motivation discipline & distractions
polycounter lvl 6
I see and read about more and more young people with a reasonable amount of talent falling in front of the same old hurdles that many great minds have over come in the PAST. Time and time again I read posts on different sites telling the same story and the responses are mostly the same: you have to focus more and work harder. While I agree with this it’s not working in today's modern world as we are constantly bombarded with distractions. Now we can all look up quotes from famous people and even the veterans will preach the same but the world has changed a lot from there early days, it can no longer be connected for want of a better word.
Just look at the software options that a 3D artist has at his or her disposal compered to 20 years ago, the same mentality back then is easy to project onto young people today and I tell you it’s not working. More and more young minds are becoming so mesmerised with today's options (to achieve the same goals as in the past) and I can understand why it can be so difficult to stay focused, in fact I see why it’s becoming more and more unlikely that one will be able to achieve a level of concentration that is parallel or even to surpass that of the great minds of the past.
Everything looks and sounds the same today with very little room to maneuver as art, audio and vfx become more “REAL” there is something lost along the way. We all use the same software, work in the same teams and not very often do I see or listen to a creation that really makes me stop and think. The “Outside The Box” thinking has been replaced by compliance and standardisation which is great for monetary/financial sectors but degrades the human need for freedom of thought and ideas. The current global education system follows the same path as they did after world war two with very few exceptions.
To all the young people out there studying and learning these new techniques I want you to ask yourself one simple question: Why is this the only option I have ?
Now I know the cherry pickers will crawl out of the wood rot and will be all over this post like a rash to try and justify what they do is how it should be done but I for one have seen with my own eyes enough talent being wasted within this modern standardisation that makes me sick. If you really want to create something new then you are not going to do this with the current level of thinking and working, you need to get outside the box and look down on the current standard and it is my personal belief that one must explore options that are never truly thought of in our current state, as a society.
If we continue to go down this road are we not the producers of our own steady demise in all forms of creativity? How far will we go, that anyone with a PC and a mouse can just point and click and call it “a work of creativity / art?”.
This has been documented for a long time now and many artists and composers are enjoying the ease of use from the new found technology but it’s just a matter of time before even they will start to question the logic, the music industry was warned by many hard working artists in the past and look at what we have created in that department.
Sir Ken Robinson has done his upmost to bring these concerns to light but sadly to no avail and it is in my honest opinion that the future lies with our young minds thinking for themselves and not doing everything by the set rules. You will never stray from the pack with this level of thinking and you will continue to post on forums about motivation and disciplinary problems which will grow exponentially as the future decades pass.
Get out of that bloody box and start thinking for yourself more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
Just look at the software options that a 3D artist has at his or her disposal compered to 20 years ago, the same mentality back then is easy to project onto young people today and I tell you it’s not working. More and more young minds are becoming so mesmerised with today's options (to achieve the same goals as in the past) and I can understand why it can be so difficult to stay focused, in fact I see why it’s becoming more and more unlikely that one will be able to achieve a level of concentration that is parallel or even to surpass that of the great minds of the past.
Everything looks and sounds the same today with very little room to maneuver as art, audio and vfx become more “REAL” there is something lost along the way. We all use the same software, work in the same teams and not very often do I see or listen to a creation that really makes me stop and think. The “Outside The Box” thinking has been replaced by compliance and standardisation which is great for monetary/financial sectors but degrades the human need for freedom of thought and ideas. The current global education system follows the same path as they did after world war two with very few exceptions.
To all the young people out there studying and learning these new techniques I want you to ask yourself one simple question: Why is this the only option I have ?
Now I know the cherry pickers will crawl out of the wood rot and will be all over this post like a rash to try and justify what they do is how it should be done but I for one have seen with my own eyes enough talent being wasted within this modern standardisation that makes me sick. If you really want to create something new then you are not going to do this with the current level of thinking and working, you need to get outside the box and look down on the current standard and it is my personal belief that one must explore options that are never truly thought of in our current state, as a society.
If we continue to go down this road are we not the producers of our own steady demise in all forms of creativity? How far will we go, that anyone with a PC and a mouse can just point and click and call it “a work of creativity / art?”.
This has been documented for a long time now and many artists and composers are enjoying the ease of use from the new found technology but it’s just a matter of time before even they will start to question the logic, the music industry was warned by many hard working artists in the past and look at what we have created in that department.
Sir Ken Robinson has done his upmost to bring these concerns to light but sadly to no avail and it is in my honest opinion that the future lies with our young minds thinking for themselves and not doing everything by the set rules. You will never stray from the pack with this level of thinking and you will continue to post on forums about motivation and disciplinary problems which will grow exponentially as the future decades pass.
Get out of that bloody box and start thinking for yourself more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
Replies
But... Yea as one of these young people I feel quite powerless about all of this, this is how I have been educated for two thirds of my life right now and I definitely remember being way more creative when I was a child. There was no such thing as motivation, only taking the pen and paper or legos and building nonsense just for the sake of it and who knew what could come out of it.
Alternative styles of art can be more difficult to create; handpainting is tedious and takes a lot of skill in traditional painting and artistic sense to really shine. Making a game where character animations are actually stop-motion photos of IRL potatoes is a risk. Making materials, and slapping it onto a model with a few tweaks in substance painter; while still taking a solid 2-3 months to really understand, takes less effort and time to produce, has a very well established pipeline, and is risk-free.
Anyway, that's my two cents.
I suppose, from my perspective, what it comes down to is that being easily distracted from doing work suggests a lack of interest in said work. And that all comes down to the individual in question, whether they actually want to be where they are, doing what they are doing.
Technology is going to freak people out within the next 2 decades and the advancements are moving very fast indeed but the education systems are not. For example taxi drivers in Singapore are now getting worried because of a new driver less taxi system that is going through tests. The creators are projecting that the service will be fully operational within the next five years, that's going to put some taxi drivers out of work and this is the problem with technology and it will be coming to a game studio in the not too distant future. Machines & computers surpass humans 10 fold when it comes to hard work and globally we show very little interest in the downside. After the second world war more than 70% of Europeans worked within the agriculture system and it is now less than 5% due to technology.
Working in a bank for instance was one of the most sought after jobs in the 60's & 70's and now people are being paid off in drones due to the advancements in algorithms (Wall Street is run on algorithms btw). So I think you can see what I am getting at if you look at CG in general, it's becoming more and more "code" orientated and the film industry knows all about this.
My question is: What are young people supposed to do when the time comes to make the choice in school on which direction they should spend the best part of their young adult lives on? In today's fast and furious world my heart goes out to them because it must be a nerve wracking period in their lives. I work with many young people who made the wrong choice and ended up dropping out of uni mostly because of the lack of future job placements. They end up in shitty jobs for years trying to payback loans and studying something new on top of that and I talk a lot about this with them.
The education system has become a vacuum and with the help of Government denial is creating the perfect scenario for global unemployment particularly among young adults and I wont even mention globalisation. The age old attitude that you have to work hard and just get things done is not going to help this situation and in general most people who are in their nice (what they think) secure jobs don't give a rats ass about what is really just around the corner.
We need to start encouraging our young to find their talents and help them learn and develop them further, we are not currently doing this. If we continue to ignore this then I guess we can all use facebook to complain about the consequences.
I bid you a good weekend