Animation Mentor Student
Hello World (or more likely “hello” to the 2 or 3 people who may actually come to view this)! As of this day, I have decided to add a blog section to my website. While first and foremost, this site remains a place to store and show-off my animation portfolio, I may also at times wish to share my thoughts on current news items and trends in technology. These could range from game-changers, such as the 3D revolution that is taking place in the video game and film industry at this time, to less consequential topics, such as the pending release of a new movie or video game. Finally, I will update my blog with occasional journal-like entries on my experiences in Animation Mentor, an online school for character animation which I will be starting soon.
This is actually my second attempt at starting and maintaining a blog, the first being a rather unsuccessful venture. After starting my previous blog as part of an English assignment at Purdue University and completing the minimum number of entries required by my class, I failed to follow through on continuing to update the site. Hopefully this time around I will be able to find the motivation and inspiration to continue writing on a regular basis. There are several reasons why I have higher expectations this time around. For starters, I now have a clear view of what I plan to do with my life. A mere year ago, I was a student of CGT (Computer Graphics Technology) without a sense of direction. Sure, I had taken classes in Photoshop, CATIA, and Maya, and even managed to declare a focus in animation, but this still left me with a very vague sense of direction. The field of computer animation alone has an enormous number of career paths. Whether you were to go into film, tv, or video games, you would still have to choose between texturing, rigging, modeling, animating, lighting, programming, or any number of different occupations. The “generalist,” who is a jack-of-all-trades, is a dying breed. So specialization in one field was a must. Now that I am certain that I want to be a character animator, I can approach my writing and my view of technology from a firm and solid point of reference. The second reason to be optimistic about the lifespan of this blog is that I finally have a website to be proud of. For months I have struggled with a design for a webpage that I could be happy with. I’m certainly not a programmer, and require the help of my web-developer friend Kenny Wilson on even the simplest coding problems. For this reason, I was (and am to this day) confined to a WordPress theme for the design of my site. Most of these put the focus of the layout and design on blogging. However, as I have mentioned at the beginning of this post, blogging on this site comes second to displaying my multimedia work, something blogging themes are notoriously bad at doing. The current theme that I am using, “Widescreen,” by Graph Paper Press, is exactly what I was looking for: a minimalist theme that puts the emphasis on video and image content.
I actually have another one of my friends, Daniel Beck, to thank for my new-found interest in blogging. While he will say that I was largely responsible for helping him get his own blog started, his success with http://debeck.wordpress.com/ has instilled in me a newfound interest in the idea. It’s pretty cool how things can come full-circle in this way. This here’s a shout out to you DB!
So until my next post, feel free to look around, check out my work, and have a nice day.
I’m one of the two to three people!
here’s a shout-out back to you! i, too, am a “two to three” other “people”!
if you’re down, we can do a cross-promotion-type situation (whatever ya wanna call it). we could post up blogs about each others’ site. or we could do guest blogs. whatever would be more reasonable. i’ll get back to you after i’ve taken a look at more of your website, to decide how i’d wanna approach it–whether i could write something for this, or just review the site.
I like the guest blogger idea. I have a narrower topic area than your blog, so it’d have to be relevant to entertainment and/or computer technology, but other than that I’m up for it. That would give us opportunity for crossover traffic eventually; we’d have links to the writer’s blog within each guest article.