Konbanwa minna-san. Watashi wa Chris “Orrin Scott” DeWitt desu. Hajimimashite, douzo yoroshuku onegashimasu.
Good evening, everyone. My name is Chris “Orrin Scott” DeWitt. It’s a pleasure to meet you.
For most of my life I have been pursuing a career in animation. Not drawing or painting, or character or prop design, or even writing and storyboarding, but a blend of history and education in the hopes that sharing my burning passion for the animated world would encourage at least one person to either approach animation with a new appreciation or to give new context to the already established enthusiast.
Animation has had a huge impact on my own life and how I perceive interpersonal relationships all the way up to global affairs. It is hard to identify an aspect of my life that has not had some impact from my studies of animation. Animation has changed the world, will continue to change the world, and can even, if you let it, change your own perception of the world. The reverse is, I feel, true, too. The world has molded animation into many forms; from the humble beginnings as vaudeville sideshows to today’s global commodity. From propaganda to cutting edge technological powerhouse, and a lot of spaces in between.
If these statements seem like the words of a zealot, well, they just might be. However, there are statistics to back up my claim. This past January the industry research company, Research and Markets, reported that the global animation industry had a value of US$ 264 billion in 2019. With this year’s global pandemic in full swing in the United States, and at time of writing with no end in sight, the animation business has been one of the few industries to see an uptick in productivity and series orders due to quarantine orders and the ability to work from home.
July 12th, 2011. A less hairy me had just moved to Dallas, Texas a week prior. My then employer, GameStop had promised a promotion to Assistant Store Manager and I used the opportunity to move closer to the animation industry, in this case, the anime industry. Unbeknownst to me and my excitement, neither FUNimation nor GameStop would be in my future in a few short weeks.
My pursuit to establish myself as an authoritative figure in animation history has been one of trials and errors. Though, I feel that might be the case with most people growing up in the turbulence of the early aughts. My pursuits have taken me across the country filling different positions in many different industries; retail, transportation, industrial, and food service to name a few displeasures. Each one taught me varying life lessons along the way, or not. I would neither wish them upon my enemies, nor wish to trade them for different experiences. I made decisions I felt were right at the time with the knowledge I had at the time. To wish otherwise would result in a different me today, and that simply would not do.
During this pandemic, it has forced me to stop striving for success long enough to question how to go about achieving that success and ask in realistic terms what I’ve always wanted to do. This blog is one part of the answer I have come up with. My plan is to incorporate blog writing as a tool to get the topics on animation from my head onto something tangible and, maybe in the future, profitable. If you are reading this, then at the very least I have succeeded in sharing my passion one iota with someone else outside of my personal social bubble.
I hope you do join me as I pursue a syncopation to call my own as I leave an earmark on the pages of animation history and share the lessons I've learned and new discoveries along the way. At the very least, it should be fun.
Source URLs:
No comments:
Post a Comment