Missing Persons Report

You and me have a lot of catching up to do. So sit right back and get yourself a hot cuppa joe and let’s dish dirt.

The first thing I want to do is to sincerely offer all the dear readers a huge and hearty thank you. Thank you for commenting on my posts. Thank you for asking where I’ve been. Thank you for showing interest. I think because of you I am re-motivated to keep writing this blog and keep chronicling my misadventures in animation for all to point and laugh at. For all that can’t check out the H.264 codec, I am right now compressing all of the movies in a windows friendly form and will have links below all of the old posts' images for you to click on.

What happened? The last few months of school were an exercise in sleep deprivation and burning fumes. Despite my best intentions to keep things short and sweet, my piece kept creeping longer and longer. I knew that it was already a challenging proposition to get a minute of quality animation done in three months time, even if you are able to work on it full time, which I wasn’t. But there comes a point when you ask yourself what’s the best thing you can do for your short and mine was to give each scene the amount of frames it needed to get good acting and tell the story right.

The downside of all of this of course was that I had to make some pretty serious sacrifices to make time to even get a chance of getting this short done, the least of which was abandoning this blog for a period. You’re too old for me to lie to you dear reader, the last three months of school was probably one of the most difficult and stressful times of my life. But here I am all bright and shiny on the other side of h-e-double hockey sticks and I’m still smiling and seemingly no worse for wear.

School officially ended in early October. There was an option to extend classes by three more months at half price when school realized that the majority of students were struggling to finish. I was tempted for exactly half a second but then realized what that meant as far as the commitments I had made to my wife, family and friends. I had to turn down the offer.

For the three months following that, it was a lot of picking up the pieces of my life. I put most everything on hold and had quite a bit of catching up to do (and I still do in fact.) Starting in mid November, I began putting together a reel and started polishing that which needed it the most.

I’m happy to report that many of my fellow AM’ers have met with some great success through just the school’s alumni website alone. It would appear that the studios have been approaching the school asking for people and the school has been directing them towards people who have work that may be a good fit. It took me a long time to get my reel posted on the website after school ended. I’m sure that hurt me much more than helped but at the time I was thinking that I didn’t want to show my reel before it was ready and felt it was wiser to wait. Hindsight is 20/20 as they say.

So far students have placed at ILM, Dreamworks, Sony and BlueSky. I’m sure there have been many more that have landed great stuff than that, but that is all that I’m currently aware of. It’s very inspiring to me. Sadly, Disney and Pixar are going to have a round of layoffs in February so they aren’t currently hiring and that has made Sony initiate a hiring freeze in anticipation of snatching up some of that laid off talent (one presumes.) I’m not sure if this is particularly the best time for a junior animator to be hunting for a feature position but perhaps I over think things.

Coming up next, my reel, my short, my word!