What is the "Creative Commodity"? Part 1

Before I got into animation, back when I was a young meat truck driver, every weekday morning I drove downtown to an office in the Fulton Market area, called my customers (butchers at small independent grocery stores), took their orders, called my suppliers, ordered the meat, collected it, and delivered it to the customers. Hey, it kept me out of jail. Sometimes I got orders for slab bacon or salt pork. Both of these items came from pork bellies. On the radio, I would hear reports on "commodity trading," and pork bellies were always among the commodities listed. It made me feel more important: I wasn't just delivering meat, I was delivering commodities!

(By the way, I still don't understand why pork bellies are a commodity, but e.g. beef loins are not a commodity ... anybody out there know why that is?)

Those years as a meat truck driver/salesman taught me, in a very concrete way, the basics of business. The idea was to bring in more money for my boss than he had to shell out. The boss had to pay my salary and my taxes, he had to pay the suppliers, he had to pay for the truck, he had to pay for the gas in the truck, he had to pay rent on the office, he had to pay for the phones. Sometimes crazy stuff would happen, like when my truck caught on fire - he lost the truck and all the meat in it. If, when all was said and done, there was money left over from sales (most importantly, collection of the bill payments), then the boss was profitable. With lunkheads like me working for him, it was amazing he ever made a profit.

Business is risky! Don't I know it?! With everything I learned from meat-sales, my first company - StarToons - still went bust after 13 years. Having great artists was a great commodity, and I was lucky to have collected a really talented bunch of creative and hard-working guys and gals around me. But a successful animation studio also requires good marketing, networking, a good long-term strategy, and more. We got by doing great animation, but we lacked a very important commodity: business savvy.

A commodity is anything that is "of use, advantage, or value." Pork bellies are an important commodity in the agricultural field. What are the commodities in the animation industry.

So with that in mind, I have this to say about my current vocation: Knowing what goes into actually producing a cartoon, and knowing the way Hollywood executives think ... as an artist and a director, I feel undervalued.

Is getting a raise the answer? Not sure. You'll see what I mean in the next blog.