Bouncing Back When a Creative Project Ends up in the Toilet (Literally)
For stop-motion animator dina Amin, being a great artist means first being a great producer
dina Amin—that lowercase ‘d’ is intentional!—is an Egyptian creative whose stop motion work brings inanimate objects like balloon animals or glue bottles to life. Amin is our latest #ConnectedByLemonade artist. We checked in with her to hear about a few projects that didn’t turn out quite as well as this one did…
Tell us about a time when a creative project went really, really wrong.
My first shoot for a big commercial was disastrous. The animation itself came out great but the process was so nerve wracking…
I was shooting a small stop motion part of a much bigger ad (with actors and all), so they made a small set for me on the same location so that the director could oversee both. But they put me in a room which had the only toilet on set! Which meant on a set of 100 people, every two minutes I had someone knocking on the door asking to use the toilet, and I had to stop and warn them not to bump into anything… then wait for them to finish, warn them again when they left… then a few seconds later another person would come in.
I wasted so much time and couldn’t focus at all until eventually I told them that’s not gonna work and denied everyone from peeing. People were not happy.
From that shoot I learned that being a good animator for client work is not only about your mad animation skills. You need to be a great producer and plan for all these logistics, or else things won’t work—especially in Egypt, where stop motion animation isn’t common.
You didn’t start your career with stop motion though, right?
My background is Industrial Design and not animation. I became a stop-motion artist by complete accident. When I first started getting into the world of stop motion I kept telling myself that this is just a phase, that I’d still be an industrial designer… for a long time I never called myself an animator. I believed that I would never be able to pick up animation skills because all these amazing animators I admire have been animating for a really long time, and I thought if I wanted to go through the ‘animator’s path’ I had to learn drawing and all these other mediums that I wasn’t really into.
It’s not that long ago that I realized that being an industrial designer and an animator is what makes my ideas very unique. I decided not to pay much attention to job titles, to just explore my ideas and the things I love and learn new skills and see where that takes me.
How did you get past these feelings of failure or frustration?
I felt very lost for a very long time, and was trying to search for the right thing to do. Would I ever be able to learn animation? Should I start an advertising agency? Advertising work didn’t excite me—until I learned I can be the director as well, and bring my own ideas to the table, doing work that’s 100% me.
I would never have imagined how things would play out. No matter how much planning, I would never have imagined where I am at right now. I learned to focus on my ideas and develop my skills and do the work, rather than focusing on where this work will lead me.
What advice would you offer to younger artists who might be afraid of making creative mistakes?
Start with smaller projects. It’s better to make thirty 10-second animations than to start off by making a short film, especially with something like stop-motion animation, where you need to learn about so many thing: animation, photography, prop-making, video editing…
There will always be mistakes, especially if you are trying something new that no one has explored yet. That’s where personal projects are important: You get to make mistakes in a less stressful environment, you get to learn how your brain works and develop a style that clients will ask for later.
Check out more of dina Amin’s work here, and on her Instagram. And don’t forget about all the other art, design, and creativity content on #FF0083!
