From Animation to Typography, an Elective Switch
The typography elective has turned out to be a surprise. A good surprise! I entered the course after a disappointing first day of animation...
After being stuck in that sweaty IT PC lab for three hours going through the beginnings of Flash MX I was bored and disappointed. I thought it would have been more drawing or concept based, but it was in fact, a step by step guide to using the Macromedia software. For me, I’ve been using it for the past four years, so that first day was tedious, though on a positive note, since I’ve always used it to publish for the web it was nice to learn a few new tricks for doing heavier file size animations.
Thankfully I saw Patrick, graphics course director, in the canteen area during lunch, and thankfully he asked me how the elective was going. Of course I didn’t hold back my criticism and after describing my frustrations he said, “I thought you’d be better off with typography...” at this time I panicked a little, realising he just confirmed my suspicion that I sucked at type during the first 10 weeks of graphics and thought, I should take his suggestion and try to improve.
That night I was feeling hesitant about switching and thought I’d best speak to the animation tutor to see if she could offer any advice. I HATED typography in Graphics and felt dubious about transferring, even after speaking to Patrick, I was convinced I just had a bad first day in animation. So, I approached the tutor in the next morning’s lecture (Robert Morgan’s animation) and told her I felt the class might not be right for me with all of my Flash experience and asked if we would be learning any of the traditional and experimental concepts of animation. She replied with something along the lines of this, “you can push the brief whichever way you like, Katie will be doing some tutorials in After Effects, but no, I won’t have time to show you how to get under a camera. I can’t tell you what to do, you have to do what you want to do.”
I left after the lecture and switched to typography.
After being stuck in that sweaty IT PC lab for three hours going through the beginnings of Flash MX I was bored and disappointed. I thought it would have been more drawing or concept based, but it was in fact, a step by step guide to using the Macromedia software. For me, I’ve been using it for the past four years, so that first day was tedious, though on a positive note, since I’ve always used it to publish for the web it was nice to learn a few new tricks for doing heavier file size animations.
Thankfully I saw Patrick, graphics course director, in the canteen area during lunch, and thankfully he asked me how the elective was going. Of course I didn’t hold back my criticism and after describing my frustrations he said, “I thought you’d be better off with typography...” at this time I panicked a little, realising he just confirmed my suspicion that I sucked at type during the first 10 weeks of graphics and thought, I should take his suggestion and try to improve.
That night I was feeling hesitant about switching and thought I’d best speak to the animation tutor to see if she could offer any advice. I HATED typography in Graphics and felt dubious about transferring, even after speaking to Patrick, I was convinced I just had a bad first day in animation. So, I approached the tutor in the next morning’s lecture (Robert Morgan’s animation) and told her I felt the class might not be right for me with all of my Flash experience and asked if we would be learning any of the traditional and experimental concepts of animation. She replied with something along the lines of this, “you can push the brief whichever way you like, Katie will be doing some tutorials in After Effects, but no, I won’t have time to show you how to get under a camera. I can’t tell you what to do, you have to do what you want to do.”
I left after the lecture and switched to typography.
posted by erin at 11:44 am
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