Avery Brown DIGM 475 Blog Post

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Life Before DIGM

When I first started high school, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do.  Computer graphics had been my hobby, but I had limited access to tools and no formal training.  Mostly, I just liked to make buildings in Sketch-Up.

640×480 was my perferred resolution at this point

Maybe, I thought, I will be an architect.  Sometimes, I still wonder if that would have been a much better choice.  However, at the beginning of my Sophomore year, I transferred from a tiny private school to a public school.  That public school was eight times larger and had a huge career and technical education program.  When I first started school, the guidance counselor was helping me with my schedule, and he asked me what I liked to do.  Fine art had always been my go to, but I already had an art elective from the year before, so the counselor suggested that I try out their Graphic Design course.  I was hooked in an instant.

I took time to play around with Photoshop after my classwork was done.

At the same time, the free 3d application, Blender, had entered into a new age, which brought the interface into the 21st century.  It exploded, along with the training available for it, and I caught that wave on my spare time.  It just so happened that the same teacher that taught graphic design, taught Broadcasting and Video Production.  He let me download Blender to make visual effects for some of my projects in that class.  I ended up taking six career and technical education electives, all related to digital media, and including an Internship class with a student run t-shirt printing company.  With the encouragement and opportunities afforded me by that program, I eventually decided that I would really enjoy doing this for a living.

Me, dissolving myself with particles.

When it came to college searching, I was still not sure which major I wanted.  It was pretty much, animation something, Film and Video, or Graphic Design.  The animation something was my favorite, and the one that felt the most fun.  But, it was also the rarest and most risky one.  Drexel was an instant standout, because the title was Animation and Visual Effects.  Others, the titles were confusing, and hard to tell whether it was actually the thing I wanted to do.  So, thanks to the clarity in the description of the program, the, unfortunately discontinued, VIP application, and a very generous financial aid package, I chose Drexel from the morass of universities offering media degrees.  The jury is still out on whether that was the right choice…

The Past Four Years

Sometimes I wonder where I would be if I had decided to get an associate’s degree from community college and used the vast amounts of money I have spent on a Digital Tutor’s subscription and a nice computer. After going through English 101 and 102, I actually became a worse writer.  However, most animation courses were certainly worth it, as well as all fine arts classes.  Working with professor’s who have set a deadline and expect a product makes procrastination hard to justify.  Finishing projects is difficult when there are so many other things to do, so a grade is a pretty good motivator to work through it.  In the fine arts, I have a much greater skill level than I had before, and getting guidance from several professors here has really helped me develop as an artist.  For animation classes, there is no way that I would have been pushed into understanding computer graphics (as little as I do) without great professors such as John Berton, Dave Mauriello, and Jeremy Fernsler.  As much as I hate the computer science department at this school, without the classes I took in computer science, I would be as clueless as the day I came in.

A little bit nicer than the Sketch-Up stuff. From my co-op.

My co-op at Brooklyn Digital Foundry was a great experience, though Drexel (and by that, I mean the SCDC) was very little help in finding it.  The person whom I should thank the most would probably be Josh Hollander, who co-op’d at the same place I did the year before, and convinced the company that Drexel students were worth hiring.  Honestly, in terms of professional development (professional practices, public speaking, etc…), there was little that Drexel taught me that I didn’t already know from various high school programs and the Boy Scouts.  Co-op was definitely the opposite of this.  It changed the way I do so many things.  My computer graphics skills improved many times over, my people skills improved even more.  I also made the realization that working isn’t a privilege, granted to you by some all-powerful boss, but a service that you are providing to other human beings in exchange for payment.  And, it was fun!  Even making pictures of pretty standard apartment buildings, was a load of fun.

Looking Ahead

Everything after June is a mystery to me.  I have no job lined up, and I have had no time to really devote to the search.  I know about just as much as I did four years ago.  Finishing senior project is my greatest priority right now.  Hopefully, I will have plenty of reel material that can come out of that.  For the next couple of years, I will have to simply go where the job market takes me.    My co-op in Architectural Visualization was really fun, and I still love modeling buildings.  The market for that is not huge in Philadelphia right now, and it just seems like I will have to leave some time in the near future.  Still, I like the area, though the weather in California and Texas agrees with me much more.  Virtual Reality seams to be a pretty big deal right now, but I will be just as happy making virtual reality content as I would be making anything else.  The medium is not the message that I care about, Mr. McLuhan.  Getting rich on some crazy new technology is not my goal.  Creating really cool things is.  If they intersect, then more power to me, I guess.  My far future goal (sometime in the 2070s most likely) is to retire to a nice place like Sedona, Arizona and spend the rest of my days painting landscapes in the southwest.  Hopefully our Mad Scientist will be able to stabilize the climate with his freeze ray before global warming ruins everything.

Our SPROJ mad scientist dropping some sick beats

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