ANC220 - Week 01

Another Trimester means another assessed component pertaining to weekly blogs. I'm assured that this time they will be read; whether or not I believe that won't have any bearing on the quality, lengthiness, poor grammar or excessive use of long winded, unnecessary sentences throughout. In fact, anonymous reader, if you enjoy reading through my blogs I'll even link you to my personal webpage where I wrote for some past subjects. www.ryanmittencreative.com.au/blog.

You'll also be able to see the blogs I've written for other units here on this Wix blog - why didn't I just enter them all in the one place? Surely that'd make it easier for people to see, right? Well here's one of the many reason I love writing blogs for classes. You see, my personal webpage was created so that I could market myself and my display my portfolio. Now because of the kind of person I am, I felt that sharing my blogs - especially those related to my school work (as this is proof of development of my skill set, as well as proof of study) would be of benefit to me as it would differentiate me from others within the creative space (as I don't believe that many other artists share this kind of information with their audience) as well as help me create a connection with a potential client. Anyway, I proposed this (although in not so many words) to a past lecturer who was all thumbs-up for the idea and allowed me to post my blogs on my website. The following tri, another teacher allowed me to do the same, but in typical SAE fashion, we had to write blogs for nearly every damn subject and I had a repeat teacher in both first and seconds tri's who also required blogs who didn't feel the same way about me writing on my personal webpage - subjectivity in marking: brilliant. And so [yes, I began a sentence with the word 'and'] I had to create this blog to write for those units. This has of course occurred multiple times throughout my first year of study and now I have blogs across two platforms.

Of course your next questions is, "Well then Ryan, why not just move the blogs from one place to another to condense them?" Well, smartypants, I've already tried this. If I had to choose between my personal, paid, webpage and this Wix site, I would of course choose to host everything on my own site - however, one of the personalized stipulations for a complete blog entry form my last teachers, were that I had to show proof of progress in my blogs through the use of screen caps - which you would've noticed by now, because i know you've gone and read through my past entries, my posts are chock full of. Because of the nature of this platform (Wix), blog posts are created in a weird, CSS influenced template which is always accessible - I guess one of the main benefits of this is that it allows for posts to be AMC (add/move/change) ad-hoc and updated in almost real time (you know, because you still have to publish the settings before they take effect). However, a feature I feel is severely lacking from Wix is the ability to pack the entirety of the post into a text file or something self-contained which can then be manipulated outside of this platform (yes, I'm aware that for the reasons of keeping the information within Wix i of benefit to them is obvious), because if that were the case then I'd simply copy/paste each and every entry that is located her, on my personal website. However that is not the case, and therefore I cannot do that, and I would instead have to place all the paragraphs, one by one and then upload and insert each and every image again and again for all the blogs - I mean, I'd rather watch paint dry.

So I've really said nothing of substance so far - then again, I haven't really produced any work of substance thus far in the course - we have however gone through our lessons plans - or at very least, the structure of the weeks. For the first time, this subject is quite lax in it's criterion for assessed work - I shot Phil an email earlier in the week asking for information about the assessments this term - you see, I have an Excel spreadsheet that I create every term, and include all the assessments, their due dates, weighting, what's required etc - it helps me stay on top on things. Now i usually pull all this information form the module guides located on campus online, yet for ANC220, the assessment section in the module guide is...well it's different, it's a loose outline of the work that's expected, but that's about it. It's not a set of guidelines to follow as with other subjects, rather it takes the tone of "well, you'll be producing some work with these students from another tri and you'll be marked on your performance through the term". Which to me is crazy talk! not really, I just like that phrase. Anyway, Phil told me much the same, that there will be a major assessment to be completed in conjunction with the Studio 3 kids and there'll be some individual components to be completed in our workshop that's run by Nigel.

