I want to take you through my mind palace and share the last studio crunch time experience I had. The year, 2013, the place, Myrooms Inc. in Salt Lake City. The company started out fun to work for, but, after a few months they decided to work crunch time into our schedule as a normality. We began working crazy hours. There were days that I would show up to the office at 7:30AM and would not leave the office until 1, or 2 or even 3AM. Then I was expected to return to the office less than eight hours after that leave time.
     Let me tell you a little something about this company. They paid us all salary, which in Utah meant they were not obligated to pay overtime because the jobs were desk jobs. Their version of making it up to us was buying us sandwiches and pizza for dinner.
    During this time they had us stay late for asinine reasons. One day we were told that before we left, we had to rename all assets that used the naming convention _widget had to be renamed to _icon. They told us this at 4:30PM. It took us 5 hours. We had to rename every file, every texture, every model within the files. Then, 2 days later we were told to change it back to _widget. (FYI, this word is only seen by developers. Users would never see this naming convention.)
     After nearly 3 months of treating us in this manner, they rewarded us with only 1 day off for our efforts. Here's the kicker, the week after they gave us our glorious day off, they fired half the team. 
    In conclusion, scheduled crunch times are ineffective, lower company moral, and treat people with disrespect.

Q: What are some movies that give you inspiration?

A: It is so hard to answer this question. There are just  too many! For me there three parts that complete the movie experience. Story, Character, and artistic portrayal.
Movies like  Inception, Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, Upside Down and Tron for their incredible special effects and cinematography.
Beauty and the Beast, How to Train Your Dragon, Megamind, The Incredibles, and Lilo and Stitch for brilliance in story telling and animation.
And I love inspiration films like Miss Potter, Saving Mr Banks, The Help, 100 foot journey.  
These are just to name a few.. Maybe I should have given a top five list!

Q: What are you currently working on?

A: Right now I work for a company called Glymed Plus. I work in their Media department doing graphic design, 3D modeling of their product line, and magazine advertisement design and illustration. We have campaign that is running all year long featuring illustrated character artwork. It has been an absolute joy to work on.

Q: What advice do you have fore people starting out?

A: The first lesson I had to learn is that you are going to be discouraged. I don't think there is an artist that I have spoken who who had not hit rock bottom. I think I have more times than I could count. I think I go through an artist rough patch at least... once a day? lol. But on a serious note once or twice a year I seriously lose confidence in myself, and there are many more times that I simply struggle getting through a piece.

It took me a long time to realize that that is both perfectly ok and completely normal.

An instructor I had, Sean Sullivan, taught me that any musician or performance artist is able to practice behind closed doors without anyone watching. And as soon as they are done it's gone. They can screw up over and over again and no one would ever know. And that is why their performance always seems so perfect! They screwed up enough times to get it right when people are watching! Every mistake makes them better.

An artist, however, gets to keep a copy of their practices. every sketch get's left behind. Because it exists we are forced to look at it, and we get discouraged when it's not perfect. We think every image we produce should be good enough to go to print.

That simply isn't going to happen.

And there aren't any shortcuts that will get you there faster. It is going to be a long uphill journey.

Wherever you are in your project I hope that you find solace that you aren't alone. Other people are going through the same struggle and I hope you find success. Even if all that means is that you made something, and it's yours. Best Wishes