But perhaps a particular business owner just isn't interested in changing the nature of their business. Perhaps they are not in business solely for the purpose of surviving and making money.
Perhaps they actually have an abiding interest and love for the particular product or service that they've chosen. I'm reminded of a line in a Don Henley song (A Month of Sundays) regarding the plight of the small family farm:
Folks these days just don't do nothing simply for the love of it.
Then they either find a new location that is friendlier or choose to shut down and go do something else. My choice to retool was far less about money than that I loved what I was doing. I have always wanted to work in the arts, loved working in animation and visual effects, and had been made very aware how long the odds were that I would ever get to do so.
If I wanted to continue to do what I loved doing I had to adapt to that changing environment, simple as that. But that change wasn't free. My first computer, a Quadra 950, cost more than $8,000 and came with a mighty 8mb of RAM. 16MB chips were $750 apiece. The Wacom graphics tablet ran $3500. Disc storage ran about $2000 per gigabyte, unless you went with cheaper drives, which were really unreliable back then. Applications, like Photoshop, weren't cheap, and they were crap compared to what I could do with a brush and paint. I could have made a substantial down payment on a house for what I spent of retooling in 1992. Working in a digital painting environment was like being shackled. Over the years I figured out ways to make it work and developed tools for painting as the software moved beyond rudimentary. I hated the technology, but accepted it as necessary if I wanted to continue doing what I loved to do. That was the choice if I wanted to continue to do what I loved doing.
A little more on the lighter side: Jesse- How many sable brushes do you own? Are you able to use any of the "vintage gear" in today's work?
John, I don't know the exact number, but I would guess about 150 or so, of various types and sizes. I found that brushes could do different things based on what stage of use they were at, so I had well used and worn brushes that could produce painting effects that fresh brushes could not, and vice versa. And many of those brushes were expensive, $25 and more per brush. I still have a Windsor & Newton 2" wide sable that I used to use for knocking in skies on my matte paintings it's not even offered anymore because few people could afford to buy one.
As for the 2nd part of your question, it's been several years since I had occasion to use any of that old gear. But once I hang it up, I'll see what's still viable in the stuff I prepped for storage and stored away, and start painting again for my own pleasure. The paints alone would cost many thousands of dollars to replace.
S'posedly it's illegal to discriminate based on age, but they do it anyway
Ageism is a huge problem and it's rampant in my industry. I was warned that it would get harder to be hired after hitting 40 because of the obsession with creating for a young target audience. I passed that milestone more than 25 years ago, so so much for that.
My career has had its up and downs. I co-founded a division at WB only to see it shut down as a casualty of a political struggle among people far higher on the food chain than I. A few years later I was the Xerox copy boy at WB Animation, working at 20% of what I had once been paid and happy to get it. Because I had held some pretty high positions, people would refuse to hire me because they thought that I was "overqualified". What a load of bullshit. As I've told a few interviewers, the only thing for which I'm overqualified is unemployment. A job is an opportunity. After a turbulent couple of years, I've been back doing what I love to do for the past 18 years.
