We were lucky to catch up with Sean Malony recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Sean, so happy to have you on the platform and I think our readers are in for a treat because you’ve got such an interesting story and so much insight and wisdom. So, let’s start with a topic that is relevant to everyone, regardless of industry etc. What do you do for self-care and how has it impacted you?
I officially started meditating in 2014 during my first job as a fulltime stop motion animator. I was getting around the city via biking at the time and it was about an hour-long commute each way. A friend at the studio recommended the Headspace app to me, and for years I would do their free Take-Ten course. 10 minutes of guided mindfulness meditation each day, or at the time at least every day I could remember to take a sit. During that time I also practiced yoga and Tai Chi Chuan, started therapy, and read a lot of books on Buddhism, Taoism and the like – sometimes I would have a crazy world shaking revelation but not really have the tools to articulate it.
I eventually got up to 20-minute meditations, but there were a lot of challenges and and it felt like my meditation journey was stagnating. After a lot of upheavals during the pandemic, I ended the year 2020 with a fairly good meditation routine. At the time I was animation supervising for a 60-minute web series we were making, and would do a guided visualization sit during lunch. After that job ended, my friend and fellow animator Ari Grabb asked if I would be interested in working with him as a meditation coach. I learned a TON from working with Ari, and now had much more refined tools to understand my experience and mind. We primarily focused on Shinzen-style Vipassana meditation, and for the first time I got into a daily meditation habit. For the past two years I’ve been taking online classes with one of Ari’s teachers, the meditator Michael Taft, which has helped to further refine my practice and understanding. Just as with animation, there’s truly no ceiling.
While meditation is just generally good in every part of life, I find that it really helps navigating the professional animation landscape. With stop motion, when the curtains close and you’re launched on the shot, it’s just you and whatever you bring in their with you. The animation that flows out is in part an expression of your state of mind. Being able to drop in to that awake awareness helps to circumnavigate the resistence, doubt and stuggles that arise frame by frame.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
I’m a mixed media animator, focusing primarily on both stop motion and After Effects animation. I’m part of the core team of Apartment D Films, along with Max Lopez and Cami Kwan. We primarily work as a commercial service house, but are also developing some original series. In 2022 we released our first short film in many years, The New Adventures of The Blue Mist, which also serves as a proof of concept for one of our original characters. Blue Mist is a kid with a powerful imagination, and after seeing how much is wrong with the world, decides to become a superhero to find and punch the bad guys responsible for concepts he only has a surface-level understanding of, like pollution and economic inequality.
At the end of last year we launched a Kickstarter for a new project, Ruff Ruff Danger Dogs – basically Power Rangers but with dogs. We concluded the campaign fully funded plus some extra! The story will follow five abandoned dogs who are designated as the goodest beings in the galaxy. They’ll have to learn how to fight nightmarish monsters and pilot mecha while still getting housebroken. We’re going to film this series using both stop motion animation and live-action toy puppetry. Currently we’re building the puppets, and planning to release the first short this summer.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
It’s not possible to pick just three things that were most impactful, that’s too reductive. Three important qualities are tenacity, self-education and friendship. Like the main team of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, you have to believe in the you that believes in yourself, and make an intelligent push towards your goals. While Max and I were preparing to start the studio, we read a ton of books about business, marketing, accounting, managing and strategy, and nowadays I’m learning a ton about VFX, screenwriting, developing, directing and so much more. Never stop learning! Learning is the ultimate act of rebellion against the old world.
And none of my journey in the industry would have been possible without my friends. The industry is made of people, and although mega corporations are trying to make humans irrelevant and extort as much capital as before the planet burns up, at the ground level it’s all people making art. Ultimately I want to make cool things with my friends that make the world better and provide us with stability in a turbulent universe. A worthwhile thing to learn is how to see yourself as a friend. I feel like the norm is to view yourself as an enemy to be overcome, or to overidentify with yourself so much that your neuroses spread like wildfire. If you view yourself as a friend, you learn how to be kind to yourself while also holding yourself accountable. Externally and internally, friendship is so important.
Before we go, any advice you can share with people who are feeling overwhelmed?
Vi passana meditation has helped me the most with the feeling of being overwhelmed, which I feel basically every day. Like, things in the world are objectively not great, and I don’t see a path where they get better without getting much worse first. In meditation, two of the qualities of mind to be developed are shamatha and vipassana. Shamatha can be understood as “peaceful abiding” and vipassana as “clear seeing.” Practices like focusing on the breath or another experiential object are shamatha, while vipassana is seeing the emptiness of experience. Another way to think of it is that in vipassana, you’re dissecting your experience into its component parts.
Shinzen Young’s style of vipassana starts totally like this, and I find it’s a very accessible form of meditation. In this system, you can break your experience apart into 6 modalities – external sight, sound and feeling, and internal sight, sound and feeling. Like if you’re sitting in a park, you can see a cloud in the sky, hear dogs running around, and feel the sensation of your butt touching the ground. But simultaneously arising are mental images (maybe picturing an email you need to answer), mental chatter, like about the environment around you or tasks that need to get done, and bodily sensations of emotions. When it comes to emotions, it’s helpful to separate how they physically feel from the mental images and mental talk that ariseses with them.
With the feeling of being overwhelmed, I find that my mental chatter is going haywire, with tons of mental images blipping into and out of existence. At the same time there’s a tightness in my chest, a rapid beating of my heart, maybe even a stiffness of my jaw and brows. When you notice any of these things, breathe slowly and deeply, and remember that everything is inherintly impermenent. The overwhelm is just a temporary, empty sensation, and will eventually dissolve on its own if you don’t feed it. By cultivating calmness, spaciousness and inner slowness, you can come at a problem from a place of wisdom.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://apartmentdfilms.com/
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Image Credits
Personal photo was photographed by Aaron Umetani
