A Fortnight of Years

Today is the first day of Autumn: the Fall Equinox of Twenty Twenty: the weirdest year ever.

Actually, I think it was yesterday. I asked Google when Libra began and it was like “lol the 23rd I gotchu fam” but apparently that’s not the same day as the Autumnal Equinox this year?

Whatever.

I don’t really have anything to add rhetorically to the resounding chorus of lament as to how terrible this year has been. I moved into a tiny apartment downtown in the largest city in my state under the impression that the city will be my backyard and six months later the city, and the whole world, were shut down. Things seem to be improving somewhat now...  if you squint and ignore a lot of stuff.

I have certainly had no shortage of free time. 

Often, during this newfound abundance of free time, I find myself completely indulged in a fantasy of my own making instead of focused on the reality right in front of me. One of my favorite fantasies is to go back in time to a specific moment in my life so that, much like reloading an old save file in a video game, I could just start there and redo everything that's happened since.

It seems this is a pretty common flight amongst us neurotic folk. Sometimes I’ll be doing something mundane and I’ll suddenly remember an embarrassing moment in high school where I tripped over my words or said something stupid. It’s as if my brain has been holding onto that moment for years, or even decades, just to release it like a sudden reminder of just how lame one could possibly be. 

But this save state fantasy is not really the same thing as a compulsive romp down Embarrassment Lane. No, I just wonder if I could have done things differently. I think if I could actually load up a save file from my past, I would go back to college somewhere in the year 2006.

I could go back further. Maybe to the mid 90’s, a more innocent time, before pubescence and the harsh realities of the adult world. Or perhaps to 2002, when I met the first girl I ever loved. If I could do that over again, knowing what I know now, it’s possible I’d be married and trotting along happily ever after - who knows?

If I really could load up an old save of my life, it wouldn’t be to salvage a relationship, it would be to start my career over again. I don’t hate the path I’ve gone down, but if I could go at it again with the wisdom I’ve gained in the last fourteen years I would like to see how differently I could do it over.

It’s been weird.

One of my earliest memories is painting with watercolors. I was probably 4. At the age of 5, I played Duck Hunt on the original NES, and the idea of creating graphics on a computer was permanently sealed in my mind. I continued drawing as I got older, eventually creating comic books with my friends and later my own series set in my own world. The writing was terrible, but it was the best my little kid brain could do. 

In high school I started writing more. I think I’ve actually been complimented more for my writing throughout my life than I have for anything else. People seem to connect with it. In tenth grade, I remember my literature teacher calling me out in front of the whole class for a piece I had submitted as a creative writing assignment. It was called “Freeman” and it was about a guy trying to escape in the sewers after some terrible event occurred on the surface above. I don’t have that piece anymore - like so many things, it’s lost to time. I remember that I wrote it in an ambiguous way. I focused more on the moment to moment actions of the protagonist and his desire to escape. My teacher was enchanted by this and announced to the class that what I wrote was atypical of high school students. It felt more like a real short story written by an actual author.

Little did she know that I was actually just obsessed with the game Half Life and I had written a piece from the perspective of the main character, Gordon Freeman.

So I began writing almost as much as I was drawing. Still today, I draw and write all the time. My life is fairly simple; more sophisticated computer work, chasing girls, and going to the gym are some of the only additions I’ve made to the life formula of art and introversion since I was a kid.

By the time I started college in 2003, I had written an entire saga complete with character designs, storyboards, and an appendix of made up things. I remember meeting a friend at a café during those years so she could read it. Again, the writing got the most praise.

The first college I went to was a local community college. It cost about $3,000 for books and the first semester but I later got a full scholarship from my art teacher. My teacher and I had very similar tastes. He painted elaborate pieces based on biblical iconography. One really cool tidbit about him is that he was personally trained by Nall Hollis, one of the last students under Salvador Dali.

After I graduated with a degree in Studio Art, I enrolled in a far more expensive accelerated program. This time I thought it would be a good idea to bridge my interests in technology and art into a singular focus so I chose to move to Orlando and study Computer Animation. I started Full Sail in January of 2005. At the time, it was just an accelerated program college, but now it’s a full fledged university.

