Here is another installment from Simon Taylor and his experiences with the Animation Mentor Program. Congratulations to Simon on being hired by Impossible TV in London. I have really enjoyed watching Simon's growth from a participate in the Young Animators Festival in Bradford, England to a working animator and believe that we will hear more from Simon in the future.
Greetings!
Time's flying past at Animation Mentor and a lot has happened since my last blog entry. I'm now in Class 4 "Introduction to Acting" and on top of that have just started my first full-time animation job at Impossible TV in London. This is going to give me an entirely new perspective on the course as I'm really going to have to manage my time well. Luckily I'm on a bit of a roll with my current assignment which always helps although it doesn't seem to happen anywhere near as often as I'd like!
My mentor for this term is veteran Disney animator T. Dan Hofstedt. It's been fascinating learning from someone who worked on so many of the films I grew up watching such as Aladdin, The Lion King, Hercules, Tarzan, to name but a few. We're of course learning a lot from the lectures as well with this week's being about eyes, there was also a Q&A about Up which unfortunately clashed with my first day at work. Waking up at 4am for the Q&A probably wouldn't have helped my state of alertness!
A couple of weeks ago I went to my first Animation Mentor gathering in London. It was great meeting so many fellow AMers and everything suddenly felt a lot more real and in a strange sort of way almost like meeting somebody famous off TV when we've only ever seen each other on webcams. Who'd have thought we all had backs to our heads! We met up in Hyde Park, chatted, shared Pringles, moved to a pub, chatted lots more, I got told about the benefits of Twitter and then a couple of us went to see Ice Age 3 in the evening, sadly the 3D wasn't working, which was the first time I'd ever seen that happen. I need to think of something pricey to go and see now that I have a London-price complimentary ticket! I can't wait to meet up with everybody again, which should be soon as Up is finally released over here in October!
I suppose I should probably go to sleep now, it's bizarre getting used to a "normal" sleep pattern again and working Monday to Friday, it's been years since I last did that! Maybe I'll even manage not to trip over the same paving stone just outside of London Bridge station that I managed to forget about every day last week! I'm really looking forward to week two though, it's a great environment and we're a surprisingly small team, reminds me of doing our group animation projects at University last year. Been good fun so far.
All the best!
Simon
