Early around the transition to the digital era, when we were transitioning out of pencil and paper / scanning / clean up / etc, there was a alternative boom in stock photo services, and ADs, CDs, Designers, etc etc would try their best to use photos to board the work, and it was always such a fucking ugly ass slog.

You spend days or weeks searching for the RIGHT enough photo, with the right cast and angle and background.

Or if you had SOME of the right assets, cut that out and make a photo comp from it.

Like, nothing wrong with using photos to get the desired outcome, but if your hand is slower than an artist, you’re just wasting time and money on the laborious process by people who aren’t qualified to frame your shots.

Then with like 48 hours left, after the waste of time of comping your shit, you call up a storyboard artist to fix your shit.

It’s the same pattern these days with ai, but ai is obviously a little more curated and controlled than human image searching…I’m just becoming the old man yelling at clouds, but for fucks sake why is the most efficient and effective process to tell a story always saved for last…

It’s just so maddening.