Classes

My first week back at school went fairly well.  Just like last quarter, I only have two classes.  I’m taking animation portfolio, which is where I gather all of my crappy animations I’ve done during my years at SCAD and put them into a crappy demo reel.  I also create a resume and business cards.  The next class is 2d character animation 1 which is just another traditional animation class.  I took the class about two quarters ago but dropped out after the first class because I didn’t think I’d be able to handle it.  The professor wanted us to do an in between test without using a light table.  He also had this funky grid he wanted us to follow.  Basically, his way of animating was quite different from the way I learned.  If I couldn’t do a simple practice test on the first day, how was I supposed to be able to do the real assignments?  I had to jump ship.  I’m glad I did because I ended up replacing that class with world religions, which I thought was incredibly interesting.

But, I still have one more animation requirement so I figured I’d give it another go.  Sure enough, on the first day, we had to do that same practice in between test.  It went a lot smoother this time around.  We are now doing two head turns using the Mushu model from the Disney film Mulan.  I did the first part earlier today and it was sort of fun.  As I mentioned, this is a traditional pencil and paper animation class and I haven’t had one of those classes in about six months.  During spring break, I was looking forward to it.  My skills as an animator are extremely limited but I think I do my best with a pencil in my hand, not a mouse.  I definitely can’t do 3d animation because there is a heirarchy system to animating.  When you move one thing, it affects everything else which can be extremely frustrating when you want to tweak one tiny thing.  But when I draw it myself, I have full control over what’s happening.  Plus, I’ve always been way more interested in 2d.  I’ve been doing so much animating on the computer that it was nice to go back to the basics.

I’m not too worried about the class and I hope that I can take all that I’ve learned and create some nice animations.  I’ll need them for the portfolio class, the one I am worried about.  The class itself doesn’t seem to be too hard…if you have good material to work with.  I don’t, so that’s where the worry comes in.  We have to create two reels: one is a two minute reel of our best work and the other is thirty seconds of the best of the best of our work.  This poses a problem ’cause I don’t feel I have material good enough to put on a reel.  Unfortunately, I’ll have to work with what I have.  I’ll also have to create some supplemental animations to beef up my collection.  Since I only have two classes, churning out a few extra animations shouldn’t be too much of a hassle.  It sucks, though, because I was hoping to take it easy my last quarter.  I was planning on using my spare time to read and write but I wanna be a good student, I should probably spend that time creating super amazing animations to make a super amazing demo real to get a super amazing job. 

I’d just rather watch zombie movies.

I guess we’ll just have to see what the next nine weeks bring.