We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Valerie Gill. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Valerie below.
Valerie, appreciate you joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?
Starting a project is always easy; we set our hopes high and always hope for the best as we allow ourselves to get wrapped up in our visions of grandeur. At least that’s how I went into college with all the hopes and dreams of graduating with my thesis film fully animated and scored by the one and only, me. However, life does find a way of steering us off course. I knew going into college I wanted to make an original film, I actually had plans to make a lot of original animations, and I did thankfully through a lot of well documented learning processes. I was able to record the evolution of so many of my projects and started practicing creating content for social media. Through my many experimentations I became my biggest motivator to face my greatest challenge, staying on task.
About a year before graduation I was set to finish making my own original animated short film for a show concept I had been envisioning. I’d been letting the thoughts of what my show could become ferment in the back of my mind until it could be put on my actual academic schedule. That’s honestly how I work best. If I don’t have a list and a schedule the honest truth is I won’t be the person getting the job done. I often feel like I have a goldfish brain when it comes to everything I’d like to accomplish. And because they’re my accomplishments, I often find myself trying to not be “selfish” which has allowed what I can do for others to get in the way of my own growth. Learning to make time for yourself is a lesson that no one else can really teach you because only you know how much time you need to do what you feel you need to do. And the idea that I had been moving my projects forward on stolen time didn’t really hit me until the first COVID lockdown.
I was in my senior year of college, on my last semester before graduating which at this point is the sad start of a sentence that I think we’ve read so many times in the last three years. Like many students across the world that March 2020, I felt like the rest of my school year had basically finished up with one little announcement to go home and not come to school for a few weeks. Only my class didn’t just lose-out on walking together that spring on our campus, there would be no senior gallery art shows, no senior film premieres and showings, no gallery opening specific for those with animation practices. It felt like three celebrations that were meant to happen for all of the art and work we had been putting together had really been taken out in one simple moment. And with that the proof of all of the hard work we’d been investing that we could finally show and celebrate with others. Normally with art there is a trade for the pain we pour into our work and we feel seen and validated for our sacrifices and efforts; and to see it stripped away not only first hand but amongst my peers as well it was devastating. And then we where still expected to push through the vulnerability and disappointment and surround ourselves in the very environments that we know are not designed for our work. While fighting the feeling that we simply aren’t doing enough, despite how many lists we’ve burned through or sleep we’ve lost. It doesn’t matter to those in your immediate vicinity when you constantly have to explain why you’re too busy to help them, they just see an obstacle getting in the way of what they might need done.
Needless to say my film didn’t get done that year, I could barely keep up with the regular distractions of constantly being at home and “appearing available”. It’s tough being an artist and carving time for your art when you’re the only person who sees the amount of work it actually takes. Cause to an outsider, well you’re drawing, you’re doing the “thing you love” but in all respect, there are still parts of it that do take work otherwise we would all be artist. No one is going to take the time to promote you, no one will record your process, and unless there’s some money to be made very rarely will people help out with your projects, there is always some give and take. Now thankfully I had given a lot to some people in the past and honestly to a lot of my on surprise a lot of my friends really liked the project I was pitching. And despite not being able to pay them with money I was able to have two of my favorite people I met in college, Mel and Aubrey, help me with some of the coloring here and there. And the beauftiul thing about art is exposure can go a long way. I had reached out to two of my friends, Frank and Andrew, because they really do have distinct and calming vocals and to not have them being heard is really a disservice. They thankfully agreed and worked with me patiently, as I had no experience directing or recording others before.
When I say I learned a lot from making Marbles, this is what I mean. I had been recording, editing, and drawing for myself since entering college with one goal in mind, make something that looks professional. I learned that I could rely on myself to pick up a new skill and trouble shoot my way to an end result. I also learned that I actually have more ideas than I give myself credit for, and planning is the only way to stop making them ideas and to start making them realities. Because I’m a visual person if I can’t see what I need to get done, then I’m probably not going to get it done, mainly cause I’ll be too busy being distracted by something I could visually see wasn’t finished. And lastly, that as great of a production person I might be, a production team will always finish what I can do on my own but a much faster rate. I had to learn what I didn’t know so I could become a better director and talk with my actors so that in the future they’ll know how to work for me and I’ll know how to take back their feedback to make them deliver the results we all want from one another.
I learned so many other things while making this short but my biggest takeaway, is life will never stop throwing curveballs. It took me until January 2023 to learn how to handle my distractions. But most importantly to not let the emotional distractions take me out and to always use them as fuel to keep pushing me forward. Because after the COVID announcements the updates my life would get for a while really just started to take me out. It really took losing my dog, Tissa, and feeling the existentialism of so many different passings these past few years that showed me how short life is. Art is a literal part of my brain structure it’s how I process and teach others; it’s been engrained in me from the day I used it as an escapism and it will remain in me as the way I manifest my future. Everyday I draw is a day I get closer to living a life that makes me simply and blissfully happy.
