#402 - After 12 years it's time to say goodbye...
... to my beloved Wacom tablet.
What? Did you think I was quitting this rodeo? Never!
But, back to the story.
One of my missions in life is to urge video editors to start using pens and tablets instead of mice as one way to safeguard the long-term health of their wrists and, thus, the viability of a multi-decade creative career.
Why?
I'll let (now) veteran Animator Kenny Roy lay out a cautionary tale about his initial experience of working at ILM to explain.
The setup is that Kenny is working across the hall from an animator who comes in and sits down with his arms folded for eight hours a day.
“And so this went on for days and days and days and weeks and weeks, and eventually, I started thinking to myself, as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as I was and excited to be on the job, I just thought to myself, nobody, nobody has such a bad attitude that they'll just come in and not work for weeks and weeks and weeks. Like, this guy must be seriously burned out. I don't know what this guy's problem is.
But it was a little weird because a couple of times during those weeks, people would come by his desk, look at what he was doing, and then walk away as if it was good work or that he was actually working. But I promise you, for eight hours straight, he'd fold his arms like this and stare at his desk.
Eventually, I got up the nerve to go over there.
And I asked him what he was doing and when I came around to his side of the desk, I noticed that he didn't have a mouse. He had little foot pedals. He was using a foot mouse. And I asked him why he was using a foot mouse and he said because he and his friend both blew their wrists out working on a film that had been at ILM a couple years before.
Just completely blew their wrists. Can't use their wrists for anything anymore. The wrists are done. And he said his friend actually had developed foot problems with the foot mouse and his friend actually was using a head mouse now. I told him to be careful because if you blow your neck, I mean then you're done.”
– Kenny Roy, Animator & Game Designer
