BeTween!

So, I've been meaning to blog about this for weeks, but I've been putting my efforts on the project into realizing it, rather than blogging about it. You may remember me making noise for months about an unconference for freelance animators, and finally, with the support of David Billings and Sam Niemann, it is actually going to happen.

Our website is coming together, and the event will be on May 1 at the Art Institute open space. I'm so so excited.

Even though it's an unconference, we'll have some "experts", who can speak to IP and copyright/fair use, taxes, health insurance, software... my hope is that people can get real information out of these sessions, rather than just trading stories and frustrations (although that's incredibly important too).

It's been such a pleasure working with David and Sam, and I've been thinking a bit about that. It was so discouraging all those months when I would talk about it and people would just give me a vague look and nod. And I was so convinced it was a good idea, but so few people seemed to share that conviction that I got discouraged (as I often do). So the process of just continuing to talk about it until I found the people who got it and shared my enthusiasm has been enlightening. I can think of other projects that would have benefited from that kind of persistence and faith, so I need to keep that in mind.

They also really want these to be ongoing events, which is an interesting idea.

So let's close with a quote from TH White in The Goshawk:

To write something which was of enduring beauty, this was the ambition of every writer: as it was the ambition of the joiner and architect and the constructor of any kind. It was not the beauty but the endurance, for endurance was beautiful. It was also all that we could do. It was a consolation, even a high and positive joy, to make something true: some table, which, sat on, when it was meant only to be eaten off, would not splinter or shatter. It was not for the constructor that the beauty was made, but for the thing itself. He would triumph to know that some contribution had been made: some sort of consoling contribution quite timeless and without relation to his own profit. Sometimes we knew, half tipsy or listening to music, that at the heart of some world there lay a chord to which vibrating gave reality. With its reality there was music and truth and the permanence of good workmanship. To give birth to this, with whatever male travail, was not only all that man could do: it was the human contribution to the universe. Absolutely bludgeoned by jazz and mechanical achievement, the artist yearned to discover permanence, some life of happy permanence which he by fixing could create to the satisfaction of after-people who also looked. This was it, as the poets realized, to be a mother of immortal song: to say Yes when it was, and No when it was: to make enduringly true that perhaps quite small occasional table off which subsequent generations could eat, without breaking it down: to help the timeless benevolence which should be that of this lonely and little race: to join the affection which had lasted between William the Conqueror and George VI. Wheelwrights, smiths, farmers, carpenters, and mothers of large families knew this.