WIP Wednesday #4 - Hope labor

It's not Wednesday, that much is clear! But, I want to keep this up and let you in on what goes on in the background here that contributes to why I do or don't share what I'm working on.

Mostly, the projects I've been working on most in January are pretty secret! That is, I only share the barest of details in a public forum for both creative and business reasons.

The business reasons are pretty clear – I'm working on pitches for series and feature films, and people like to control how information about those gets out. Sometimes there's actually rules about how much you can talk about something before submitting it to a competitive pitching event.

Creatively, I think there's some kind of hesitance to talk about the projects that aren't sure to succeed as a way to manage expectations, to not claim that I can do something I can't. A superstition that if I talk about it I won't be able to finish it. But this blog post series is supposed to dispel that a little. It's nice to share my creative process, and it helps me be accountable to you!

Here's what I will say about the pitches:

I submitted projects to two different competitive pitching forums. One is a sci-fi series based on a short film I wrote 8 years ago to give you an idea of how long it can take these ideas to mature. I've sent it into the early development Writers Vision pitch at Seriencamp, a big series conference in Germany. I've got no idea if my 12 pages hold up to the standards that they're looking for, or if the material is interesting to them. But for me to apply seriously to these kinds of events, it's a statement to myself – this project is ready to shop around and figure out how to get it made. I've got the pitch document and now I can bring it to the Berlinale film festival and meet producers and directors and find out if it hooks someone else.

The other is a pitch for a feature animation. I applied to a pitching session at the Annecy Festival MIFA event, which is the biggest animation market in Europe. It would be a big deal to get into this thing! It would also be a bit of a surprise and somewhat of a long-shot because of the level of work required to even get a foot in the door. Most animation that pitches already has a fair amount of money in concepts. I have those, just audio not visual. I can't tell you about the project in detail though, because Annecy retains rights to the first public presentation of the project in Europe.

To be clear, I think festival premiere status is a weird power trip based on scarcity and exclusivity generating value, which is funny for something that is ultimately a mass media and meant to be simultaneously distributed to many people. I think it's about power and elitism, but I'm willing to listen to a counterargument.

But – if you know any producers in series or animation that would be interested in talking, please introduce me to them! This is a direct ask :)

Hope labor

Anyway, all this stuff is something my partner calls hope labor, which is actually a real studied phenomenon around cultural work, i.e. artmaking.

Hope labour is unpaid or under-compensated labour undertaken in the present, usually for exposure or experience, with the hope that future work may follow.

Basically, I'm creating all this stuff without any resources coming back to me that facilitate my life, with the hope that one of these things will catch someone who does have access to money and they'll give me some. My goal isn't to get rich, but to make things and be able to live comfortably while doing so. (I've got a secondary goal to make enough that I can feed it back to other fantastic artists in collaboration or just support and appreciation.)

The article I link is a deeper philosophical article, I haven't read all of it because it takes me some time to parse, but it is about the creative worker in the neoliberal world and how they survive and strive. But for me, there's a deep well of this energy to make. I don't know what I would do otherwise and I don't know what happens if this well runs dry or I cover it because I'm tired of hauling this precious feeling out of the depths.

I think my problem is that I don't yet know how to take my dreams and make them sustain me. I just don't know how to promote my weird skillset to people who might want to hire me, or get people to buy onto my own ideas. I'm resistant to 'getting a job,' because I have a funny relationship to authority, obligation and focus. It's been this way for my whole life and it's a work in progress to know myself and make it work.

In conclusion, despite producing a small mountain of interesting creative work, I don't have much to share this month because I've mostly spent my time capturing some dreams and wrangling them into a form I can communicate with others to try to convince them to help me make these beautiful ideas. Wish me luck, send me help if you've got it!

I have other small things to share - I did write up a second work in progress, but I thought it lands better on its own, so now you'll get it next week. You'll have to come back :)