Animation classes start up again less than 24 hours from now. Holiday break is officially over. My mentor for Class 4 is Ike Feldman, animator at PIXAR. I'm excited to see what we'll learn in our next lecture and the details of our upcoming assignments. I look forward to returning to learning, but I was very glad to have had the long break.
I decided to mostly abstain from animating during the break for a number of reasons. First and foremost is that focusing so intently on school work for the past 9 months meant I had to neglect some other important areas of my personal life. My room and my desk have been a disaster area. Though bills were paid as agreed, I had to keep the details of personal and family bookkeeping to a minimum, so there are some things that hadn't been attended to in a while. (I am responsible for my parents' finances as well as my own, so it can be kinda complicated.) The break afforded me much needed time to take care of these kinds of things that have been hovering incomplete over my head for too long. There are still many things I have to work on, but I got a lot done during the break.
Second, I needed a chance to relax. Well, sort of relax. My life itself is stressful and exhausting a good deal of the time, so removing anything from my plate relieves some of the pressure on the days when things are especially challenging. Not having to worry about finishing an assignment helped a great deal.
The third thing is that I guess I felt like taking a break from animating would give me a fresh start for the coming months. I know that it will be a while before there's another break and, with so many other responsibilities, I thought I'd better focus on other areas while I had the chance.
That said, it wasn't really my first choice to put aside animation. If I wasn't so far behind on other things I would have preferred to just keep right on animating, revisiting and cleaning up past assignments, experimenting with new ideas, practicing. I mean, I do love animating! If my time was my own I surely would not have stopped animating at all during the break. In fact, for the first week of break I was seriously jonesin' for some animatin'. I kept wanting to drop all that other boring stuff and just animate, but there just wasn't time for it. Luckily, this past week I started getting into it again with the help of Jeff Kim's 3-hour "Animation Showdowns". I actually did one of 'em and had a good time. It would have been great to do more, but now class is starting up again and I'll be plenty busy.
One thing all of us Mentees are excited about is the totally revised Version 2 of the AnimationMentor campus! Many of us beta-tested the new site over the past few weeks and it is a huge-normous leap upgrade from the previous one. Wow! What a lot of work that was and awesome great job the AM teAM did getting it all together. As I've mentioned in our own forums, incoming students have no idea how much better they'll have it.
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