At one point I considered training for a job in the animation industry. I asked D.P., an acquaintance who was a successful storyboard artist and had worked on many animation projects for some of the big studios around L.A., for advice on how to prepare a sample portfolio.
She told me -- seemingly in all seriousness -- that the animation artists she'd known were mostly geeks who carried huge baggages of unfulfilled adolescent fantasies and liked nothing better than to scribble girlie pictures on their breaks; that they would surely consider me a promising candidate if I included a lot of cute female figures, especially nude studies, among my samples. I thought that made perfect sense (stack the deck with subliminal signals? Oh yeah!) and made sure there was a bunch of female figure studies in my portfolio.
As it turned out, I did not make the cut and never did become an animation artist (for which I'm actually grateful, considering the big changes that upset the balance in the industry soon after), but a couple of years later I was talking to D.P. again, and I took out the portfolio I had prepared in accordance with her advice, to show her. Her opinion? It didn't look right -- for someone who was hoping to get a job working for Disney and Hannah-Barbera, I sure had an awful lot of images of naked girls... Evidently D.P. had forgotten all about the advice she had given me.
(Don't bother looking for the nudie-cutie pix here, though^)
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