“Our time at Art Center is all about pushing limits and taking chances, but a lot of us lose that creative fire when our personal visions butt up against professional realities. In many ways our book RE:INVENT was a reclamation of the risk-taking spirit we had when we were back in school. Art Center alum,” says Derick Tsai (Transportation and Entertainment Design, ’05), who found his own unique creative voice (and heaps of critical and professional success) by thrusting himself out of the security of his thriving design studio and into the wilds of his own imagination. Here he tells the story of how he forged his path to personal and professional fulfillment.
Between the time demands of paying the bills and spending time with our friends and family, it seems like our passion projects never get off the ground. And this is a shame because it’s those passion projects that are often the truest expression of our personal vision and have the potential to elevate us to the next level. It’s pretty easy to get started but at a certain point, questions and doubts inevitably creep into our minds.
”What’s going to become of this?”
“Will anyone care?”
“Will this be worth anything?”
That last one’s the killer.
That thought has stopped me in my tracks more times than I’d like to admit. And I’m guessing it has stopped many of you as well. So I want to share with you how a personal project of mine eventually developed into a critically and financially successful book, lucrative client work and a TEDx Talk for Livestream audience of over 30,000 people.
I want to share with you what a personal project can be worth.
In early 2010, I was at my wit’s end. I was living in Minneapolis and two years into a failed sabbatical. I had moved out there from LA to do the work I hoped would reinvent my career, and all I had to show for it was a pile of half-finished projects. I had been a design generalist, able to adopt different looks and styles, but never truly having an artistic territory of my own. I was looking to create a project that could be a calling card, something that could be the seed for the next phase of my career. But I was failing.
“Will this be worth anything?”
That thought crept into my head over and over again and kept me from finishing my projects. At the time, I was reading Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, the best book I’ve ever read on identifying the forces that hold us back creatively as well as offering solutions on how to combat them. Pressfield talks about this concept called Resistance, which is basically the negative force inside all of us keeping us from doing our work. Well, Resistance was kicking my ass up and down the block on a daily basis. I spent 10-12 hours a day hammering away at my studio with my cat Lando next to me and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy playing in the background, but I just couldn’t get over the hump. I couldn’t get out of my own way.
I was frustrated beyond belief and near my breaking point when my good pal Francis Tsai told me he had ALS. His fight against his disease shook my world up like a snow globe and my definition of worth changed in an instant. See, what usually stopped me was I wasn’t sure what my project would be worth to an audience.
“What if they didn’t like it?”
I had let the prospective opinions of others stop me from finishing my work, but this time it wasn’t about external approval anymore. The act of finishing something I set out to do was reward enough. Even the opportunity to fail was a blessing. The project I was working on at the time was Mythika, an epic fantasy inspired by my love of world mythology. I was trying to create something that had the strong graphic look of modern animation but had the hand crafted feel of Javanese shadow puppets.
I didn’t have a set story in mind yet, but I did have a feeling I was trying to capture.
Something epic.
Something emotional.
Something…ICONIC.
I know these are really vague terms, which made the project extremely difficult to crack. Over the course of a year I did iteration after iteration until I finally found the balance of elements I was looking for. This is what I eventually came up with. It was the truest expression of what I saw in my mind’s eye that I’d ever created. I was happy I had finished something for myself, but my mind eventually drifted towards practical application: “Were these puppets worth anything in the real world?”
It turned out they were!
The response was immediate and unanimously positive. Imagine FX asked me to do a workshop on one of the pieces. And Mythika eventually caught the eye of The History Channel which led to a large-scale job designing animated content for their hit show, Vikings. Mythika also led to opening title development work for the action fantasy epic 47 Ronin.But the most exciting project Mythika led to wasn’t from a client. See, when I was showing Mythika to various colleagues I found they all had a personal project they were all dying to do, so I made them all a deal. If they would create their dream projects, I would collect everything into a book and we’d debut it at San Diego Comic Con this year. The end result was our book RE:INVENT, which we did debut this year at Comic Con to both financial and critical success.