That first year was magical. I met some of the best friends I’ve ever had, learned a ton about technology, art, animation, sculpture, figure drawing, and 3D modeling. I finally took a nude figure drawing class - something I had always wanted to do but never had the opportunity. I learned to work in Mac OS, Linux, and Unix command line. I learned how to set up an animation from start to finish - from storyboarding, to modeling, to rigging, to lighting, and rendering.

At the end of that first year, we were assigned groups and told to come up with a short animated story. We would draw the storyboards, model the characters, rig and animate them, then render it all out ourselves and the end product would be our demo reel. I was placed in a group of super talented guys - most of whom I assume are now working on huge movies or games. We wrote a story, we came up with the characters, and began pre-visualization.

This is where all my talents and dreams coalesced. All my life I had been drawing and writing, and now I was doing something for real, with an actual group of talented students, and we were actually going to make it a reality.

The semester came to a close. It was December break and we all went home for the holidays.

This is the moment I wish I could go back to.

I had no idea what was about to happen. I thought we would just go with the plan - make the animated short. But upon my return to school, we found out that the entire curriculum had changed. Now, instead of working in a group, we would each individually create three pieces of work, completely unrelated to all the storyboards we had already created.

Obviously, this caused quite an uproar. Something about Full Sail that they don’t tell you in the brochures is that about 90% of all the students that enter the program fail. A ton of people had not made the cut already, and this drastic, sudden change inspired a few others to jump ship. At this point, I had yet to find the classes overly difficult so I shrugged it off and got to work.

Before the change, I essentially was writing and directing a short, but now I was simply animating three different things. We had the option to either do three animations, or create three rigs (the bones inside a computer model), or three models, or light and render three sets. My roommate, who didn’t even start as an Animation Major (he was interested in Audio Engineering), decided to get into lighting and rendering - and now he does it professionally for Dreamworks. My neighbor and - since this was college - my honorary other roommate decided to focus on compositing - a subject we only briefly went over, but he knocked it so far out of the park that it blew even the teachers’ minds and now he’s a badass at an ad agency.

I on the other hand had trouble. I wasn’t exactly the best animator but I chose to turn in three animations. One passed, the other two never did. I took the class three times and never passed the other animations. Knowing what I know now, I realize that the problem was that I was too focused on the technical aspects of Maya - the application we used to animate. I was fascinated by its node based approach and kept digging deeper into it. I should have been focused on animating, but instead I was looking at an endless daunting ocean of possibility…

I spent a lot of time building a robot for the animations I had planned. Just the act of building it was really all I was into. The technicality of it. I went down a rabbit hole at exactly the worst time - but then again, isn’t college about figuring yourself out?

The animations never passed. I took out more student loans (that I’m still paying for). And eventually, I dropped out.

The Silence is the Question

I went to school for art and then I went to school for computer animation. I graduated with accolades for art. I failed with crippling debt for computer animation. I was no better off either, at least at first. The only work I could find was for minimum wage jobs I could’ve gotten without any degree at all. But I never turned work down. I couldn’t really; perhaps the student loan debt was more a motivator than anything else.

Finally, I managed to convince someone to hire me. It just so happened that it was the Army. I had actually tried many times to get work with them doing super technical stuff and even video game design (the Army did, and still does, make a video game.)

The job was technical and involved a sort of hybrid advertising, and I did it for six years. Then I got my current job. Now, I do more tech stuff during the day - which I might be better at than anything else - and I draw FLOLAS, or hiatus projects, or graphics for Chinese light bulbs…

That’s a real thing! (In China!)

I once watched a vignette about how Rick and Morty is made. It’s very laborious because they use vector rigs, that being 2D hand drawn assets that they rig up like 3D puppets, or marionettes, then they move and transform each vector - lines, shading, Rick’s lab coat - keyframe by keyframe. This process becomes exponentially more complicated when they have dozens of characters on screen, or camera movement. One of the technical directors is quoted as saying “it took a lot of work by a lot of very talented people to get that shot.”

I think about stuff like that, and not that I don’t want to do such work - I do - but it’s amazing that so many people work so hard on someone else’s project instead of dedicating that same work ethic to their own project. This is a background process running in my mind at all times.

What I’ve managed to do for myself is get a stable, somewhat noninvasive career in IT that allows me ample time to work on FLOLAS: my comic book, this website, and this blog. I’m not rich or famous. I don’t have tons of accolades or readers.

But it’s growing.

And I’m becoming a better artist. Which was the point of this all along.