So the main reason for our slow outputs on our personal work over the last year and still ongoing is simply due to money. Both having too much thrown at us and also a lack thereof. A lack in the since that if we were independently wealthy, we could just work on our feature documentary films, photojournalistic outputs, and essays - which we would love nothing more than to make our full time employment.
In terms of having too much thrown at us, that means doing freelance jobs which we work crazy busy overtime at that pays well but sucks us away from our own personal outputs - thus we don’t particularly want to be doing. So basically we’re always in the push / pull where our personal outputs which use a good chunk of our full creative skillset being a documentary filmmaker make us little money, while our freelance jobs primarily as a digital artist use only 1/10th max of our skillset, yet make us good money.
Much of our background professionally over the last 20 years has been as a digital artist in post production capacities and some on set capacities as well. This is what we got our first job doing once graduating from university because of the plethora of work available at the time over just doing live-action work. The industry has seen a great deal of change with numerous ups and downs and we have spoken of this in various places in regards to our background. However, to this day, and almost especially due to Covid, the industry has moved very much to remote work when it comes to artistry, because it’s mostly all done in software on computers.
In our younger years we lived in Toronto for about six months as a low level Visual Effects Supervisor for the film “The Incredible Hulk” when Marvel was just getting going as a movie studio. But we stepped away from that career a bit to work on our own documentary projects including our first feature Transmutation. Very bad decision financial career wise with what Marvel has now become as a powerhouse studio but an extremely rewarding one for our personal artistry and life path. Yet because of the ease of now doing various post production roles from home combined with the advent of the streaming platforms rising to the forefront over the movie studios, there is just a constant amount of work out there for talented artists as they always just desperately need employees. Especially for these superhero movies which take hundreds if not thousands of people to make. So this is us admitting that we’ve gotten sucked back into our old industry over this last year, spending most of our time working on other people's projects, which are not always but often superhero ones, just like we use to do before we made Transmutation.
So our endless struggle these days, which isn’t really that much of a struggle and to be honest, a good problem to have in life, as there are gazillions of people who would love to be working on Marvel movies, is constantly getting sucked into working on these projects and trying to find time to get to our own stuff. Yet, one could call these problems first world problems.
Here are trailers for the current two projects we’re trapped inside: