A Quick Post on Failure - (An old post I wrote but never published)

Last week all the animation students at University had to hand in their latest showreels for a pre-christmas assesment. We then gathered as a year and watched them on the big screen for everyone to watch...

I'll admit, when I watched my showreel I felt like it wasn't up to the standard I usually aim towards. The title cards were outdated, the pacing was bad, none of the shots were rendered, none of the shots were finished to a stage I was happy with and it was generally boring to watch. 

That being said, I feel like it's okay to have a major kick in the teeth like this one. 

As 'artists' we're constantly asking ourselves to create. Create drawings, sculpts, matte paintings, animation, whatever it is, our job is to create. And in order to create great work, we must fail, and fail often. By failing fast and often we are constantly faced with opportunities to assess the quality of our work and then ask ourselves and others how to improve.

Failure teaches the shape of our intuition. After you keep making a mistake/failing, you'll begin to see it coming from farther away than before.

All in all there is therefore no straightforward path, so keep failing and fail often.