Career Prep!

I just discovered that the initial blog that I wrote, didn’t save properly. Well, here’s round two.

I’ve never done any blogging before, and I’m starting to see why people do it. Keeping a log of my views and thoughts about the industry and my progress at school should be beneficial.

Having progressed this far after term 1 in the Digital Animation program at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, I’ve decided to focus my skills around 3D character design and animation. In order to improve my work, I feel that I should be gathering more reference, and sticking to the 80/20 rule.

Spending less time thinking about doing my work, and more time actually doing my work should definitely help me with my work-flow a lot more for the upcoming term. Sometimes, I have to remind myself that making mistakes and learning how to fix them is all a part of the learning process. Thus, doing 80% of the work 20% of the time is better than doing 20% of the work 80% of the time.

Hopefully by the time I finish this program, finding a job won’t be too hard. Ideally, I’d like to work for a local company in Vancouver. On the other hand, I definitely wouldn’t turn down any alternative ideas, either.

Being in the program has definitely opened my eyes to what kind of material is being produced in the industry. So far, I’m quite impressed by how far we’ve come. It is definitely certain that anything which is done really well is never done with just one “click” of a button (yet, some people still have the common misconception that computer work is just that easy.)

In general, the work I like the most comes from Pixar and Industrial Light and Magic. They seem to consistently make features with high quality production values. Some of my favourite scenes come from such films as the Incredibles and the Transformers. Although I’m still in the learning process at school, I hope to someday achieve that level of quality.

Of course, here in Vancouver, most of the companies that have set up shop here make video-games. I find it really exciting that these companies have chosen to produce their games in our great city. When I was a kid, all the video-games that I played were 2 dimensional, 8-bit pixel graphics. Seeing the industry progress to where it is today is really awesome.

In the end, whether I get a job in video-games or film, I would be absolutely thrilled.

Dream Works Pictures, the Transformers, 2008