I'm Getting the Hang of Animating With Maya

I'm about 6 weeks into the Animation Mentor program now and I must say that I love it. It's challenging, interesting, the learning environment is great and the people are great too.

I've learned a lot of different basic animation concepts but the biggest thing is being able to practice with assignments and receiving professional feedback. That's where I've learned the most. There have been so many details in my animation that I wouldn't have noticed without someone else with far more experience looking at my work.

My Animation Mentor Journey Begins

I decided a few months ago to shift my career fully into 3D character animation. I had dabbled in 3D animation while working on commercials with my previous company and really enjoyed it. But character animation is pretty darn hard and if I'm going to do it, I want to be awesome at it.

That's why I enrolled in Animation Mentor. It's an exclusively online program and the instructors are all professional working animators. The demo reels produced by students of the program are excellent and the demo reels are what matter in this industry. I went to a USC Cinema job fair a few months ago and I was encouraged to learn that the Pixar and Dreamworks Animation reps both spoke very highly of the program.

Hello world!

I'm finally relaunching my blog! After several attempts to get the right CMS software on my server, I've settled on Drupal and will be using this site to write about different topics that interest me.

I've debated whether I should keep a tight focus on a particular subject or write about whatever interests me. I've decided to do neither and both at the same time. (Can I be any more indecisive?) I'll be focusing on a small number of topics that interest me. These are: (1) film and animation, (2) technology, and (3) food. Those are pretty broad topics but there are only a few things that I like to talk about within each category.

So let's begin!