Animated

Quick post, today:

My experiences as an artist and graphic designer have been… varied, to say the least. I’ve had jobs that kept me stagnant and uninspired, and jobs that have challenged me and exposed me to big name clients I’d only ever dreamed of working for. I’ve worked for small businesses and massive industries alike. I’ve spent time perfecting personal work that no one’s turned their head at, and whipped out corporate work, without much thought, that’s gone on to become so public and widely distributed that I’m not even allowed to lay claim to it, or feature it on my portfolio (damn contracts and NDA’s). I’ve even had the thrill to have a famous face or two (or three, or four) sit across from my desk.

Yet through it all, and particularly within the last year or so, I’ve noticed that my skillset as a designer - graphic or otherwise - has gotten me only so far up the side of “career fulfillment mountain”. Yes, it has helped me break into an industry I’d have never considered possible 5 years ago when I graduated college, but because I’ve taught myself most everything technical that’s brought me thus far, it feels like I’m at the end of my rope - capability, speaking. So why not do it again? Why not do exactly what I did senior year of college, when I recognized that what I’d been taught would only get me so far in the real world and taught myself graphic design? Rather than sit tight where I am, why not grab hold of my knapsack of skills and move forward? To stop hiking the slowly winding trails up the side of the mountain, and start climbing up the side of the damn thing?

This is my long-winded way of saying I’m going back to school for Motion Design. Motion Design/Motion Graphic Design, while being tricky to define, is essentially “animation driven by design”. I’m an artsy kid of the 1990’s - a forever Mouseketeer - so animation is everything to me, and “design” is what I’ve been studying and falling in love with for over a decade. Design + Animation = Gray is very happy. And I can honestly say that, even after a week of study within the world of “MoGraph”, I am certain this is the right path for me. Motion Design is calling into action not only all I’ve taught myself and all I learned from art school, but now, thanks to these classes, coming up from the ground is a once-dead, academic backlog of trigonometry practices, calculus theorems, and computer science knowledge that can finally be put to good use (so there you go, kids - what you learned in your high school math class actually can help you out later in life - yay, liberal arts education!).

So, here we go again! It’ll mean long nights in front of the computer, Eddy snoring at my feet, and shilling out $$$ in the midst of a global economic and medical crisis. But I’ll be investing in myself, truly investing in myself, for the first time in a long time. Not just with money, but in spirit. Motion Design is already reigniting the creative spark I was certain had gone out when I left college, and it’s helping me believe in myself and my capabilities again - as an artist, designer, and illustrator.

For that, I’m incredibly happy.

Or, I suppose you could say, I’m ‘animated’.