A day that honestly, I never thought I'd get here. A long 5 years? I don't even know how long that was. I started out at Kennesaw State as a computer science major. And after going for a couple semesters, I found out; I hate it. It just wasn't for me. The idea of dropping out of school for the second time was looming in the back of my mind. At the time I was a student assistant filming and editing videos, as well as creating motion graphics for the university. (Which at the time of writing this, I do that full-time at KSU)
I felt extremely lost and felt like a huge failure in life.
Working there I met some pretty cool fellow student assistants, shout out to the homies! They led me in the direction of this new program at school, digital animation. Not sure when exactly the program started but I didn't know we had that at my school. Let me tell you I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Under the assumption that it was all After Effects and VFX stuffs, I enrolled without telling a single soul. I hadn't taken an actual art class since middle school (maybe 10 years before that haha) and I had no idea how to draw. Like most people I was under the assumption that you must be born with that talent.
Unfortunately for me to start as an art major, you have to take a bunch of drawing classes. I was terrified my first Drawing I class, thought everyone in there was gonna be freaking Picasso. Turns out I was not alone, a lot of people didn't know how to draw either. But over the course of the semester we learned. I mean it wasn't like we immediately turned into amazing artists, we were simply put in the right direction.
Over the course of the next couple years, I meet some super amazing and crazy talented artists; some of them were cool too hahaha. If anyone knows what it's like working on animations, you spend a ton of time around in the lab working on your craft. Getting better, failing, having the MAC Lab computers turning off and losing your entire project that's due the next day. Making friends with people was a big benefit of all our hard work.
Anyways, as always I'm rambling a bit. So to wrap it up, we made it. I did that thing. Massive thank you to everyone involved in anyway along this journey!
The post was originally about photos from my graduation... those are below :)
Also we had a Senior Film exhibition that showcased all the gradating seniors animated films, there's photos from there in the gallery too. Ok no more from me, look at the photos!