Now I'm usually on top of all the work that's to come for the trimester, by the end of the first week - because i use the time off study (because there isn't much work to be delivered comparatively) to get my head around what all my deliverable are. Yet for this unit, ANC220, i'm still kinda perplexed. I had thought that by Thursday - the workshop class- that some light would be shed by Nigel, and to a point, it was, but I'm still not too sure what work we'll be covering int he weeks to come. Likewise, in Phil's class, the bare bones structure of the two, amalgamated studios is still finding its feet and until we all really begin to have discussions about the project, I feel there's still much speculation surrounding what work we'll actually be doing. Of course, I imagine that by this time next week, I'll have more information and in that blog I'll probably explain all that ot you, but if by you, you are indeed Phil, then I won't really need ot explain it all because you're in the class and will have first hand/or you know, second hand knowledge of what work we'll be doing. Which is another thing I usually poke fun at in my blogs - I'll go ahead and explain a concept as if somebody other than my teacher, who explained the concept in questions to me in the first place is reading it. Hilarity!

Nigel's pretty cool btw - I know he's new to the school, so the faculty members probably don't know a whole bunch about him either - but he seems nice enough, educated enough and disciplined enough to get results out of us - but that's still to be proven. He wants us to bring in 3 objects form home to model as assets for one of our first pieces of work in the workshop - that's pretty cool, because as I said in class, I like to model stuff. I also like to draw - go check my website - I also like to animate. Although I don't know if animation is all I wanna do - that dope sheet is hard work, man. Also because I as well as many of the students in class, self taught ourselves almost, literally everything - animation included. So my lack of experience with animation is only due to my lack of work put into mastering it - although I must say that when things start moving, I find it quite cathartic - I put that down to my younger days - in primary school I would draw comic strips of stick figures fighting other stick figures in super awesome battles - I grew up watching old kung fu movies: Project - A, Police Story, Big Boss, you know what - pretty much anything with Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee - then to a later, chronological extent, Jet Li, Tony Jaa and Donnie Yen. I also fell in love with the cinematography and fight scenes in the wahciozksikssis' Matrix 1. What was I saying? Oh, the comic strip - I also liked to draw little animations on the bottom of post it notes - so i guess I've always like putting animations together - but I see that mastering fluid, and believable animations in Maya for instance, is an arduous journey, and not only do I have to master it, but I have to do so BETTER than hundreds of other people who can likely already do much much better than I can who are also looking for jobs. Oh Christ let's not talk about the job market. Basically animation may not be the thing I want to pursue professionally - I mean my dream job was to develop Video Games, before i knew what 'develop' actually referred to as a vertical within the industry and coding can f**k right off. I had to learn Java when I underwent my bachelor in IT and never again. Because I love to draw, I think that being a concept artist would be great! In fact, here's some of my work for you to peruse.

But after being to Japan a couple of times I realise that there are literally thousands of people more skilled than I am at that - not to mention, I'll likely be working for somebody which means that i'm drawing the things they wanna see, and not what I wanna see. Of course the goal is to have my own game dev studio, because then I can draw whatever the hell I want! mua ha! Ok now I'm just wasting time - you're gonna have to forgive me - I work a lot given how many hours I also need to dedicate to school - (someone's gotta pay off the $70,000 tuition for this course, amiright?!) I'll let that sink in - because every time I mention it I almost have to do a double take, because it actually costs about that much. Anyway, the reason I mention the hours of work is because I usually get a day off between school and my job - and on that day I go bat shit insane and try to dorp as many hours, undisturbed on my school work as possible because I don't have a large block of time to do so the rest of the week - and by the end of it, which is about now - I lose the plot and just type, which is why i leave things like my blogs to the end of the day because their quality can be compromised and I don't really care....unless you were the teacher I had in seconds tri last year - see, he wanted each anad every blog to be as succinct, spell checked and professional as possible. Tot hat end I had to re write a handful of them - I really hated doing that - and the hilarious thing is that I had actually switched classes mid tri that term, because the student services or whoever allocated my timetable put me in the wrong class (i was will all audio students) and that audio teacher wanted all the blogs to be as creative and colorful and all over the place as possible! So I had gone and written a bunch of blogs, changed classes and then my new teacher didn't like the style of any of my blogs is i re wrote them! What fun!

Ok i'm done, this is a waste of time now because I sitll have more work to try and do. Here's somethign fun though, if you go through this blog again, and replace all the fun words with negative words - it really changes the tone of the content!

Bravo to you if you made it down here.

- Ryan