Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Anna Latzer Latzer. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Anna Latzer, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. The first dollar you earn is always exciting – it’s like the start of a new chapter and so we’d love to hear about the first time you sold or generated revenue from your creative work?

So, I work in animation. And the first real job I ever got in the field was a remote job for this little boutique studio called ARG! Cartoon Animation, based in Bolder, Colorado. I was living at my parents’ house in Erie, PA. I had just graduated with my BFA in animation from Rochester Institute of Technology, and my advisor set me up with this job to get experience. The job paid peanuts–the guy who owned the studio was actually losing money on the project, but he wanted to get the studio’s name out there. It was a Nigerian kids’ cartoon called Turtle Taido. You can watch some of it on Youtube. It’s very cute and very obviously low budget. It was all done in Adobe Flash with mostly puppet style animation and occasionally some very rough traditional animation as well. It was my job to animate scenes of this show from scratch.

In order to get this job, I said I was very familiar with Adobe Flash. I actually was not. None of my classes in school had covered Flash. But after I got the job, I had a day or two to quickly cram and learn as much as I could about the program. Then I just continued to learn as I went. I enjoyed animating, and I felt so freaking cool, getting paid anything at all to do it.

It was this job that gave me the start of a real resume, and I think it was this experience that got me hired at my next job–a real paying job, with a salary I could live on!–all the way in Vancouver, BC, Canada. This was a layout artist job that also required me to know Flash. I eventually moved into doing storyboards revisions and storyboards. I worked in animation in Canada for 9 years. Then just last September I got a U.S. job based out of Los Angeles, so I moved back to my hometown of Erie and am working remotely on that. I am having a blast.

Anna Latzer, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

In my free time, and more than anything, I love making comics. To me, comics are precious relics that preserve the soul. When I make a comic I am crystalizing a little slice of my mind, one tiny thought that is as inconsequential as any other, and giving it weight and lasting power. In your own comics, the world you make operates by your rules. You can give attention to whatever you deem worthy, and only you have to deem it worthy, no one else can stop you. You get to reject the world’s values, what they think is worth someone’s time–and you can shine a light on things YOU want to think about. And then, when you put those things on paper, they change, they become something more than what you thought they were. They outgrow you. The whole comic becomes so much more than the sum of its parts.

I have never made money doing comics, but I was a storyboard artist for many years, and that is definitely a related art form. Although, with storyboards, you don’t get to disregard time and space in the same way as you do in comics.

What has allowed me to be successful? Luck, passion and a lot a lot of hard work. And taking rejection well. One time, I did a whole storyboard, worked over the weekend on it, and my directors said it was unusable and threw it in the trash. And I cried. But then I trained with someone more experienced and gave it another try. And I learned a lot. And by the end of that job, my storyboards were a hit!

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

I despise thinking about finance and I have no mind for business. But of course I have to survive. I would say Miyazaki’s book “Starting Point” is really great for young career animators, but I fear even his advice cannot help someone in the face of our industry’s current state of collapse. My biggest media recommendation for a young artist trying to make a life with art is “David Lynch: The Art Life.” There you will see the life of someone who submerged themselves in art without being constrained by medium, or genre, or any traditional idea of a “career path.” That documentary made me feel that however I end up, so long as I am creating, I will be ok. Even if I have to work a crappy job at Swiss Chalet, which I did two years ago, when I was unemployed for six months during the writers’ strike.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

It’s like that story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” It’s not a real product. It’s a scam!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.annalobster.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/annalobsterland/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-latzer-93259692/