‘Waking Life’ Animation Director Bob Sabiston: It’s OK To Not Work in the Animation Industry

For young artists, it’s often impossible to see possibilities beyond The Animation Industry. Their films and TV shows are everywhere, and major animation studios spend a lot of money preaching to students that the only real measure of worth is being hired at one of their companies.

But that’s not the only path for artists. Bob Sabiston, the animation director of Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, explains in this brief but fascinating talk that it’s perfectly all right to choose alternate career paths outside of the mainstream and to do what you want to do — even if Steve Jobs is repeatedly asking you to come and work at Pixar:

Sabiston concluded that being an artist with total independence and the ability to pursue his own vision was more important to him than anything else in the world — and he’s O.K. with that choice:

“I write iOS apps…Altogether these apps sell a combined total of about 15 copies per day, netting me almost $40. But that doesn’t bother me too much because I’m doing what I want to do. I have my indendence, and as you can probably tell from my story, it’s the most important thing in the world to me.”