Valerie, 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?
Most people consider me an artist, that I find to be a very broad term, but then again I do have a pretty broad portfolio. I like to consider myself a Jack of Trades and yes I have actually mastered some, but only time will tell if I can master them all. I run a production studio called Curly Sauce and through it I’ve produced an array of content that ranges from music production to animated videos, to live action skits and ukulele covers. My end goal is to have a couple different animated shows and movies being produced from my own studio. In the meantime I’ve worked on marketing myself on instagram, youtube, and tik tok with specified content for each platform to help spread the word and promote my work.
I feel a lot of my work has a whimsical yet spooky vibe, my most recent production ‘Marbles’ is one that I would consider to be like a sci-fi thriller but it will have some magical elements from time to time. I like to focus my work on real problems that people, mainly children and young adults , go through from time time. For example dealing with death, different family situations, friend drama, relationship problems. And then I like to take the situations and throw them into fantastical settings, but still try to make their worlds have logic. Like even if theres magic, the magic has to make sense and often it leads to me avoiding plot holes I’ve found. But more importantly I think it helps deliver the message that anyone can be great but you’re still going to have to learn to communicate with those around you for life to go smoothly, any life.
At the moment I have actually been migrating to working on some of my other animated projects but through comics, to help get them promoted while simultaneously working on visual development. The current comic project pairs with an album project my band, The Curly Collective, have been working on. Not all songs on the album are for the comic, however there are music videos with two of the songs that will take visuals and storyline from the comic. The Comic is called ‘It’s a Slice” and is meant. to focus around three young musicians, hence the music, hence the animation. I won’t spoil too much here as both works are still in production, but development for both these projects can be seen on my instagram and tik tok for now. Production on the first season of ‘Marbles’ is currently in a work in progress stage as I work on putting together fundraisers to help get my team paid out this time and hopefully produce ‘Marbles’ full time.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
To feel something, is the greatest answer ever given as to why humans make art, I however feel a lot. “I actually feel all the time, and I don’t often feel like I feel things on the same level as others”, said the artist. The artist being me. But in all seriousness, I know everyone feels emotions, I just feel like my emotions are always set to extremes and I’m just doing my best to act like I feel things normally. But I know I don’t because while everyone else is crying at the sad part of the movie, which yes you will find my sobbing to as well, I will also be found possibly teary eyed if not balling for sad commercials, stories, music, and it doesn’t always have to be sad. If a film trailer has all the right components; beautiful visuals, amazing music, and its all just capturing one emotion successfully ill probably be crying, I don’t know if it’s from the intensity of the theaters or the fact that I want to be one of those trailers so bad. I think thats what I want from my creative journey not just to be a trailer in a theater, but to capture all the emotion I can from my characters and make the audience feel it. I think thats maybe cause to some degree m characters are an extension of myself and their stories an extension of something I or someone I have loved has gone through. And if I cant explain that feeling to someone else how can I ever really process it, I want to heal my trauma, thats why I draw, and if someone else can help be moved through theirs then so be it. Let me move you.
Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?
I don’t think there’s any one tool that has made me a great creative, I think what has made me a great creative is the fact that I can use so many tools. I think the greatest resource if anything other than myself, is that of the internet and social media. Learn everything you can about social media and see what people are learning from it. We live in a strange age where you have access to schooling if you want it but that you don’t need it to prove that you have that skill. We live in a world where a paper that says I know everything about my required field is more important than my ability to show my skill to someone else and explain my capabilities. That’s not a world I want to live in, I just happen to, so I did go to school to learn how to animate. Only I got there too early so I gradated with Illustration on my degree instead and the rest is history.
The only thing it gives to an artist is a community, but it is temporary, in order to be successful you have to find your communities in the real world reach out to them. School taught me what I should be doing as an artist to promote myself and be better; drawing standing up, drawing people live, different softwares, hosting gallery shows. But all of those are things you can do outside of school and the truth is the faster you learn how to do them outside of a school setting the faster you’re in in the making it part of “fake it till you make it”. School was able to help someone like me who needed the right environment and prompts cause I had never found a way to access those things outside of school. But school gave me the confidence I needed to be able to find out how to do those things outside of a school setting even when I was there. I think the faster you learn to rely on yourself, to find a goal and figure out a way to get it accomplished by your own doing is the best thing you can do for your craft. Because obviously you can’t get everything done by yourself, but if you don’t know how to do it how are you going to explain to anyone else how to get it done. Thats an important rule for running any business and as an artist you’re basically an entrepreneur.
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