Fall 2018

GAND 101 & 102: Two classes that were shared within the semester. Foundational GAND classes that got me started on thinking about how to solve visual problems and create simple yet effective designs and pieces.

GAND 103: Class that was meant to challenge how I think about a creative project. New mediums and materials were introduced, and though the crafted projects were difficult, I showed proper work ethic in my process. It wasn’t as much about how good the projects were, but rather how the artist handles the work, and how willing they are to keep trying, despite many failures. I redid one project at least three times, and another one about the same. Neither turned out great, but I never quit.

CTZN 110-58: My Honors course for this semester. I learned similar lessons as in SOCL, but I learned more how to debate and feel around a sensitive topic more than about the topics themselves. I learned what can or cannot be a sensitive nerve to hit when talking about a certain topic, and if I mistakenly make somebody upset, I learned how to work through that with them. One of my harder classes, but not bad.

(Writing course was satisfied by previous AP English credits)

Spring 2019

GAND 104: Digital craft was a fairly hefty class, with plenty of work to do and a lot of time to get it done, except for towards the end of the semester. I had a lot of trouble trying to piece together enough content in such little time for the knot booklet I did with a partner, and it taught me to start utilizing my time smarter than I do right now.

GAND 105: Wow.

This was by far the hardest class I’ve ever taken, in my life. We were hitting the ground running from day one, and did not stop once during our time in this class. Critique and research for design takes much more work than anyone would expect, and it killed everyone. People broke down over it, everyone hated it. But, it was still hard and good work. It simulated the pressure of working on tight deadlines, where the design team could just barely get it done in time, even when working constantly on it.

This was the class that took up a majority of my time, doing nothing but consistent research, frantic building of presentations for things like Research Day, and writing plenty of creative briefs and case studies for our projects. Despite hating it, it was all good information, and I’m glad I survived it.

GAND 204: Less intense of a course, but got more intense towards the end of the semester. The storyboarding for the end project took a lot of time, and a lot of heartache, and this was only because we had not started it sooner. My excuse: GAND 105 ate our time, but even then, it’s not quite a valid one. I still had time I didn’t utilize to the best usage it could have been, and it gave me one more slap over the head to drive home the point of “DO NOT PROCRASTINATE.”

Fall 2019

GAND 202: This class was one of my more fun classes, where I studied many people’s poses, and studied how to draw human and animal movement. The thing I realized in this class is, my favorite thing to draw, if I had to choose, would have to be flowing movement and action poses. I already enjoy fluid fight scenes in movies and shows (as cliche as that is) so it made me wonder: could I draw pieces and assets like these for a career later? Or would storyboarding better suit me? This year had given me many moments like that, where I’m starting to figure out what I like about animation, and what I prefer not to do.

GAND 205: One of my less fun classes of the year, where plenty of my time went to researching, building a motion film, a poetry cube, the whole nine yards. It’s practical experience as usual, but what makes me happier about studying these things is, it’s almost over. I’m beginning to focus more on timing in film/animation, so hopefully I’ll be able to continue learning these things. Building cubes out of wood isn’t my idea of animation, but it is still experience. I’m not spiteful, nor do I regret this class.

GAND 210: I wish I had focused more of my energy in this class. This was Animation and Simulation I — my very first animation class, aside from Action Analysis I. And I feel like I blew it.

I passed, sure, but many of my tiny animations I did in this class felt like I could have done MUCH better than I did. I had plenty of chances to go all out and make the most realistic, physics-influenced animations I could, and yet, I spent all my time essentially doing nothing, and then rushing to finish my animations the night before deadline. I’m ashamed of myself and my poor work ethic, and I don’t know why I keep doing this to myself. Animation and Simulation II will hopefully be better than this one. I want to do well. I don’t do well, but I want to.

GAND 325: This one was my 3D Modeling class, and it helped introduce me to many, many new concepts in the world of animation. It was interesting! I built a whole, mostly functional bike, put a character on top of the bike, and I practiced some simple animation with these models. This class helped me realize that I would really love to build some character models using a 3D modeling software, but I’m still not really prepared to do that yet. I struggled a lot in this class, because many parts of my bike liked to be broken or look strange, so it required a lot of extra hours to fix everything. I regret nothing from that class, though, and it makes me excited to continue with 3D modeling. I didn’t think I would enjoy this bittersweet struggle so much, but I did, and I’m gonna do more.

Spring 2020

ART 362: This class was pretty fun, though difficult, because as usual, I’m not the greatest at history. Art history was interesting, in that it’s the kind of subject I NEVER hear about. Maybe I’m not looking in the right places to see this topic, but I did this semester, and it was nice. It didn’t change my view on art dramatically, but it helped contextualize the kinds of artworks that people made. Usually I saw pieces that were reactionary: a time period shifts because of a big event, such as war or new colonies, whatever, and as a result of this dramatic change, artists created artworks and paintings to reflect their own feelings about it. Some enjoyed painting what they saw in the world, perhaps wanting to reflect on a better time, or to capture how their world is in the current moment. Some painted what they felt, or painted what they wanted to see more of. We do the same thing today, and it was a sort of comfort, seeing how people from the past coped with change. We’re not much different from those people one hundred years ago.

GAND 212: This has been another one of my classes that I’ve been waiting for, for a long time: Narrative Sequencing and Storyboarding. I LOVE STORYBOARDING. Hell, I might even try to be a storyboard artist for a career, I enjoyed it so much.

It was still difficult to juggle my time for this class, but I didn’t want to procrastinate on it like I do for every one of my other classes. I took care to express the right emotions for my characters, include beats of pauses between conversations, and generally learn to construct a natural-sounding situation. “Would this actually happen in real life?” I asked myself. And despite my creations being fantasy or science fiction, the conversations themselves were plausible. It was like solving the puzzle of social scenarios, and I like puzzle-solving.

 

GAND 330: Illustration and Digital Imaging. I don’t normally paint anything, but this class made me paint several times. I painted two posts, the front and back of a fake album cover, and then during our shift from normal to pandemic learning, we all went home and drew digital images using tablets and our computers. I enjoy drawing digitally more than I enjoy painting, but I found out that, when I have a solid subject I need to paint, and an end goal, then it’s fairly relaxing and fun to paint things traditionally. The thing that had stopped me from painting before was my lack of focus. I didn’t even know what I wanted to paint. Once I had a direction, especially with a deadline, it helped kickstart my motivation to paint and finish my paintings. I’m not the best painter, but I got my point across, and it was a nice time.

I REALLY loved building those comic pages digitally, though. That was my favorite part out of the whole class. I already draw comic pages for myself, as a personal project, so my final assignment was a good excuse to just… indulge. I went ham on those two pages.