Finding out you've made a difference.

This Christmas I was gifted with the knowledge that the job I pour my heart and soul into every day is influencing the lives of others in a positive way. Ikigai.

This little project started out as nothing more than a research and marketing tool. We wanted to get testimonials from past graduates about how they found our animation & VFX training and how useful it had proven, now that they had been in industry for a while.

What it turned into was something else entirely. I spent days over the Christmas break reconnecting with students all the way back to our very first class. (We are up to class 23!). We talked about a lot of things, including school, careers and the directions life has taken us. These graduates, all now well -established professionals have travelled far and wide, worked at studios large and small on projects from the biggest blockbusters to the smallest commercials.

Overarching their training experiences were the overwhelmingly positive memories of training at CGM. It was a surprise to me, since, as the VFX Supervisor and Director of Education, I put a lot of effort into making our trainees' experience as hard as a real studio project, which can be a bit of a shock to the system. The training system is designed to be hard so students become really well prepared for what lies ahead. They're going to need it.

Yet every single grad I spoke to was enthusiastic about how the toughness of the program prepared them for real studio life.

Ours is a school with a solid mandate. That is to train the best junior VFX artists and TDs on the planet. I believe we have achieved that goal, yet sometimes it is difficult to see the successes while you're still in the trenches. Like anyone, we have good days and bad. Sometimes it feels like we own the world. Other times we wonder why we work so hard. I guess that's just the human condition.

One conclusion I can draw from all these reconnections is that our efforts are absolutely correct and that they improve the careers and lives of our trainees in a big way. It was an enormously gratifying exercise. So I thank all those graduates who participated in this project. It was just for marketing, but I think the biggest result was a boost to my morale. I'll keep pushing, keep fighting, keep training to create the best of the best.

"Ikigai" is a Japanese concept that refers to a reason for living, and overlaps the four concepts of doing something the world needs, something you are good at, something you love and something for which you can be paid. My graduates, this Christmas, gave me the gift of Ikigai.

I can never thank them enough.

When hard work is successful, there is a fulfilling sense of contentment and a renewed commitment to the work.

If you would like, I have included a quick edit of the conversations below. These were video meetings with graduates from as close as Vancouver and as far as Milan. They are split up so that each video is one question and contains the answers from all the graduates. They range in length from one to five minutes.

Here they are: