ART vs. Gimmicks
Making a career as an artist in is nearly impossible. Most people who try will not succeed. I have not truly succeeded, most people won’t because art, high art that thing that you want to do, that you’re passionate about comes and goes. This is something you do when you’re inspired, it’s what you do when you get the big idea and you really want to go for it but whether or not your art is marketable is really about a stroke of luck. Whether it will find the market that it needs, whether that market is big enough to sustain you as a career. These are the variables it takes an insane amount of luck to both be talented and marketable. You need both, if you want to make a career as an all caps artist like the most romanticized art careers, I feel like our novelist and director you know because these are people who put out one chunk of art every few years.
You know this is someone who pours all their heart and soul into an idea for a novel and that novel gets published. It has to stand up in this greatly difficult industry and be marketable enough to make that person’s you know livelihood depends on just this one piece of art every a few years. Imagine just but one thing and then three years you live off of that one thing, being a film director for example. Very similar you know directors usually as a movie every 2 to 3 years maybe longer it’s got to be massive, it’s gonna get so many people to care about it. This isn’t likely to happen. More likely you’re gonna be a filmmaker who can’t make films in your career, you got to have either a day job or you got to have a gimmick and I’m using gimmick in a very broad, broad sense of the term. In fact I would just say any career is basically a gimmick. Let’s say that you’re an aspiring director but you’re working your way up through the film chain and right now you’re just working as first they see someone who is an AC which does the camera assistant camera. You’re the first AC, that’s your gimmick that’s something that you can do over and over again forever because it doesn’t require you to be inspired it doesn’t require you to be an artist it requires you to be a technician it requires you to know how to do a job but it does not require you to be an artist.
So that’s your gimmick while your art is over here desperately trying to get big enough to succeed I think there are hundreds of thousands of artists out there who are making art that maybe they can even make a profit off of but they can’t make a career off of it and I think where you really see the difference between a gimmick and a career vary strongly is on the internet, with Internet content creators. Most of us have sort of both I mean there’s a lot of people who just have the gimmick right they’re, just they do a gimmick every week that’s their thing they. They keep pumping out the same kind of content and they have a career based on that, they don’t necessarily do big flashes of inspiration, big meaningful projects (like ours EVANGELION AMEND, ProjectE4E) but sometimes they do and sometimes you can’t tell the difference that much or they’re mixed in together. A great example of this might be someone like Casey Neistat who does have broad enough reaching art that he could probably subsist off his art for awhile but he’s got the gimmick of daily vlogs. The daily vlog is very similar to his art but when he makes what he considers to be like a film it’s this much more inspired thing, it’s something that happens maybe once a month and he’ll put together like something really different from the gimmick, even though so much of the technique is the same.
For instance, EVANGELION AMEND is a non-profit passion project, our original anime idea that is PARADIGM ULTIMATUM and so much more future projects. But that is my art. But it’s not profitable I need the gimmick to back it up because the arts going in too many different directions, the art can be anything I’m interested in doing right now but the gimmick, that’s the foundation.
I think that right now especially as an individual creator on the internet who is supported only by yourself, you need the gimmick and it’s so hard to survive without it. Sometimes you’re not artistic and that’s one of the biggest problems with trying to use your art as your career on the Internet, unless it’s insanely marketable then you can’t make a career out of it. Let’s say you can only write a book once every 3 years you only have a great idea once every 3 years, that book has to sell enough to survive you for 3 years or else you got to have a gimmick to back it up. What it all comes down to me is that I need to find a gimmick. I can’t survive out of my art I need the gimmicks, unless I become a famous director of projects. I like would like to have the gimmicks, I think most people do I think most people become more okay with themselves once they realize the need for this because when you’re a starving artist you’re just wondering you know, what even is my value like if you never succeed as an artist? If all you do is try to make art and it never profits you you never can find a career in it. It’s going to kill your desire to do art, it’s going to kill the art it’s going to kill your ability to you know to stop working your day job, the gimmick.
If you can find a gimmick that you’re actually happy with and that allows you to do art on the side that’s when you really can open up the doors and be; “oh now I can do whatever art I want because I have this gimmick that I like that’s successful” and this runs on in the background while you work on all your art and it doesn’t even matter if the arts really successful. Now you can just do whatever you want. The gimmick is profitable. The gimmick keeps running and it keeps allowing that kind of art to happen but again for someone like me I don’t have one central gimmick that’s strong enough to hold it all together so the gimmicks do everything! I always have to wonder about what happens when some people probably try to stick with just doing the art and never have the gimmick they’re just gonna disappear. That’s my point. Gimmick and art, you might need both unless your art is so ludicrously successful that it can pay your way forward and that’s a very small percentage of people not because the other people are less talented but because their talents don’t appeal to as much of an audience and just aren’t marketable don’t have any money behind them.
THE NEW WAVE
I want to change the paradigm of the art industry and art community. I know this sounds too ambitious. I desire a change for how society treats art. Many artists are paid poorly for the hard work they put in the art industry whether that being animation, comics, manga, music, etc. anything that basically have to do with being creative. I started this STUDIO in hopes to find an opening, find a market, find a vulnerable opportunity to take and launch this STUDIO to the starts with our productions and create jobs for people. I supposed you could call me a starting entrepreneur with a vision in the art industry.
I want this studio to be a place to give artists a voice, a platform. I want this studio to help people to be artist if they so desire in communities such as our discord, YouTube, or any social media. I hope that our next big project after EVANGELION AMEND, “PARADIGM ULTIMATUM” will catch the eyes of the higher ups as that anime has a message of the state of art in todays society. Thank you to everyone who believes in our vision and agree to change the way society treats art. Because art matters. Through User interfaces people use all their lives, signs they see on the street, and art media, all those were made by an artist. Come with us in this journey to aim for the top and triumph over struggles in our lives and spread positive message through the powerful medium that is art.
Let’s change the paradigm of art for a new generation.
Sincerely, Vincent (STUDIO SYNKAI Founder)
