Shaping logic to justify feelings
Hallå my pals!
Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.
This weekend I took a 6 hour long train ride from the south of Sweden to my family’s place. I’ll be staying here for a month!
Shaping logic to justify feelings
The idea of stringing together something coherent and thoughtful about what I’m up to or about creativity overwhelms me today. We’re wrapping up development on Surmount, and I prefer to spend my spare time to write and draw Space Deer strips. The result is that I’ve not found the urge to write as much Indie Notebook worthy stuff. Which is perfectly fine. My first passion is to create stuff and running this newsletter is an extension of that passion.
I love writing about creativity but I never want that to take so much of my focus that I forget to actually practice it.
But this isn’t a flawless explanation of why I haven’t written the kind of thing I want to publish here.
This is my reasoning: I already do so much more creative work than I do writing. I work 35+ hours per week on Surmount, I only write this newsletter for an hour or so every Sunday. So realistically it would be impossible for me to put more hours into Indie Notebook. Technically that’s not an issue, but I try to mold it into an explanation because my feeling about it is different. I’m just trying to use or shape a logic to feel fine about being a little overwhelmed. Why can’t I just listen to my feelings?
(Seems I ended up writing something even though I didn’t mean to, hahah.)
Mini Notes
I might not have written much, but I have read and thought a lot. Which is what leads to good writing. So I still have some minis!
🐴 Quote - Horse shit
The “is the glass half empty or half full”-example of optimism vs. pessimism is out. This is where it is at now,
‘The pessimist sees a pile of horseshit and thinks that’s all there is. The optimist thinks that if there is enough horseshit around, there must be a pony someplace.
It’s not as snappy as the glass one though. “Is the town full of horse shit or full of ponies?”
💭 Thought - What I know is alive, the rest is not
When I stared out my friends window just after arriving in Sweden, I looked out at the apartments and felt like everything is so much more alive compared to France. Which was strange cause I didn’t see a soul outside and just a couple lights on in the other buildings. I think because in France I don’t quite know what to expect inside buildings, but I know what it’s like inside these apartments. I don’t know how familiar a french school would feel to me. But here I know everything, or at least feel like I do, even when I’m in a town where I’ve never been before.
📕 Book - Creativity INC
This is the best book I’ve read all year, it’s about the history and principles of Pixar.
Going in I had no idea how significant Pixar has been, both artistically and technologically. The founder was one of the earliest pioneers in 3D graphics, he was part of establishing the whole field. That’s what made me curious about the book in the first place, as a huge Pixar fan it was incredibly exciting to read about that. But I didn’t expect to be left with a greater hope for human’s abilities to make the world a better place.
Steve Jobs invested in Pixar before it was Pixar and helped make it what it is today. Steve wanted to make the world a better place by making joyful products, but he knew that no matter how much joyful he makes them, they will eventually end up as trash. While Pixar movies, or good stories last forever.
I will definitely write more about this book.
Thank you for reading Indie Notebook! The best way to support me right now is by sharing this newsletter with a friend.
Take care and have a creative week.
That's fun! I think if I do what I love, and I organically come about things, it goes better. If I want to write less, then I'll have more to write about next time I *want* to write! Supporting and growing my love for things... this feels much like ending a book on a really good part so I can be excited about it the next day. Not burning out, but rather looking forward!
My thoughts on 3d animation (and pixar) is that a programmer-mathematician-artist is the most beastly unit of employee in that field, and that we don't see that as much nowadays. In the movie Interstellar, they wrote an actual black-hole raytracer for CGI that took into account red/blue-shifting!
I thought that in 2d animation there's less "build-tools-from-scratch" going on as there is in 3d animation regarding physics simulation and animation tools and the fact we've barely broken the surface of what's possible, but the more I think about it, the more I realize hand-drawn animation is much the same, only less obvious. Just imagine writing pixel-shaders for your drawings and painting normal maps to make them lit dynamically; that's just one very small thing out of the vast pool of possibility. Nothing prevents us from fundamentally re-thinking our tooling and making tools to fit the project!
Except... time, budgets, and energy ;)
One summer I was staying in a hotel room in China. The TV channels were all Chinese but there was a selection of movies available to watch, one of which was a documentary called "The Pixar Story" from 2007. I watched that thing a handful of times, I feel.
It goes into a lot of what you mention with that book and I really recommend it. It really is a very exciting and inspiring story.