Like others, I embrace the humble dream of changing the world, improving the quality of life of everyone I can and creating a better society, with better education and better and more jobs. I always felt that if there was one way to achieve this, it was through the Creative Industry, since creativity is at the base of every human action.
That’s why I spent the last 10 years studying and trying to understand how I could help the creative minds of this world – the artists, the ones that fuel our dreams and that bring to life the worlds within them.
What I realized through my research, is that artists are still not respected in the business world, even if nowadays without them we can’t have 99% of the movies we all love, the games we all play, the apps we all use, and the animations we all spend hours watching.
Artists create jobs, move economies, but don’t seem to have the same value on the market as others because, I believe, they don’t value themselves.
So I decided to make a plan to bring everything I thought was needed to help and improve the industry and community, or at least try to, to Trojan Horse was a Unicorn. After years of hard work, finally, in 2017 we will start implementing some really important chapters in our plan.
Every year we try to understand the needs of the community and then adapt THU to fulfil them in order to help the community move forward. Everything at THU was in fact designed to respond to a specific need. THU is an event in continuous evolution, where you can really create connections and improve your skills based on honest and constant feedback.
We went from being an event for concept artists, to becoming an event for “creators” – a place that supports all creative minds in their artistic endeavours.
The evolution of THU is not only a choice, but a necessity for us. So many art events and art workshops have popped out all over the world that to survive, we need to continue to evolve, improve, change, every year. We need to stay different to make the difference, but that means risking it all each time.
We know that we still have a lot of things to do if we want to continue our mission to help more and more creative minds to be successful. For example, for a long time, we noticed that more and more artists wanted to develop their own projects, create their own IPs, but we had to wait 5 years until we were ready to bring this subject to an “art” event – the business side.
No one ever thinks of connecting art and business, which are almost seen as enemies of each other, not two things that could go hand in hand. “We’re artists, not boring business people” attitude versus “We’re business people, not self-obsessed artists” attitude.
But creativity is everywhere. It’s something good developers have just as much of as good business or marketing people – and our duty as artists is that of guiding them and integrating them in this movement we started 5 years ago.
Of course it would be less risky and more simple for us to stick to the basic winning formula of THU, but I never wanted to just run a casual art event with no real impact. It’s well-known that human beings don’t like changes. It’s in our nature to choose our comfort zones and at THU we are changing things all the time, but always bearing in mind our ultimate goal.
Even if we sold out for three years in a row, I’m always afraid that at some point the community will not appreciate what we are trying to do anymore and will prefer the basic formula – just a group of concept / digital artists in one place, having some drinks at the end of the day and going home to sleep.
But THU is not and should not be about this. THU is about more than just art, it’s about creativity. We realized that if we really want to bring some change and help these incredible minds move forward, we can’t just offer them the same old thing each time, live demos and sculpting or talks, but we should set an example and try different things and bring new concepts to the table.
It’s by showing different content and different visions that we will move forward. We need different people, with different backgrounds, who will enrich our community and our lives.
If we start understanding that our community is bigger than what we think, we will realize we also have more power. And maybe, finally, we will manage to start changing how society sees us and how we see ourselves: we are not just artists, we are creators.
Andre Luis
