Directive?

First off, I loved WALL-E. The first preview I saw sent chills up my spine: will this be Pixar's first bad one? In the end I forgave them for the things that bothered me about their marketing and some things they did in the film, and loved it. They made two robots fall in love, and they made me believe it.

I feel it kinda necessary to recap what happened over the past month or so, as well as some things that have been eating me for a while now. I may look back on this post in the future and chuckle at my own naivete or whatever, but oh well. Incoming brain-dump:

The last few weeks for me have been a blur. That feeling of being simultaneously totally stressed out and totally excited reminded me of the time leading up to my graduation a little over a year ago. Also, this little project has more or less marked the end of a very gripping (and kind-of secret and personal) art-block that I've had for more than a year. Attempts to force myself to work on my own stuff have been unsuccessful, so I work on other people's instead. I'd almost blame getting hired for this, except that I know it started well before my graduation.

Serious attempts to end the lack of inspiration and motivation started with this blog, but it really took this project to fall into my lap to obliterate the dam. When Liz first called and offered me the task I accepted without a second thought.

Summer Studio 2008 was an all-around tremendous success in my book. I was especially impressed with the Animation and Film departments, those kids have a very bright future. I really had no idea what I was getting into, trying to instruct and direct a bunch of high school students to learn Maya and Unreal Editor in one day and then make a 3D game in 2.5 more, but we pulled it off. The project turned out almost exactly as my original best-case-scenario vision, but I absolutely could not have done it without some major help from two other people. Rachel, as I mentioned before, who created the UT2k4 mod and showed me how to use it, and Kyle Hug, the mysterious student assistant I was promised, who turned out to be the best assistant I could have hoped for.

It was really great for me on a personal level to see how eager and excited many of the high-schoolers were to be working on a 3D game project. It reminded me of what it was like when I was their age, how the game industry was mostly a black-box, with some 3ds Max and WorldCraft tutorials scattered here and there. How mysterious and exciting it all was, and then when I went to school and eventually landed my first gig in the game industry, how it had become mundane every-day life to me. It was a reminder that not everybody gets to do what I do, even when they really want to, and I'm grateful for the things that have, and the people who brought me to where I am now. (Man, I feel kinda old now after writing this! Haha!)

Being up in Portland for a week and doing something totally different than my normal routine has given me a chance to do a lot of thinking about my life and where it's going. My head has really been spinning ever since the few weeks before graduation, then through graduation, then the couple of weeks afterward before I got hired... and from then on. I now realize that I never really felt any closure from being a student, and living in the artificial world of student life. This time around, over a year later, I now had something very specific again to focus on, and this time people other than myself were relying on its success. And this time I was not alone in the struggle, I had people who know things that I don't and who do things better than I do helping me on the way, and it all worked out. I couldn't have done it on my own, and realizing this has put a lot of things into perspective for me.

Hopefully in a couple of days I'll be able to link to the website that was made, documenting the Summer Studio so you guys can see what the gamers did as well as everybody else.

My diploma was sent to the wrong address (Well, technically, the right address, but the wrong time). It bounced back and had been sitting in the AiPD archives for over a year. I picked it up while I was there, got a nice frame and everything. Now my experience as a student feels pretty much complete. Maybe all it took was a silly piece of paper, eh?



One last thing- I've decided to start work on an animated short film. I've got a few ideas knocking around, I've also found a couple stories that other people have written that really touched me. If all goes well maybe I'll get the chance to make a film out of one of them. This will be a not-for-profit effort which I will hopefully submit to various film festivals. It's something I've been threatening to do for a long time, but this time it starts now. SO BE IT!