My College Experience

As I walk out of graduation with blank degree in hand and tassel moved over to my left side, I feel that it's only appropriate to take the time to reflect on my journey so far as both an artist and as a human (but mostly as an artist). So here's a review of my undergraduate college career and how my mindset has shifted over the years. Because really I can't even keep track of it all.

Year 1: I was accepted to a small university close to my hometown. I was convinced that this was it. This was my "dream school" and where I would spend the next 4 years. It was where I was "meant to be" and "the one." I was 17. I had the intention of learning to become an animator. I was fresh off of making comic books about my friends in high school for 4 years. I always dreamed of being able to make my characters come to life and move around instead of being limited to still images and word bubbles. At the same time, I also wanted to do storyboarding since I felt that was what I was "already good at" based on my comic-making. First year, I made very few friends. Due to certain circumstances, I had the room to myself for the rest of the year, which put me in a space for a lot of self-reflection. I binged a lot of Netflix and taught myself how to knit. I learned to like Starbucks and took strolls around the city. I started watching beauty tutorials on YouTube and for the first time, started wearing makeup and using hair products. I learned to be on my own and handle things on my own. I traveled the city streets alone and figured out everyday adult things on my own like cashing a check or finding a doctor. I started doing workout videos and studying baking videos.

The classes I took were basic gen-eds and a couple of drawing classes. I thoroughly enjoyed my screenwriting class and the creativity I had there, but I was surprised to find that I struggled with my drawing classes. It wasn't even that I was getting poor grades in drawing. It was simply that I just didn't enjoy it. I felt uninspired and unmotivated to do what I had to known to love for so much of my life. The introductory animation class I had was mostly stop-motion, and I knew for sure that that medium wasn't for me. I also learned ToonBoom, Illustrator, and After Effects; programs I had never used before. I wasn't a fan of AE. I figured that 2D "tradigital" animation was the way to go. For me using ToonBoom, I could animate in it and still draw, knowing this was the only skill I had. I learned that I wouldn't be touching any 3D software until junior year. I told myself that I always wanted to learn 3D if I could, but I didn't know if it would be too hard or too technical for me to enjoy. I felt I liked 2D enough. It was exactly what I had hoped it would be, but I just had to get better at it. I started going to the school's mental health counselor, the first time I had ever tried any kind of therapy. I really liked her and she helped. Still feeling lost, I kept going fueled by my new-found interest in health and nutrition. I did a lot of baking that summer. By the end of that year I felt as though I had aged 5 years in 7 months. I felt so much more self-aware and self-sure. The growing up I hadn't done in high school finally happened, but all at once, and I finally felt comfortable with it. However, I was still lost and hopeless in my career goals. I tried not to think about it too hard hoping that it would just come back to me once I started doing more with animation.

Year 2: I went in with a little more confidence having established some more solid friendships by the end of the previous year. I went to the gym every single morning and tracked my meals and my water intake. I started learning After Effects more, and came to really like it despite how I felt originally. I taught myself how to use duIK and create 2D puppet animation. After struggling to be happy with ToonBoom animation and drawing, I found the puppet animation in AE to be a lot more rewarding. I enjoyed making graphics. Despite what I was doing in After Effects now I was still questioning everything. I was doubting my decision in my career. I felt if I didn't LOVE it, I shouldn't be doing it. I tossed around my feelings about a simpler life with marriage and kids. It seemed desirable, but it felt uncertain and not completely right for me. It felt like it would be wrong of my character to default to that. Storytelling and art had all I ever been passionate about growing up. I finished the semester with an AE puppet animation about a cow that got some good laughs in the theater. It was moments like that where I felt certain that this was what I loved doing- creating something that causes an emotional response from an audience. However, I fell into quite an existential crisis for the next semester. During the holiday break, I started researching other schools... just for fun. I also hate to admit I did some light research on careers in psychology, nursing, and dietetics. Of course, these ideas went away quickly and just didn't seem realistic for me. I had heard about Ringling College just before leaving for break and how great it was and I started looking there. It felt like I had found the land of milk and honey. But it was $$$$$ to say the least. More than I would have ever considered spending when choosing a school.

