We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Elaina Scott a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Elaina thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

I think I knew I wanted to be in the creative arts from the age of 6 or 7. I started drawing when I was about 3 and I always disappeared into my art, even from a young age. I was an awkward child, shy and inquisitive. My parents divorced when I was 8 and I had a hard time handling my emotions. I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was 14 and Tourettes’ Syndrome and that made making friends and having confidence even harder. Drawing and writing gave me an escape and an outlet so when I was growing up I always hoped I would be able to have a career in the arts but It wasn’t a certainty. I was lucky enough to be accepted into Otis College of Art and Design out of high school and I studied there for a year but realized they didn’t provide any career paths that interested me. One of my Life Drawing teachers also taught at California Institute of the Arts or more informally known as Cal Arts and he told me that the students there made their own animated short films, and that was when the light went on for my passion and so I quit Otis and took a year off to build a portfolio to be accepted into Cal Arts. That is where I learned animation and I’ve been an Animator now for over 25 years. Best decision I ever made!

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I started in the Animation Industry while I was still a student at Cal Arts. I was always on the lookout for ways to build experience and a resume while I was in school so at the beginning of the second semester of my freshman year I answered an ad for a Story Board Artist for the South Park Movie: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut. I got the job along with an upper -classman at Cal Arts and we worked on the movie for the last couple months of production. The following year I got an internship at Sony Online Games studios in the summer after my sophomore year, That was my first Games Industry job. Then in the summer after my Junior year I secured a summer internship working as a Character Layout Artist on “The Simpsons” and got to work on 3 episodes and got 3 onscreen credits which was amazing because I had been a fan of the show since they were shorts on the Tracy Ulman show in the 80’s. Then in 2002 when I graduated I started working at a small independent games studio and worked on some PS2 and Game Cube games. I went on to work on several games between 2002-2010, the most successful being the PS2 and XBOX version of “Starwars Battlefront 2”. In 201o I started working in VFX and worked in film and television both as a final’s animator and a Previs and Post vis animator. The type of work I did in VFX varied from creature and character animation being added to live-action footage, to helping clients visualize their ideas quickly before they shot the film and television show as well as adding rough visual effects to the plates after they shot the film or television show to help editorial tighten up their edit before sending the final edit to the final VFX vendors. It was really challenging and rewarding work and I really got to stretch my capabilities by learning how to apply my animation knowledge to as many purposes as possible and learn as many tools and software as possible. I was able to work directly with big directors and work on properties that I had been a big fan of and I also got to work as a lead and a supervisor and stretch my interpersonal and leadership skills.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Working in the entertainment arts means constantly testing your resilience. You will constantly be asked to solve complex creative problems for a client, and you will often be met with resistance to the answers you provide and you will question yourself and your abilities constantly as well. But the key to surviving this cycle of notes and re-doing work is to remind your self that that this is a natural part of the job and that most of the time, the person who hired you knows you can answer their needs but that it may take a few tries and they may change their minds and that is no fault of your own, it’s just the nature of the business. And you are going to work with impossible clients sometimes, that’s also part of it and you have to remind yourself that difficult clients are difficulty because they don’t know what they want and they are often treading water in their own right and they are just passing that stress on to you. It’s best to learn how to be a bit Zen about the whole process. Put your passion into every pass but when you hand it off you have to release it, it;’s no longer your baby, and you have to detach yourself from it. Become enamoured with the process of creating the work and not the work itself and you will have a healthier relationship with your work. I had to learn that the hard way. I attached too much of my self-esteem and self-worth to how my work was going or how it was received and it just drove me crazy and made me depressed. Sometime you have to realize that the people judging your work don’t actually know it as well as you do and you have to thicken your skin and just keep believing in yourself. Resilience is KEY to surviving in this industry.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I was working on my first Creature VFX series and this was after transitioning from the Games Industry and I was still very insecure about my abilities and every time I got notes on my shots I would go home feeling like a failure and crying myself to sleep because I was new to this industry and I felt like every day was an audition. But it came to the point where my boss realized that something was wrong with me and he pulled me aside and told me that he absolutely believed in my skills. He said he appreciated the speed with which I turned notes around and my (at least outwardly) positive attitude toward the notes. After that I was able to re-do really complex shots that were asked to be re done not because the client didn’t like my work but because the concept had changed. Working in VFX and Animation means having your work projected on a huge screen and picked apart and it can be really scary and uncomfortable but I credit that job with giving me the grit to go through that on even bigger projects that came in my career. It was important for me to learn that notes are a positive thing because they help you grow and learn to spot those things in the future before they go to a review.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.anim8rgirl.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elaina-scott-175970/
• Twitter: https://x.com/Anim8rgirl

Image Credits

The image credit is from my workspace at home