So I’ve been avoiding speaking too much about school because honestly my first impressions weren’t the best, and also there’s a ton to cover. It’s now been about a month so I feel like I have a much better (and optimistic) handle on things.
So far I like it. I’m not crazy in love with the program but it’s pretty good. At first I had to take a bunch of intro/fundamental kinda classes but I was either able to test out of those classes, or just straight drop them after talking to my Mentor. Everyone gets a Mentor that handles about 10-12 students and helps you do what you want to do and iron out and any issues you have otherwise.
Being an ‘Experimental Animation’ student has it’s advantages. I can kinda take whatever I want. This is opposed to the character students who have almost their whole program fixed from the start. If I want to take some film classes, I can. If I want in on the 3D maya classes, I can do that too. But not everything is open to everyone. There are some limitations as far as what is normally open to students. For instance, I’m in a Character Animation figure drawing class, which is supposed to be Character students only. But I just got a slip signed and it was not a problem. It seems that everything is like this. If you really want to take something you don’t really have to ask that hard. This class kills me by the way. In the bad sense. All the character students are ridiculously good at drawing. I’m very easily the worst artist in the class by a large margin. What this means is that for the duration of this 7 hour class (I just said 7 hours yes) I’m sweating like crazy trying not to notice this fact, or have anyone else notice. I’m getting pretty good at not giving a shit, but it’s tough work let me tell you. I’m always kinda trying to cover up the gigantic piece of paper with my arm, but it never quite works cause it’s fucking huge. But it’s good for me. I can tell.
For the most part, the students are serious and don’t screw around. This is a very welcome change from my experience at junior colleges.
The cafeteria food is actually really good and cooked right in front of you. To top it off, it’s super cheap. It’s like 5-6 bucks for eggs, hashbrowns and coffee. They’re good portions too.
The classes I’m in worth talking about are my Intermediate Stop-Motion class, and my Advanced Character Modeling for Maya class. Both have great teachers. I’m excited about the stop motion class because he’s going to go into how to make puppets out of foam using molds. He’s a cool dude despite that he works on Robot Chicken. The 3D Maya class is cool cause the teacher used to work on special effects in old 80’s horror movies. He made the scupltures that were used in things like The Exorcist 2 and Army of Darkness. He moved to 3D computer stuff a while ago and just got a job at Digital Domain and is a lead modeler there. He seems really scared about it. In fact he actually said that he was scared, cause I guess they’re like crazy next level over there and he’s got like a ton of stuff to learn. Most of it being taught to him by a 24 year old.
All in all, I’m pleased with school and I think it’s only going to get better with time.
I’ll be posting some random things from my classes as soon as I can. I can’t promise them to be all that great, cause they’re not. Most of them so far are just excercises that I had to bang out in a couple of hours. I doubt they will impress you or warrent repeat viewings. But whatever, it’s my blog and I’ll post shit if I want to. Thanks for reading if you made it through it all!