After coming back to school, my mom forwarded me a course catalog for Savannah College of Art and Design that came in the mail. Georgia seemed like such an obscure place to go to school. I looked it all over though and it struck me in the same way Ringling had and seemed to be about the same price or maybe mildly cheaper. I weighed all the pros and the cons and eventually I decided to apply. I applied to both Ringling and SCAD. I officially submitted my application on Valentine's Day. During this time, I was thrown into a Film Production class. We worked in groups of 3 to make 3 short films. It was far out of my comfort zone needing to go out with a video camera and shoot actors and work hands-on with other people. Also, it was February in Pittsburgh so it meant walking around filming in the freezing cold and snow. Surprisingly I survived it all. I enjoyed the editing part of the class and I even applied my very limited VFX skills that made me feel like I was still doing what I felt I "specialized" in. I even managed to get my second film voted into the final P1 showcase at the end of the year. At the same time, I had been working on animating a single project for the semester of purely 2D puppet animation in AE. It was a stressful semester on top of the personal and emotional issues I was dealing with at the time. The semester was a whole lot of waiting and it taught me patience and taught me how to deal with disappointment. Because every area of my life felt as though it was crumbling, I fell to the darkest time of my life. I ended up going back to the school therapist. I spent a lot of nights crying and one night crying in the bathroom hours before my film was due. I went into a weird place of numbness where I just wanted to sit alone and be at peace. Life felt weird. The waiting had been torture. I just wanted to run away from all my problems. I felt alone and trapped. Finally I did get my acceptance from SCAD. I received my financial award and again, it felt like life wanted to disappoint me. Despite the financial award letter being low, I decided to visit Savannah anyway, take a tour of the school and talk to admissions counselors about my options. Fast forward a bit and in the mid summer, I had decided to just bite the bullet and go to SCAD. I decided I didn't want anything else. And so I planned to go to SCAD that fall for motion media design. This year I had learned patience, I rid my life of toxicity and self-doubt, and thought long and hard about my long-term happiness.

Year 3: It felt like senior year of high school all over again. The excitement to start something new and start over. I was scared at the same time. I ended up needing to take gen-eds and foundation courses right away, while I figured my way out around this new world. I made friends with my roommates very quickly and they ended up being my closest friends. I took a still-life drawing class as one of my foundations and I enjoyed it so much. I thought my love for drawing was gone for good and this class at this school made me find it again. This drawing class had a wide range of different skill levels and it gave me an honest perception of where my skill level was at. I concluded that I was very average. I wasn't the worst in the class, but I definitely wasn't the best. And I felt OK about that. It allowed me to understand what I truly needed to work on to get better. In my design classes, I learned I did not have an eye for design or an eye for the abstract. I was put out of my comfort zone needing to work with traditional materials rather than the computer. Finding I had little design sense made me start to question my choice of major and I started to miss character animation. I got the chance to learn Maya for the first time. I modeled a table and then an environment and learned to render it in Arnold. I filmed a fake movie trailer that I thoroughly enjoyed doing. At this point I was pretty convinced that animation was where I needed to be, but to test it out, I decided to take 2 of the required animation curriculum courses and one motion media class. I took my first motion media class and while I did enjoy it, I started to further realize that I was meant to do animation all along. I always had characters and acting in my projects. I couldn't help it. I couldn't bring myself to make shape morphs and abstract patterns with no story behind it. My brain just didn't work that way. The action analysis class that I took was like figure drawing class, but it was so much more.To this day, I would still say it was one of the best and most valuable classes I ever took because I still find myself applying the concepts all the time in my work. I was proud of myself, going into the class as a C student at drawing and ending with an A. I finally could say I loved drawing again. It forced me to work hard and challenged me to draw constantly. The third class I was taking was modeling in Maya, which helped ease me into the 3D interface. At the end of this year I felt certain that 3D animation was where I'd want to be. I had ruled out 2D animation, hand-drawn, motion graphics, and puppet animation. I never wanted to do stop-motion. 3D was my last bet and it was the one.

Year 4: I took my first animation class learning 2D principles with the toughest teacher in the department. It was an incredibly strenuous class with restrictions that had to be followed closely. It made certain that I would work in the lab every day at the light boards in order to get the animation done. I was really afraid that I would have a hard time because I feared that needing to draw like this would revert me back to my hatred of drawing. But the structure of it all made me not even think about it. I did what I had to and I didn't feel tortured by it. That's not to say that it wasn't a LOT of hard work and anxiety. I felt like I was getting the foundation that I truly needed. I started 3D principles the following quarter and also took a screen design class. I learned what my limits were and my weaknesses. I learned to not compare myself so harshly to others. I learned to be supportive. The following quarter was even more of a killer.

