The Agony of DaFeet and other Musings …
Well, we had our much awaited show and industry mixer yesterday at the California Market Center. It was a hectic drive to get there on time with my family in tow as I had to work for several hours that morning -but we made it. The building houses the Otis School of Design and we enjoyed walking the hallways, looking at the fashion renderings - I really loved the way they rendered the textile textures (with marker and prismacolor pencils it appears). There were many standout designs including some oriental inspired pieces that were stunning.
Our school - Brooks College - had student displays from our Fashion Design, Interior Design, Graphic Design and Animation programs. There was some awesome work and for a school that has a pretty fast track (average program is only 18 months compared to 4 years for many other schools) I think we did very well.
I had a 2D short (Primal Soup) and a 3D bit (Snails of the Lost Park) at the show as well as my portfolio. Sadly I didn’t win any prizes … there was only first prize in each category and one of the judges pulled me on the side after the judging to confide that I was second on several judges tickets for all three categories. I won’t lie and say I wasn’t hoping to win, but my fellow students who won those categories really did smash up jobs and since I’ve been in class with most of them for the entire 18 months I can’t help but be very happy for them.
Our student short, which we struggled to pump out in about mmm…. 8 weeks? Didn’t make it to the show! Our instructor Ed Gomez, who was to bring the DVD had his wife go into labor and had to rush to the hospital for the birth of his first child - congratulations Ed; any lesser excuse and we would have drawn and quartered you.
I was disappointed at the lack of industry presence for the animation group. It seems most of the studios do their hunting at CalArts. I was eager to make some contacts and talk to some people who might critique my work and perhaps offer entry level jobs and if they were there, they were wearing their ninja cloaks of invisibility. I think that is one of the negative parts of a fast track degree like this. On average we have 8-9 weeks to produce our short films where I hear that 4 year colleges may spend a year or more on one killer short. Will be hard to compete toe to toe with one of those reels.
I slapped a few extra sheets into my portfolio (I know I know, should have spent more time but juggling finals, work and wrapping up all these assignments has been tough). Here are the extra pages in case anyone is interested. Since I finished my school work early (YAY!) I’m going to spend the next week or two of school time revamping my portfolio, eating pizza and creating a demo reel. I hope I can also squeeze in at least one new killer piece, let’s see how it goes.
In case you’re an employer in my area I have a lot more varied work than this and would love to hear from you.