Featured Mentor at Animation Mentor this week!

I'm the Featured Mentor for Week 9 at Animation Mentor this week, so for students, stop by and ask away with the questions! I look forward to it!

Josh

SIGGRAPH Wrap Up

SIGGRAPH was a blast. It's great to have a celebration of our industry and art once a year. It's a time to catch up with old friends, see what other people are working on, and for the industry's future to get it's start. Previous years at SIGGRAPH I was there for the first two reasons - this time it was for the third. I spent the majority of the two days there in the Nickelodeon recruiting booth in the job fair, talking mostly with students and recent grads looking to get into the business.

We decided, for better or for worse, to offer feedback on students' reels. The "for better" is that this is for the most part critical advice that students really need, but have a hard time getting. The "for worse" is that we were swamped with people who wanted feedback, literally having a line form out the door when the job fair opened. But, I'm always happy to help, so we started scheduling people at 10-minute intervals, which then turned into 5-minute, when the list filled up the full two days I'd be there in several minutes.

There was some solid work by the young folk looking to break in. One thing is clear - it's the student, not the school, that determines their success. I told a lot of students something along the lines of the following:

"You gotta keep going. Keep creating more. Everyone who's made it in this industry is here because we're all self-driven. You don't create because you have an assignment or a teacher telling you do finish, it comes from inside. We do this at nights, on weekends, after work, etc. You can have a million excuses why you can't work on something, but it takes the drive of always growing, always getting better, always pushing yourself, to make it. If you're not working on getting better, someone else is".

Or, as I've always said "It's about how bad you want it".

I don't want to scare people, but it is a very competitive industry - that's the truth. Now is a great time to get in, as the industry's growing, but it's still takes persistence and determination. And skill. And those all have to come from within.