We recently connected with Paige Annabelle Turner. and have shared our conversation below.
Paige, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start with what makes profitability in your industry a challenge – what would you say is the biggest challenge?
The Arts is something that we respect subconsciously, but only artists have a conscious appreciation of what goes into their work, how much time it takes, and the level of sacrifice it requires, even at a social level, to choose art as a career. I’m inundated by artist friends who talk about how their parents don’t respect their vocation. Mine always respected and encouraged my visions and goals but that wasn’t shared by the industry. I was in the middle of too many destination points for an animator – I didn’t want to animate children’s media, I struggled transitioning to 3D at the time, and pretty much every variety of animation other than 3D was taking a back seat in the industry. Studios were shutting down because people didn’t want to see the same thing over and over again anymore. My choices were to do corporate motion graphics or starve, so I did a bit of both.
Motion Graphics I did not fully appreciate at first, but it’s fun and challenging and helps my animation grow. It’s also really the only truly profitable form of animation, particularly for the animator. I never joined a studio, partly because by the time I was able to, it did not sound like a very attractive option. Whether you are working on The Avengers or My Little Pony, if you are bringing the characters to life, you are probably not getting paid as much as the people giving the orders. MoGraph funded my entire home studio, I am able to produce music and animated films because of the skills I learned in one class at university and Video CoPilot. If you can keep up, there’s money in it, but it sucks when your passion in life is considered an unprofitable option by others. Maybe do it for fun, or for yourself, but the industry has made it so that you should feel lucky just to be let through the door. That’s not to say that this is true, just that this is how they tend to make you feel. You have to rise above it. If you are consistent, people will hire you and your rate per hour will gradually increase.
I once went to Burbank to pitch a couple of adult shows I had come up with, I tried to follow the proper channels to get a hold of Adult Swim but it was impossible. You needed an agent to talk to them, and agents wouldn’t even look at my pitch bible. It was kind of insane. To their credit, Frederator had briefly floated the idea of doing their own Adult Swim and even though that had fallen through, the guy there asked to look at my stuff anyway and he gave me tons of valuable advice. But I believe that in this day and age, if you want to get your show made, and if you want animation to be a profitable career, you should probably do it yourself. That’s why I prefer to run my own studio.
Paige, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Ever since I was a little larva, I knew that all I wanted to do was something creative. I didn’t know I would be queer or trans or have such a weird sense of humor, but I knew I was going to be an animator, make my own music and voice act my own characters, stitch puppets, paint, or put together a comic. It’s not just a hobby or a project, it’s pretty much my whole life. So far I’ve been most well-known as an animator, and it is my favorite because it combines so many disciplines. Creating an animation by yourself is a large number of skill checks, but I rose to every test, and tried again when I failed, because it’s worth it to see your ideas come to life. Ditto with painting, music, and everything else I struggled with until things finally started to ‘click’. Drawing always came easily as I am a visual person and a dreamer, but over the years I ate my humble pie and amassed the technical foundations that allowed me to breathe easier with more difficult commissions, and express my more ambitious ideas freely.
Every now and then, I like to switch tracks. My current project is ‘Softcore Dolls’, my creepycute bespoke artisan dolls. I love my little pattern people and aliens; I’m usually at a sewing lab slicing up patterns for them. I am newer to sewing than my other disciplines, but I have been at it for enough years now that my creatures are really starting to come to life and people are already lining up for custom commissions. I have been making myself known in the doll making community with my complex patterns and very lively, cartoony characters who are based on my drawings. I plan on streaming a sewing show on Twitch showing my process for creating them, and the marketing is being driven by video and animation content so I get to finally experiment with film and stop motion again while I’m at it. I’m even picking up 3D. My enemy has never been fear!
I’m an obsessive gamer and pop culture junkie and I don’t often feel like the communities I’m in are well-represented in mass media, so my answer is usually to do it myself. These days, on the internet, you can do that. I grew up watching the big studios kind of go to sleep and give way to a generation of animators wrangling Macromedia Flash to make things move around on the screen. The second I got my hands on it, I saw the potential, and now I feel that way about any piece of software or hardware that brings me closer to my creative goals. It’s hard to explain what it’s like to have hundreds of characters running through whole worlds and all their stories in your head every day, and feel like you’re carrying around a secret world until you reveal it to someone in a sensory and provocative way. Their eyes may bulge and they might say “whoah”, and that’s when you remember, not everyone sees stuff like this in their heads 24/7. They might only see it when you put it in front of them. I don’t take it for granted anymore.
Since moving to Phoenix, Arizona, I’ve been really involved with the local community, and visiting maker spaces and going to things like open sewing clubs has advanced my knowledge enough that I can make it work as pretty much anything I want. As a ‘business’, all I want is for people in Phoenix and the world to know that I’m willing to make your vision become a reality, too. It might not be a doll, but Paige’s magic can take many forms!
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
I had to unlearn a lot of self-taught lessons, particularly as a designer. I have a feedback-based approach that means every mistake is documented and studied and applied to the next attempt which makes me an excellent independent learner. In real-time activities, this simply means adjusting your behavior until the thing is doing what you want. If you keep throwing the ball to the left, throw to the right.
Design, however, is more of a formal language. It requires some knowledge-work, but there are fundamental principles and rules that taught me that the chaos of untarnished subconscious has its place – but when you’re putting together a box for a product on a shelf, it has to be crystal clear and direct. It can’t just be a pile of ideas spread over a dieline. In this hypothetical case it has to be a discrete, cubic customer experience. That’s why it’s called a design!
The way our very rigid, jobs-focused education system is set up, there’s a certain attitude that there is only one correct way of doing things, and if you don’t do it right, you’re an idiot, and you need to try harder, and we’re on a time limit here, goddamnit. What’s really sunk in over the years is that as long as you’re patient and mindful, you’ll figure it out in good time. Eventually it will just catch up with you and you’ll never forget it. Bad habits, on the other hand, could take an entire career to unlearn. I would strongly recommend that if you feel like you’ve invested tons of time into your art and you are still struggling, go back to the basics, the fundamentals, and really test yourself. The advanced and experimental are all built on top of these foundations.
We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.
I was once told of my art, “that is so on-brand for you”. I’d never thought of myself as a brand before, but I knew exactly what they meant. I have a certain style, specific tastes, that brand me as me. When you are your own brand, it means you put your money where your mouth is and you do a good job. I’ve found that all of my best business comes from repeat customers. It’s great to be talented and everything, but when you’re reliable, people will keep coming back to you again and again. I’ve seen hubris burn some bridges because people didn’t act professionally. They turned out really great work, but it was always a risk to deal with them. Some disappeared, others turned in mistakes at the last second. You can’t be that person if you want to keep in touch with people, you have to be the lifeline.
If you feel like you should be charging more on the next job, do so, because your customers will be aware that it is the cost of doing business with an artist they can count on. Take a job now and then even if it’s more enriching and well-suited to you than strictly profitable. If you do a good job filling in for some album art, you might get to do the whole album next time, and the next three albums after that. If you have a brand, then earn that brand loyalty!
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Paige Annabelle Turner