Sunday, September 30, 2007

New (School) Year, New Classes, Same Goal: see above

I've long since returned from New York/New Jersey and the short of it is this: you can't fit a square peg into a round hole, especially when the square knows it's a square and tries to anyways. Trans: I'm not an assistant, knew I wasn't, but tried to hack it anyways. Whoops.

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Onto the business of the moment. I'm more or less a DXARTS major now, which is great. This year, my time is going to be dominated by the Computer Science dept.'s Animation Capstone series. The class is more story-centric than the DXARTS equivalent, and is designed to provide us with an immersive, industry-like experience during the production of a short animated film.

In tandem with the capstone class, I'm taking a Technology & Story class that is responsible for developing stories for the class-wide animated short we're to begin work on winter quarter. It's entirely story-focused, which will be great for me since I feel like last year's video sequence made me comfortable enough with the moving image as an artifact itself, for me to be able to focus more on just the act of storytelling itself. It's a process of give-and-take, I think.

On the DXARTS side of things, I'll be taking DXARTS 400 all year as well, which is a two-credit undergraduate research seminar. From what I've heard, it's a pretty open-ended experience, that is just supposed to allow us students to dream-up a project and follow-through with it. Needless to say, it should be pretty fun.

So, all that said, the subsequent posts in this here blog are going to involve either story ideation for animation, or for project ideation for DXARTS. And maybe a little cross-pollination of the two.