Building A Creative Team
Art by Jake Parker
How do you build a team of editors, agents, and contacts to help you publish your work? And how can you tell if you would prefer to lead a team or be a part of something bigger? This week, Jake Parker, Lee White, and Will Terry discuss the ways you can pitch your ideas to your peers and organize into a professional creative team.
Note: We’ve done our best to provide relevant links to products mentioned in this podcast. SVSLearn and the 3 Point Perspective podcast are supported by qualifying purchases. Thank you for your patronage!
SHOW LINKS
FLIGHT COMICS ANTHOLOGY by KAZU KIBUISHI
WELL FED ILLUSTRATORS/WHAT THEY DON’T TEACH IN ART SCHOOL
INTRO
Lava monsters incoming for 2021! You heard it here first.
How was everyone’s year career-wise? Some people made it work, others were really vulnerable. Restaurants were hit hard but artists tend to work at home as sole proprietors. Online business has boomed, including SVSLearn — we positioned ourselves to be in that spot for the last several years.
Will was able to turn down jobs and feels blessed to be able to focus on jobs that he deems more important. Has this helped publishing? Libraries are closed — if you know their impact on book sales, let us know in the forums!
Schools and book fairs have been winding down this year as well — Scholastic has posted losses this year because of fewer book fairs.
Comic conventions have been cancelled, and live action filming has dropped drastically. Only the really well funded shows are able to shoot.
Jake is looking to do more digital illustration and less linework/inking. He worked in animation during the 2008 recession. People watched movies throughout the recession regardless of their financial woes. Streaming is posting record profits with high subscriptions. Jake feels like we might be going into another recession, and if people have less disposable income, they would probably cut children's books and online learning and kickstarter projects before Netflix and Disney+. Jake is considering replacing one children’s book a year with freelance work for movie studios. Everyone is working at home anyway so it doesn’t matter that he is based in Arizona.
A lot of animation these days are trying to be huge epics, but animation movies from other countries tend to focus on smaller moments and stories, to greater success.
Jake pitched a film version of Little Bot and Sparrow to CAA in Los Angeles. They liked it but it wasn’t a huge story, it was too small and intimate, so they didn’t accept it. Studio execs are the ones who gatekeep what is made in the industry. How do you get past that? Sidestep the gatekeepers and make it yourself if you work in an industry that could permit that. Feature animation is hard to do independently because it’s just so expensive.
Not everything needs to be a two hour feature length film, sometimes you can keep stories short and they will still have impact.
ARE ARTISTS RISK AVERSE?
Will feels that artists are the most risk averse group of creatives — writers, musicians, game devs have to take risks on new projects with the risk of not making money. Artists are very eager to make sure that they have a contract in place to ensure they get paid.
Will wants to challenge every artist to retool their thinking, and consider pursuing their dream project. Jake suggests that not everyone is Walt Disney, lots of people are really happy to be part of a team and do their part of the work. But if everyone were to try and become a Walt Disney type, would the system sustain it? Not really, perhaps commercial failures and flops would prune the people who are not ready for it. A lot of people have never been taught to dream.
Lee is turning down all commercial work this year and just trying to make his dream projects come together.
Don’t ruin a good thing by trying to make money from it. Making something and running a business are two separate things, and often you will spend way more time running the business than making the thing. Sometimes keeping it as a hobby can be really effective.
Jake’s three options for pursuing something you love as a job:
Keep it as a hobby, and just enjoy it.
Become part of a team that is building whatever it is you want to make.
Go alone and make it yourself.
It comes down to your personality, opportunities, and resources. If your personality is such that you won’t be happy if you don’t go for it, then go for it. But if your personality is such that you would enjoy hanging back and doing it as a hobby or as part of a team, do that instead.
BUILDING A PROFESSIONAL TEAM
How do you build a professional team — art directors, editors, etc?
If you have a project in your mind, and it bugs you because you want to make it and see it come to life, how do you make it come together? You can go without a team and just wear every hat yourself — some people can do this. Others tend to be more focused on a single talent. Will’s talent stack isn’t as high as others, and he likes to build teams.
First and foremost, it’s about how you treat people. Will has a friend whom he loves but who doesn’t know how to cultivate relationships. There is an unspoken accounting system with favors and withdrawals between friends. It can be hard to keep friends close if all you do is withdraw.
The first challenge is getting really good at whatever you do. If you’re amazing at your craft, getting people to want to work with you becomes a lot easier.
It’s important to learn how to reach out and ask people to be a part of your team. It has taken Lee forever to start asking for help. He hired an assistant recently to do busy work. Some of the managerial aspects of a job can be fun but they take up a lot of time. It’s better to focus on drawing than bagging packages.
Word of mouth is really effective. Jake asks his friends if they know anyone who would be good for a certain role. You want to know who you’re working with, especially if it’s something run out of your house. Test it out first, try a small project together, and then see how it goes. Don’t mention that you are testing them, just assess your working relationship.
How do you build a peer-group team? Just strike up a conversation with your peers and ask if they want to make something. Perhaps build a critique group and collaborate.
FLIGHT COMICS ANTHOLOGY by KAZU KIBUISHI
The idea was to get a bunch of like-minded artists together and all create short stories that were comics. Hundreds of artists participated, and Jake did four stories, one of which became a graphic novel series.
If you’re young and unproven, find like-minded peers and make a thing together. As you go on and your careers grow, you will have them as a network.
HOW TO BUILD A TEAM
These are Will’s steps to building a professional team.
Develop a short pitch of your project. Explain it exactly in one or two sentences without boring anyone. Don’t give them details at the start, just start with what it is and what makes it interesting.
Ask the person you want to be on your team if they know anybody who would fit for what you’re looking for. Allow them to wonder why you didn’t ask them directly. This is a psychological test that avoids a direct question and protects both of you — you aren’t demanding anything or putting them on the spot. If they recommend themselves then they are really interested.
If you decide to partner and pay people with a percentage, before you incorporate, talk to your team and discuss what you are afraid the other person might do. Discuss fears and hesitations and work them out.
Pay your people. Getting people to work for below their price will burn bridges. If you try to haggle every little thing, people will not want to work with you. If you mistreat people, you will not be successful in making teams. To know if you are that person, you need to have honest conversations and ask honest questions.
WELL FED ILLUSTRATORS/WHAT THEY DON’T TEACH IN ART SCHOOL
LINKS
Jake Parker: mrjakeparker.com. Instagram: @jakeparker, Youtube: JakeParker44
Will Terry: willterry.com. Instagram: @willterryart, Youtube: WillTerryArt
Lee White: leewhiteillustration.com. Instagram: @leewhiteillo
Daniel Tu: danieltu.co.
If you like this episode, please share it, subscribe, and let us know your thoughts or if you learned something new!
If you want to be a part of the discussion and have your voice heard, join us at forum.svslearn.com.