shame, and again, to a certain extent, your own pride. They’re all interrelated concepts, I suppose.

I like to think that I put my best foot forward in everything. I like to think that I balance my work and play well enough (i.e. 90-10 ratio) to fulfill my commitments to people. “Like”, of course, being the operative word here. And yet, when I work on my assignments, sometimes the age-old feeling of “Fuck it, it’s enough”, or “Whatever, it’ll do” still manages to seep into my head, and into my work. It’s like a cancer, because once it takes root in your head, you can never stop it from spreading.

And yet, without it, I would never have managed to finish off the majority of my workload. But still I wonder; is it worth it? Is it worth having this sort of distress creep into my work and render it unpalatable to all but the most untrained of eyes, in order to achieve a requisite grade? Because after all, grades matter little in the grand scheme of things; skills matter more than any letter that a professor could assign me for a cold, unfeeling class number.

My professors tell me I worry too much. My peers tell me I worry too much. Even my closest friends assure me that I am, by all manner of accounts, insane (which, admittedly, I perhaps am) and should probably smash my head against the wall to clear it. But if I’ve learned anything from my past few years of daring to work with other artists, it’s this: while I may have the painting psychomotor skills of an un-weaned infant who has had both arms amputated, I usually have the foresight to tell when shit is about to go down, and trust me on this one: I know that my future right now is right on the teeter edge; where I could suddenly perhaps become an amazing painter by sheer force of will (and black magic, of course). Or it could all go tits-up, and I could remain at where I am right now, until, just like on a pull-up bar, my grip slides away, centimeter by centimeter.

Then I fall. But instead of recovering, like I always do, I’m not sure what ground will be below me this time. And even if there is a plane, what shape will I be in when I land on it, I wonder?

Some things have changed for the better, of course. I can now critique certain people’s stuff and get critique back on my own work  without fear of offense or persecution. I’ve finally broken the barrier between certain professors, where I can now almost treat them as colleagues instead of figures of authority. Of course, every sentence I utter to them is still prefixed with “Sir” or “Professor”, though; that’s probably a habit that will follow me for the rest of my life.

I’ve been able to finally talk to people one-on-one about their hopes, and their dreams, and in some cases, caution them on the lack thereof. It’s odd that I do this sometimes, because when I examine my own, at times, they don’t seem to match up to what I expect of others. But of course, the world would never be able to function without a little hypocrisy.

Perhaps, most encouragingly, I’ve found that, yes, my years of mixing with people from the old Hostile Intent community has indeed paid off;  I can now mostly function within the context of an American community, an American artistic community, even. It also helps, I suppose, that I watched House M.D. a lot.

And of course, there’s now someone else who I can finally talk to on a degree which I would previously have never thought possible, not by any stretch of my imagination, at any rate. But of course, since this is a public hypertext journal, putting such salacious details onto here would leave me vulnerable to discovery. And I can’t have that.

But in the end, even with all these silver linings, I wonder about my own skills and achievements. And the skills of my peers, which currently eclipse mine by a substantial amount. There’s no denying this problem; it won’t just disappear no matter how hard I work, or how much I want to ignore it.

The real question is, and I think, the problem behind my lack of drive these days is: what on earth am I going to do about it? And quickly, for time is already turning the tides against me.

For one of the few times in my life, I’m still uncertain.

A deliverable here; a deadline there. When my little board at home and my digital board on listthings starts becoming obscured by the mass of post-its that cover it, you know things can’t be good.

And yet, somehow, in the middle of all this, where I should be at my finest, doing my best to usurp everyone else in terms of getting things done, getting stuff polished and honing skills learnt…I’m not. In fact, my drive, the one thing I can depend on when all else fails, is already beginning to slip. How it began, I have no idea either.

