The Whale

this fine illustration by I. W. Taber

I was laid off a couple months ago from Phoenix Labs, a studio I’d worked at for over 3 years, along with the rest of the ~50 at the company as the studio was shuttered in all but name. It’s been a long three years of constant layoffs in the games industry, and I’d be lying if it didn’t have me feeling really down about my future in this place. Concept art has always been The Big Dream, ever since I watched the behind-the-scenes DVD features of The Lord of the Rings and found out about John Howe, and Alan Lee, and Weta Workshop.

As just like a fun thing to do in the few weeks of shock + severance I thought it’d be fun to read Moby Dick finally. It’d been sitting on my shelf for about 100 years and I’d only cracked it open briefly to read aloud to my two rescue cats after we got them (I was told the cadence of a human’s reading voice is very calming and it’s true they did fall asleep incredibly fast).

It’s fantastic. I just finished it. I was immediately inspired to make a portfolio project out of it. I took out library books on whaling. I started listening to podcasts. I was seized by the overwhelming urge to fly across the country to the New Bedford Whaling Museum. There are just so many incredibly interesting whale and whaling facts that I started spouting (haha) them off to anyone in a 5m range. I think it would make a very very cool game.

Also—let’s be real, this book is laden with metaphors, and as I cross the threshold of 2 months of job searching post-layoff, it’s starting to feel like I have an uncatchable White Whale myself. What better subject matter to immerse myself in than this one, about a very long journey of 550 pages in which (I was incredulous) you only meet the whale is the last!! 25 pages!!!

So here I’ll be documenting the journey of this project, in an attempt to both record my process and thoughts on something I think is pretty cool and also preserve my sanity during this bummer of a time.