Wo-hoo! What a crazy interesting topic, am I right? ;)
I'm a career-oriented girl. I love to work.
I'm always working on something.
I therefore get a little curious about other people's jobs in blogland.
For the last 5 years, my job at times has been both awesome and crazy hard. And many things all at once. I've had to literally google how to do some things on the clock under a deadline. And pull very long hours. I've worked at the same animation studio, off and on - usually working a bunch of 6-8 month contracts on different animated kids' cartoon shows in a row. Sometimes it's constant, sometimes there are little or big breaks between jobs. Often times I'm working freelance animation, design, or illustration at home on the side, or working from home inbetween - or going to school now, like I have been for the last year. I love my job.
I get very curious after reading blogs for a while when work isn't ever mentioned. I mean, it's a big part of the day for most of us 9-5'ers, right? I get to wondering...is this blog their work? Do they blog from work? After work? Do they have a full-time mom job? Do they not have to work, and just blog? Call me nosy, but I wonder about these things. In a totally not-judgemental, but curious kind of way.
Reading blogs has definitely opened my eyes to all the possibilities of working from home since I started this lil blog back in 2006 - which I have done at points in my contract-work career, too (and is something I one day hope to pursue full-time), but I live in an expensive city where it would be pretty hard to live on an animators sometimes-flimsy salary alone, so I always assume everybody has to work a 9-5 to pay the bills like I have had to thus far (unless they tell me otherwise)...lol. So I get extra curious when I see someone's daily goings-on without mention of how the bills get paid.
I guess I'm curious for those who do have day jobs why it may be 'kept in the dark' almost on blogs in general....(unless your blog is your work - like online shops and such). Do we think it would be boring to read about? Do we hate that job anyway, so this is a place to forget it exists? I feel like it's kept out on purpose from some blogs sometimes, because it might kind of ruin the mystique of this whole faux reality blogging thing. Know what I mean?
Anyway - I wish I could talk about work here more than I do.
I mention it often, yes (mostly of the 'Ah, I've been working so much!' variety) - but working in the animation industry means I can't talk about it, really. I have to sign confidentiality agreements with every contract, and those can be sometimes scary when working under big conglomerates...what can I say? What can't I say? I can talk about animated shows I've worked on in the past...just not what I'm working on right now, because it's not on tv yet (it feels kind of glamourous to say that! lol). But, really, me telling you that all day I've spent my time moving little bits of characters around in Flash isn't too exciting to most, anyway. lol.
Right now, my job is to pose out the characters and set scenes up, scene by scene, on a team of twelve people, getting it all ready to be animated - episode by episode. Three weeks ago we started a new show, which has been kind of crazy, and I've worked a lot or extra unpaid hours trying to keep up with my weekly quota. Such as it is in this industry, sometimes. In a few weeks I'll be switching back to my old favorite job, which is working with After Effects on the same show, pretty much doing fancy photoshop-like stuff to sequences of images - glowing fire, making shadows, blurring stuff - all those little life-like details you shouldn't notice when a cartoon is playing. I'm super excited to make the switch back to my thing. :)
So, let's talk about work!
What's your job? Do you love it? Hate it? Blog about it, or keep it private?
And why? Would you do this job if you didn't have to?
Perhaps you didn't know that my job even existed before this post, and I'm always curious to know what everybody does that makes the world run smoothly...it's pretty crazy when you think about all the possible little things one can do, here on earth.
I've been thinking a lot, too, about how you're expected to know what you want to do forever when you're 18 and choosing universities, but how at that age you really have no idea what's even out there yet, entirely. It's a crazy thing!
