The Post-Award School World as told by Finding Nemo
Crappy GIF by Oli Nicholson
Good words by Lewis Idle
“Now what?” An iconic line at the end of Finding Nemo after the fish-tank dwellers finally complete their escape plan and end up in Sydney Harbour only to realise they are just floating in their clear plastic bags with nowhere to go.
This current moment in time feels a lot like that in many ways. I worked hard, finished Award School and now I’m ready to dive head first into the industry. The main issue is that clear plastic bag around me called ‘Covid-19’/‘the economy’/‘excessive amounts of self doubt’. I’m in the ocean, I achieved the biggest goal of my early career and I am just left pondering “now what?”
It is easy to get stuck down the rabbit hole of thinking “what if this was a normal year?”, “what if I did better in Award School?”, “what if I stopped trying to learn all my life lessons from Pixar movies?”.
But the reality is that it isn’t a normal year, I can’t make my Award School result any better and I will never stop taking life lessons from Pixar movies!
So in these months since the end of Award School I have, unsurprisingly, taken advice from another classic Finding Nemo character... Dory. Now she may have been a clumsy, exuberant fish with short term memory loss but in that film she offered up some pretty great nuggets of wisdom. Perhaps the most notable being... “just keep swimming”.
Ultimately we can’t just appear at our desired destination, especially in the current environment. But what we can do is focus on growing everyday and trying to keep moving forward. So I have looked back at what has got me to where I am and what I can do to continue to grow. Sometimes this means going back and redoing Award briefs, sometimes it means coming up with totally new briefs and sometimes it just means writing music, drawing a picture or reading a book.
It is easy to become pessimistic, to think you’re not good enough, to think that you have missed your opportunity.
But in the end all that time you might spend thinking about these ‘what-ifs’ is time you could have been spending growing and getting better. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m following the great words of Pacific Ocean-based Philosopher, Dory and keeping on swimming because I know one day... I’ll get there.
