Not that creativity is measurable, but it makes the title all catchy and stuff.
My experience with this certainly doesn’t count for everyone, but I do have experience, and I’d like to share it with you, so let me tell you a little story.
The year was 2004. I was going to graduate high school the next summer (even though technically it was always summer where I was living at the time), and head off to further my education in the Netherlands, as most students graduating there do. Even though the courses I took in high school reflected a scientific interest, I wanted to do something more creative with my career. I was particularly interested in game design because I knew it was an industry that (even with fancy graphics and what appear to be blue rays) was still in its infancy. I really liked the interactive aspect of games. Choosing a school and program to follow was not entirely easy, as I couldn’t just take a bus to go check out the school. So I had to make do with what I had: brochures and the internet. A particular program called Design for Virtual Theatre and Games at the Utrecht School of the Arts really grabbed my attention.
The program promised to not just teach me about making games, but about new ways to apply interactivity for artistic purposes, particularly for the theater. It was experimental and weird and different. Just like me. The school also had a more standard game design program that would train you to fit right into a game development team at a real company. Not for me. So ‘DVTG’ it was.
It was the year 2005. September. The academic year began. I was very excited, to say the least. The first few months were eye opening: I met new people, learned of digital art forms I didn’t even know existed, and got into seriously using my creativity. This seemed to be exactly what I wanted, I had found my future.
But then the trouble started.
It dawned on me that the whole program was a little vague, lacking direction. Now of course, that’s the whole point of such an experimental process, but it just didn’t sit well with me. As the first year ended, I realized that we didn’t actually spend any time creating anything interactive. Yes, I learned a lot of things about animation, 3d modeling, video editing, writing and even dramaturgy, but that didn’t feel like it was enough for me. The second year brought a lot more interactivity into the equation. I got to actually work on making games with Director and Virtools (which is an awful, awful program, so you know) and at the end of the year I experimented with using the Source Engine to create a kind of weird interactive machinima hybrid. That was fun and very educational, but again, I felt I could have done so much more more. This was just my personal opinion for myself, as it was clear that the program fit perfectly with some of my other classmates.
This time I started blaming the organization of the school itself. Not that the organization was objectively bad, it just didn’t mesh with what I expected and desired from my advanced education. I started doubting and wondering whether I should continue or not, as I had already decided that I would go to the university after I was done with this program. I decided to push on, I only had two more years to go, and a degree is better than no degree, right? The third year came, and the first month consisted of an awesome interactive theater project for the Dutch Film Festival that was a lot of fun. That month passed, and it was time to search for an internship. This was my own responsibility, of course, but I received zero guidance and help in my search from the school. The last drop fell. My bucket was full. I was done.
I didn’t see how I could be happy with a career that I could get with this degree anyway. My technical skills were hardly built up, (I had to use Flash for a Photoshop course, for example, without having ever touched Flash before), and without technical skills I couldn’t apply the natural talent I had before attending the school anyway. My career paths were split between doing really weird, really artsy stuff (which can be fun, but doesn’t really work if you want to have money to pay for food and such), and doing basic design work, as I watch less talented people with better technical educations zoom past me, requiring me to learn things pretty much all over again, meaning I had wasted my time.
I was done. I still looked for an internship, for myself. I did find one, and am now an official OG of Dropstuff, a project you can read more about on my, uhh, Projects page. It was awesome, I learned a lot, even got pretty familiar with Flash. The monetary compensation was minimal, but the time investment was more than worth it. The creativity I was and still am exposed to (as I’m still a part of the project) and was allowed to wield myself made me feel a lot better. I did this all by myself, I didn’t need the school. Even though the program I was following was experimental and allowed a lot of freedom, it was also vague and unfocused. I didn’t know what I was doing or where I was going, and my creative output suffered for it. I had to quit.
So I quit.
With one year to go, I quit.
And I’ve never felt more creatively free.
I still wanted to get myself some of that education stuff my parents urged me to get, so I enrolled in the Information Sciences program at Utrecht University. It’s stable, it’s academic (I’m totally a smart dude, dude), it’s scientific, it’s focused, and it’s not too difficult. It takes up just enough of my time for me to stay disciplined, while still having plenty of time left for my creative enterprises (including this blog.) I have been more active in creating artworks since quitting than I had in all my time at the school, and I certainly feel better and more proud about them.
I don’t know if I’m going to make a career out of information sciences, I don’t know if I’ll make a career out of digital art. I’ve always been capable of a large variety of different things, as shown by all the different kinds of software I’ve used to create my digital art. I think my destiny in life is to do a lot of different things, but always what I want to do. Who knows, maybe I’ll even make some money from the internet in the future. One thing I will always do is be creative, it is my greatest passion. I love to create.
There’s no doubt that my time at the Utrecht School of the Arts increased my technical abilities and my theoretical knowledge, but not nearly enough for the time and money I invested in it to be worth it. It also boxed me into a world I didn’t enjoy. Quitting gave me the freedom I craved, and has allowed me to focus my creativity to create what I want to create. This, of course, does not mean that any art related education is inherently bad. This was my personal experience, and was the right choice for me. You don’t learn everything at art school. You may not even really learn anything, depending on your already present skills and the quality of the school.
Just remember that any artistic education you would like to follow, from the lowly tutorial to freaking Carnegie Mellon are merely supplemental to your creativity. Sometimes they can help a lot, sometimes it’s just fluff.
Stay focused, stay in control, and don’t let anything get in the way of you making what you want to make.