I’ve tried going to drawing sessions outside of school. I’ve tried watching and imitating as many tutorials as is humanely possible (and believe me, with the amount of tutorials I have, both real and digital, I don’t think any human being could finish watching all of them in a single lifetime), I’ve tried asking everyone and anyone I can for feedback, critique, random shit, something to snap my mind into action. But I’m still bored. The most dangerous state of all mindsets, not just for a person in a creative industry.

Maybe it’s the lack of sleep, though I doubt it; I’ve handled worse lethargic periods and had significantly increased enthusiasm levels during those. Perhaps it’s the lack of training; that has been known to affect my clairvoyance in the past. Perhaps many things.

Whatever the case, my usual remedies don’t seem to be helping. Save  f0r one last unexpected event, perhaps.

Complicating matters is the annoyance in the back of mind about the fact that everyone still seems to be focused on academic progression rather than skills development. A practical drawing test. A practical modeling/texturing/rigging/animation test. An oral presentation. All these individual niggling details in the back of my mind, questioning me about my everyday routine and my purpose. And no one seems to share my disdain for such contrivances.

Or, perhaps, everything can be attributed to a simple case of stress. If I could bring myself to believe that my situation now is somehow less perilous than my time back in Sungei Gedong, that is. The stakes now are no higher than they were back then, and I survived that with significantly more good cheer compared to what my disposition reads as right now.

Drive. However I lost it, I have to find it again, and quickly, for I need to excel. But for now, my pride will have to keep me on the path.

“What do you want to do next time?”

Something that every young’un is asked during their schooling years, it seems. I’ve been asked this about a million times, hell, I’ve asked myself this ever since I got the desire to work with games, and every time the answer I came up with was “Everything”. Because everything matters.From programming, to graphics, to audio, to marketing…there are so many aspects, pillars, that define a product’s success or failure in the world. (Luck steadily becoming a larger pillar, it seems) And right now, I only have marginal experience in each one of those pillars. Yet all the world would have me believe that it would be better to construct one of those pillars, emboss it with the stamp of God Himself, then get to work on other pillars as necessary.

What kind of structure can you create with but a single pillar, I wonder? And yet, as the sleepless nights continue to accumulate, I find myself trying my hardest to work on everything, and yet I achieve so little. A little about rigging in Maya here. A little about C# scripting in Unity there. Some notes on how music and audio loops can be generated with Reason and musical theory in general. And then back to painting for my assignments.

There are too many pillars to build, and I strongly regret not having built their foundations much sooner. At present, two years of development in traditional media has produced precisely a hair’s worth of improvement in my own technical skill. And still, I find no one here who shares my ideal of Using Your Tools. Where you leverage whatever technology made available to you to speed up, to simplify and to ultimately improve your own workflow. Instead everyone follows whatever dictations are read down to them from unthinking, antiquated and quite frankly, irrelevant minds.

And time does me no favours. Nor does the weather, which is getting harsher as I type this: apparently snow is predicted for tomorrow.

In spite of all this, however, I suppose the most eccentric sentiment I have about all this is that I am actually glad I still have managed to help people out, whether it be with technical issues or otherwise. But I think my time back in Mikoishi (now truly dead and buried) if anything, made me understand that even if people don’t deserve the help that they get, I can still continue to reinforce my own knowledge of the subject and how to express it simply by continuing to troubleshoot workflows for other people. Even though my original intention coming here was to, again, absorb as much as I can from people who (I thought) would undoubtedly be much more proficient than me, I have only managed to see a few people so far among my batch who fit that bill. And those that do, really shine.

It is unfortunate, however, that most don’t.

And perhaps even moreso that, as far as I can tell, none are trying to build anything more than a single pillar.

I’ve been mostly busy with having about a million assignments to complete, which seems rather par for the course now. The only consolation, if any, is that I have now more or less re-integrated myself fully with a 3D digital pipeline after an absence of over 3 years, no thanks to the SAF and then of course my experience with a 2D pipeline. Right now I’m still re-familiarizing with Maya, but after that I should be ready to take on THE WORLD. Or something similar.

If only XSI was still being headed directly by Avid…