Feast!

I got hired this week at two studios! One has a day's worth of animation work for me and the other has a week's worth of puppet fabrication.

This animation/artist business is so often feast or famine, but every now and again things go just right. At the moment this means I technically have four jobs this week, three of which I'm having fun doing, and one of which I'm doing because it pays the bills. Oddly though it isn't particularly stressful other than getting to the right place at the right time. To be honest I got an email about one of the jobs and due to the fact there are people with the same names involved at both places I nearly goofed up which studio at which to be.

Nearly.

With all the furring of puppets I've been doing this year, you'd think Laika would be more interested in calling me back though.

...because I need MORE jobs. :)

Technolust

I want an iPhone 5. It's near the end of my contract and I could technically upgrade right this second if it weren't for the fact that the preorders sold out in an hour or so... But even so I want to jump ship and ditch my crappy carrier too. Which means I have to wait till January. Meh.

So in the mean time I wait and download the new iOS. So far it's neat. Some of the features I was most interested in are only available for the 4s and 5, so I still have to wait... But alas.

In other news I'm still animating. And they asked me to come back next week and work on another project, so things are going well. I still have no social life but I'm taking steps to make that happen too.

Lastly, blogger apparently has an app, new from the last time I went looking. No landscape keyboard or anything, but perhaps this means my blog will update more. :)

So I saw Paranorman, and immediately went home and applied to every Laika job I could find.  Which ultimately means I have to try and remember how to update my languishing webpage so my resume is accurate.  Which means finding my original InDesign file so I can upload the snazzy "hey, I'm a designer type person" looking one for downloading purposes so that it matches the simple text version.  And then I remembered my reel is somewhat old now but I can't put all the fun things I did this summer on it until January (at which point there will be more professional work than student work on there, yay!), so there's no point messing with it right now.  And then I remembered that there are a couple of tweaks I'd like to make to my web page.  And then I remembered that unfortunate blog post that just made me look like a douche, which is still out there somewhere whether I delete it or not (nothing is ever forgotten on the internet).

Man.  Job hunting is hard.

But when it comes to jobs, I find I have more than most people right now.  Still working the hotel (in spite of the very insistent and passionate advice that I quit and rely only on the entertainment industry and unemployment), and soon will be moving up the small food chain, if only in implication rather than actual title or pay (thankfully - there are distinct advantages to being a peon).  I like it in some ways.  It's a great safety net, I work for the best General Manager I will likely ever have in my life (and I really appreciate her, not to mention she's fun AND professional - a very delicate balancing act), my student loans, car payment, and rent-type expenses are getting paid for the most part, and my coworkers offer a lot of amusement.  The job is not too easy, nor too hard, and I truly enjoy it at times, but it's not what I want to be doing with myself.  I look forward to the day when I can leave because I have enough art type work to keep me afloat.  Though I fear that day will be followed by a day where I have to find something like it to fill the holes, but that's another problem for another day.

I spent the summer working 40+ hours on a television special, which was awesome.  I learned a lot, made friends, gained valuable experience, and worked my butt off.  Also, since it involved a bunch of people I'd worked with before, we ran like a pretty well oiled machine for the most part.  It was like a reunion in some ways, and I'll admit I teared up near the end at the last few, "we've got the best crew ever and I can't wait to work with you again" speeches.  Hopefully we will get to do another thing together... I truly love it.

The wonderful people at the hotel also scaled back my hours for me to 24 a week, so I could run off and do the project without completely killing myself.  I also have an art gig I'm working on every week for about another 10 hours, give or take, so once I figured out my time management, things went very, very well.  I think the only reason I hit any kind of burnout is because there was a definite end in sight, or I might have gone with that schedule indefinitely.

Oddly, when you go from working almost 80 hours a week to 40, you have loads and loads of free time.  I remember having only one job for years at a time and feeling like it took so much out of me that my free time was nonexistent, but suddenly it was like I had a wealth of free time.  It may have been an illusion, but it was there.  I spent about a month doing fun things like art for myself, finishing off some of the video games I'd gotten halfway through but not finished, and small bits of nothing.  After about a month of that though, the old artistic self loathing comes back into play, and suddenly I felt completely guilty for not doing anything with myself.  Go figure.

Luckily the studio came through with a bit more work - this time for some commercials and random projects - so now I'm filling all of my free time with studio work and that aforementioned art gig.  Once again I'm crazy busy, but I think I'm thriving with it.

Hah.  I remember thinking in my late teens that it would be crazy to work full time and go to school full time... and now I'm so used to it that when I have only one thing to do I get bored.  Though I miss the video game time. :)