I took 3 studios once again. I learned rigging concurrently with 3D production, which was quite a struggle. I learned all there was to know about the 3D pipeline and it truly tested if this was something I wanted to pursue. It was. I found that rigging wasn't as hard as I feared it would be. It was technical, but more like a big logic puzzle. I can honestly say that I enjoyed rigging- but not a fan of weight painting. I was also taking concept development and pitched my film idea in May. Needless to say, I did not get green-lit. I convinced myself earlier that I didn't care that much and that I was fine with it if I didn't get green-lit. When the list came out, I was more disappointed than I was willing to admit. I knew there was no point in being bitter about it. But if I'm being honest, it knocked down the little confidence I had a few pegs. Storytelling was the only thing I still felt certain about- the thing I felt I could say I was good at. And the pitch made me start to question it all again. But just like everything else, I had to keep moving forward and go with whatever life threw at me. On the final week, I stayed up for over 72 hours as my muppet animation rendered and I finished the last storyboards on my failed concept pitch. (because of the class we still had to continue developing the concept). I did a quick, lousy animation with my final rig, and I was able to turn in everything completed on time and then crash from exhaustion Wednesday night. The next day I would turn in my muppets that ended up being obscenely color-corrected and extremely disappointing in the animation. To this day, I refuse to show anyone my muppet project. The good news was, the lessons I learned and the tools and technicalities in Maya I learned were invaluable and the most I had ever learned from one given class. To this day, I am so grateful for my stupid muppet project.

Year 5: Senior Films officially commenced. Without going too much into it, it was certainly a struggle. Communication, cooperation, and coordination were all big hurdles that we as a team had to get over. I can't say it was smooth sailing most of the time. A lot of times I wanted to give up. I as well as the rest of the team would feel frustrated and upset with the way things were going. Nonetheless, we pulled through. And the resulting film ended up being better than we had anticipated at the start of the long 9-month pipeline process. In the mean time, I was still taking other classes. Most significantly, I was taking Character I in the fall and Character II in the winter. These classes became the bulk of my animation experience and forced me to get better and get better quickly. I felt I was finally truly learning how to animate in Maya and what made for good acting and character performance and even just basic body mechanic rules. During holiday break, I headed west for the first time in my life and got to see California- the animation "promise land." I attended CTN and loved every minute of it. Every presentation I went to had new lessons to learn and new speakers and stories to be inspired by.

I left knowing this was the community I was meant to be a part of. These were the people I looked up to and I couldn't wait to go again. Soon came career fair. There was a ton of build-up in my professional development class. Learning to brand myself, and get business cards printed; trips to the career advisers, and going to tons of company presentations all year long. I can honestly say that I feel far more confident in understanding how I should present myself professionally. At the actual career fair, I had the chance to see exactly 2 companies. It was a lot of waiting in line and I did get some feedback on my reel and what I can work on. The end of the quarter arrived and our film was in the final night of the juried showcase with the best work. I graduated Summa Cum Laude and with the silly cords that I wanted to so badly in high school. The graduation ceremony was phenomenal. And now, I am 2 weeks away from starting class with Animation Mentor.

It's hard walking out with a 3.9 GPA and knowing that that GPA doesn't do anything for you other than say you have good time management skills. I'm proud of myself and all that for graduating with honors, but I KNOW that the real work is in the reel and so my immediate goal right now is to get a brand new reel and send it off for the next season of hiring. I don't want any of the old stuff on my current reel to be on there. Some companies have given me some direct notes to go off of and I really hope I can make what they're looking for.

Although I know I still have a long way ahead of me and I am still on this journey of figuring out where I'll end up, I'm excited. It's nerve-wracking, but I see just how far I've come in these past 5 years and I realize that I am so much better off than where I was even 3 years ago. I know what I want to do. I know what I'm passionate about and who I am and what would make me happy. And I know how to get it. I have the all the tools and resources to get there at this point, now I just need to make it happen. I know I can do it.