Francis was a huge inspiration in the way he reinvented the way he did art. But every artist involved wanted to do the project that would propel them into the next phase of their careers. This message of personal and career reinvention seemed to resonate with the media; and we were featured and reviewed glowingly on CNN, Good, Kotaku and Imagine FX.
We ran a Kickstarter to pay for the production cost of the book and got twice the amount we asked for. But the best part of the experience was Steven Pressfield wrote me a letter. A physical letter! He told me he liked what we were doing and saluted the participants in the book for our efforts. I was floored. It turned out his publicist had found our Kickstarter campaign because I posted The War of Art as a must-read for anyone looking to create something for themselves. Magnus Rex is now working with his company, Black Irish Books, on some very cool upcoming projects. It just goes to show you never know what can happen until you get started!
But the most unexpected part of the journey (so far) happened when we were packing up on the last day of Comic Con. Jenny Stiven, who works for 20th Century Fox Home Video, saw me showing someone the work we did for Vikings on an iPad and asked if we worked on the project. (Apparently, Fox and The History Channel are joined at the hip.) I told her we did work on Vikings and that Mythika was the project that originally caught the eye of The History Channel. I then told her about RE:INVENT and how it was about personal and career reinvention. She listened intently and then called her husband Tim over. Tim turned out to be the history teacher at Canyon Crest Academy, the host school for TEDxYouth@SanDiego. After talking for a bit he asked me the big question.
“Have you ever thought about giving a TED talk?”
My head exploded.
Four months later I took the stage at TEDxYouth@SanDiego with an incredible slate of speakers and gave my talk, “The Fruits of Adversity” to 400 high school students and another 30,000 people on Livestream. It was one of the best days of my life and one of the many highlights was meeting the other speakers. These were all people who pushed past their own doubts, took risks and did something they knew in their gut they had to do. I felt like I had found my tribe.
I looked back on the experience of the last three years and realized Mythika was the seed for everything. What’s funny is that it started out as just a loose series of illustrations, but from those images a story started to emerge and things in my life started to happen. What mattered most was that they existed. I had materialized a piece of whatever was swirling around in my head into something real.
It was in the world.
And as a result a dialogue began to develop with others. So many people, many of them strangers, have been helping me shape and define it into something special. Ever since Comic Con I’ve been working with my team to take the project from just a series of images into something more. I can’t wait to share what we have been cooking up with you in the coming months. Sometimes I think about what a shame it would have been if I never finished Mythika and all the incredible experiences I would have denied myself.
What experiences are you denying yourself by not exploring and completing that personal project of yours?It’s easy to do work for an employer or clients because the compensation is tangible and immediate. You get paid for the hours you put in. Doing work for yourself is a lot harder because we’re not really sure how or if we’ll ever get rewarded. The compensation is much harder to gauge. I know we need to do the work that pay the bills, but I believe the work we do for ourselves is critical because it nourishes our souls and develops our personal voice. And I’ve found that if you’re willing to go out on a limb, people will often meet you out there with help when you least expect it.
Personal projects have the potential to shatter our normal ways of doing things and break up the rhythms of our daily lives, allowing for new and interesting things to happen. We don’t know what amazing creative and professional rewards await us until we get started and more importantly, finish something. Millions could be starving for that crazy idea you have gathering dust in the back of your mind! In the end, passion projects are worth as much as we put into them and can go as far as we’re willing to push.Do you have a dream project you’re just dying to do?
What’s stopping you?I implore you to do it, because it just might turn out to be a game changer for you. Mythika has become a calling card for both myself and Magnus Rex and has redefined my career over the last three years. It has indeed become the seed for the next phase of my career. I started out as an illustrator, but in creating Mythika and experiencing everything that has grown from it, I have learned how to write, produce, market, publish and distribute my own content.
It turned out those puppets were worth something after all.
And we’re just getting started.
You can find Derick at Magnus Rex
