100: Legacy

The motivation behind taking 100 steps to improve our VFX community… 

leg·​a·​cy

: the long-lasting impact of particular events, actions, etc. that took place in the past, or of a person’s life. 

: something transmitted by or received from an ancestor or predecessor or from the past.

Core Motivation

This is my 100th article on www.keheka.com 🥳🎉! 

One hundred compositing tutorials, tools, tips, advice, and productivity guides. (Most of which are completely free for anyone to read and benefit from).

– Or, in other words, 100 steps taken (so far!) to improve our VFX community.

And so I thought it would be fitting to talk about the driving force behind this now quite considerable body of work. 

I want to talk about motivation. 

Not about the surface-level, fleeting, spur-of-the-moment type of motivation, but the core motivation behind – that drives you to do something more substantial. 

For many of us, perhaps whether we really have thought about it or not, one core motivation is legacy. 

To make something of yourself – to exceed your own limitations and build something that you’re really proud of, and that you’re grateful to yourself for having made. Something which you can share, that will help your fellow crew members long term. 

It’s about making a positive impact on your own part of the world – contributing to your community – for example by sharing your knowledge and helping others. 

It’s equally about acting in a way that takes other people’s wellbeing into account. And trying to be a good example through your actions – actions which others may think are worthy of practicing themselves. 

I’m a firm believer in always trying to leave your surroundings in the same (good) or better condition than you found them in. In not leaving a burden for someone else to pick up, but rather having others benefit from the way you acted. 

I also believe in always trying to be useful. In picking up the slack (without being taken advantage of), and contributing wholeheartedly where you can. Especially in areas where you have an advantage. 

Doing what only you can do. Or rather, doing what only you are willing to do. 

There’s not a whole lot of people who would trade this amount of free time or sleep for writing 100 compositing tutorials and productivity guides online over the past three years, especially while working a full time job. (Or even more, during crunch times). 

However, I fully believe it’s worth it – and so it has become my ongoing contribution to the community. And you may find that something else is worth spending your time creating and sharing. Something which sparks your own core motivation. 

My advice is that you search for that thing. 

Because core motivation will have you sit down and do the work even when you don’t necessarily feel like it. It will overpower laziness. Core motivation will override the excuses you might tell yourself. 

Core motivation is very disciplined. It will do what needs to be done. It will find the time to do the work. – It will make the time. 

Most of the time, however, that core motivation will make you want to do the work – to build your legacy, or otherwise contribute to the world. It’ll sometimes wake you up in the night with great ideas, always working in the background, like a muse in your subconscious. 

It’ll make you highly perceptive and in tune with what you’re building – constantly connecting dots and coming up with new perspectives. 

If you haven’t discovered it yet, to find out what’s worth spending your time on, it’s a good idea to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. 

Expanding Your Time Bubble

In this ‘Age of Now’ that we live in, where almost everything that we read about has happened within the past 24 hours, there perhaps isn’t enough forward thinking, nor enough reflecting on the past, beyond that one-day bubble of time. 

When habitual instant gratification has become the norm, it can feel unnecessary to consider a longer term perspective. However, I think that’s a grave mistake. 

There was a famous experiment on instant vs. delayed gratification – the Stanford marshmallow experiment – which showed a correlation between the ability to suffer the short term ‘pain’ of delaying gratification, and the rate of success later in life. 

The children who were able to delay their gratification seemed to do better in adulthood. 

It’s similar to saving for a pension. You take a ‘loss’ now (putting away some of the money that you currently could have spent and enjoyed), for a greater gain in the future (a larger sum of money that will secure your old age). 

It’s something that was instilled within me early on in life. We have to consider and plan for the future, long term, to create the best conditions for ourselves and for the upcoming generations. And for that same reason, we have to consider the past to avoid our previous mistakes. 

While important, it's not enough to only live in the Now. 

Especially when the current Now seems full of doom and gloom. 

Look For The Helpers

After a war, a disaster, or an accident, it can be easy to look at the chaos and lose hope. 

A quick browse through the VFX subreddit lately might lead you to believe that the industry is completely going south, for example. 

But there will always be a spirit of rebuilding, and people looking to help: 

"When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.' To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother's words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers — so many caring people in this world." 

– Mr. Rogers

After the global epidemic, strikes, economic downturn, and the uncertainty we’ve seen in the past few years, the VFX community needs all the help it can get. 

But we shouldn’t expect or count on external help. It’s up to us. 

In addition to helping people get back on their feet, we have to prepare and build for a better future, driving everyone forward. 

For example, now that so many are working from home, there is a lack of the natural training that compositors would get if they were sitting right next to their Lead, Supe, or another peer. 

Someone should be providing that training. Someone has to provide that. Or else, it would be like if we stopped saving for a pension. 

And so that’s what this website is trying to emulate, in a way – giving you that place to learn and grow. 

That’s the “burden” (read: honour) that I’ve been trying to help carry, together with several other mentors online. 

Paying It Forward 

Like mentioned earlier, over the past 100 articles I’ve sacrificed a fair amount of free time to share (what I hope is) useful information with the compositing community.

But it’s easily worth it, because helping to guide the current and upcoming generations of compositors – and paving the way for you to do better than I have – is rewarding in itself. It’s my long term contribution to your future, showing you how to navigate situations where I’ve made mistakes in the past. 

And I hope that you’ll take inspiration and pay it forward as well. 

I read somewhere: 

Go fast alone, go far together. 

Ego may initially take the lead off the starting line, but Community will outrun it over time. And life is the longest marathon we’ll ever run. 

So, with that, I plan on continuing to share my knowledge with you, one article at a time. 

Here's to the next 100! 

I hope you found this article useful. For more like this, see Advice.