Make Art, Not Portfolio Pieces

What I learned making a short film and the point of Art School

Art by Sophie Li - “Golden Hour” (2021)

Going to art school won't get you a job. In fact, if a job is really what you want, it's usually a better route to drop out - save on student debt, work on your skills through online courses, network on LinkedIn... This essay argues against doing that, but if you do, or if you are one of my many friends who've dropped out and are wildly successful doing what they love, I really admire you and wish you the best. Now, onto the essay:)

For the first two years of art school, I didn't get it - so much of it felt pointless. Film 101, Experimental Animation, Photography and Filmmaking, and Stop-Motion were all great classes, but seemed like a waste of time to me, as someone who had already decided I wanted to be a storyboard artist. I thought “shouldn't I be practicing my shorthand, or studying films, or just making storyboard sequences for my portfolio?”. So much of it felt like busywork, and I would often skip classes to stay home or in the library, chipping away at a sequence, and that felt right. After all, I knew exactly what I wanted to do (storyboards), and how to get there (build a portfolio), so why couldn't I just do that? It also definitely didn't help that I saw so many of my peers dropping out, getting jobs and doing what I really wanted to be doing, instead of being stuck in the labs making sand animation.

And it wasn’t until halfway through making my thesis film that I realized that’s the point - it wasn’t about getting a job, it was about making art. I’d missed the forest for the trees.

Making a short film teaches you things you could never learn while just storyboarding - namely, that storyboards are not art. It teaches you to throw out your work when it isn’t working, to not care about the quality of your drawings or make perfect compositions that, when put into context or edited into an animatic just don’t work.

Art by Sophie Li - “Golden Hour” (2021)

Our job as story artists is telling good stories, and we can only do that when we allow ourselves to stop making pretty boards and accept our role as artists, here to connect with people and share ideas and emotions through our work, not make 80-150 panel portfolio pieces. Tiffany Pang's "Summer Leaves," which is rough and unfinished but so beautifully cut together that it doesn't end up mattering, Wesley Fuh's "Yoko", which he made in black and white back in 2018 and is still played at the front desk at CalArts, or Gobelins' "Golden Hour," which I continue to watch weekly and still makes me feel things no other student film can muster. None of these films would exist had they dropped out of art school to get studio jobs. Whew.

A good storyboard sequence might get you a job, but it likely won’t change anyone’s life for the better - not in the way a short film, or a personal comic, a photo or a painting can. Art school gives you the space to explore what you like, to create art that is more than a throwaway piece of production material - something that can stand on it’s own. If musicians only ever practiced plucking individual strings and never strung anything together to create an overall song - what a tragedy that would be!

Miyazaki wrote that "animation jobs are slowly becoming assembly-line work."¹, and that feels more true than ever. If you just want to tighten bolts all day while your teachers are trying to teach you to build a car, there's a pretty big mismatch in expectations. It runs so deep that even your teachers may forget that that's what they're there for - they might opt to teach you “marketable skills”, like LinkedIn Networking or ToonBoom Rigging - and that’s fine. You just have to ignore that and keep going to those optional life drawing classes, or weird experimental animation electives - that’s where you get to make art.

So please, even if you do decide to drop out - don’t stop being an artist. Make films, make comics, make art and share it with the world - don’t let a late-capitalist industry make you forget why you started drawing in the first place.

Thank you so much for reading my essay! If you liked it please feel free to share it with a friend or an enemy. Huge thank you to Sooyeon Lee, who really shaped the thinking behind this. Thank you to my lecturers who kept insisting that art is important despite my best efforts to drop out and disappear into the job market - especially Steve, Jack, and Laura.

1. Hayao Miyazaki, “Starting Point: 1979-1996”

“Golden Hour”, 2021 - Gobelins, l'école de l'image