The Gravity Falls Road Trip That Changed How I Think About Creativity

Around 2013, a group of artists piled into a van in Glendale and headed north.

The trip was Alex Hirsch’s idea. He’d created Gravity Falls largely from memories of his own childhood summers in the Pacific Northwest — weird roadside attractions, mystery spots, that specific feeling of being a kid somewhere slightly strange and unfamiliar. The show had just been picked up for a second season and the idea was simple: go visit the places that inspired it.

So that’s what we did.

Ian Worrel and Sean Jimenez took turns driving a packed van of artists up Highway 101 through California and Oregon. A lot of those people have gone on to become some of the most respected directors, art directors and creators working in animation today. But at the time none of that mattered.

We were just a bunch of kids.

No spouses. No kids. No mortgages. No real responsibilities outside of making cartoons. The studio was our workplace but it was also basically where we lived. We worked together, ate lunch together, hung out after work, and showed up the next morning to do it all over again.

So we left Glendale behind and went looking for weirdness.

Confusion Hill. The Mystery Spot in Santa Cruz. The Trees of Mystery. The giant Paul Bunyan statue. Roadside attractions that felt like they existed in some forgotten corner of America nobody had thought to update since 1987. We stayed at the Benbow Inn one night — an old historic hotel tucked into the redwoods — and I wandered down an empty hallway late that evening and had an experience I still can’t fully explain. Maybe it was a ghost. Either way I went back to my room pretty quickly.

The whole trip felt like being inside an episode of the show.

But here’s the thing I actually took away from it — and I think about this more and more the longer I work in this industry.

Getting out of the studio is everything.

I’ve been working in animation close to 20. I’ve art directed shows, made my own pilots, watched friends build something like Gravity Falls from scratch. And the one thing I keep coming back to is this: the artists whose work really connects, whose stuff has an actual distinct voice and feels like it came from somewhere real — those people are genuinely curious about the world outside their monitor. They take trips. They have weird experiences. They talk to people outside their immediate circle. They actually live their lives.

The work reflects that. It always does.

When you’re young and coming up it’s easy to think getting better is mostly about putting in more hours. Drawing more, working more, grinding more. And sure, those things matter. But the hours alone aren’t enough. The work needs something to feed on — experiences, conversations, travel, friendships, strange places, unexpected moments. The raw material that gives the work texture and feeling and a point of view that’s actually yours.

Nobody on that trip was thinking about career strategy. Nobody was optimizing anything. We were just out in the world paying attention. Laughing at tourist traps. Buying things we didn’t need from gift shops that smelled like cedar. Telling stories. Collecting experiences without even really thinking about it.

That’s the stuff that makes the work good. Not another hour in front of a screen.

Touch grass. Go somewhere weird. Talk to strangers. Get lost a little. It sounds simple but honestly it might be the most important creative advice I can offer after all these years.

The work will still be there when you get back.

And chances are you’ll actually have something worth saying.