Animation Concept and Visual Effects

TLDR - I need to decide what I want to do so I can focus what little free time I have toward that singular goal. You can't be 10 things and expect to be good at all of them. Also, getting off my ass and teaching myself the boring basic skills instead of making a long post about it would be nice.


Long version-

The University of Hawaii is good for many, many things. Digital art and lifedrawing are not among these, yet.

In addition, The Academy for Creative Media is a very good program for what it aims to do: create Film and Animation talent locally in Hawaii. It doesn't yet have a section for production art, concept art, matte painting and other related fields and I don't really see that happening with the huge budget cut. Then again, it's not like we were getting any funding prior to the state government realizing that they have no money.


Now here is my predicament. I'm not getting good fast enough and part of the reason why is that I want to do too many things. Just off the top of my head, I could easily see myself in any of the follow professions.

ART:
Pre-production visualization.
Storyboard Artist
Animatics
Matte Painter
Mechanical Design
Cute-Cuddly Design (I may not feel manly about it, but I'm better at cute than badass right now and it's kinda sad)
Motion GFX

3D Art:
generalist
VFX Artists
Lighting/Compositing Artist
Modeler/texturer
3D animator

Managerial/Production/other
Producer (heavily favored in light of recent projects)
Pipeline development
Pitching
Education

And that's just the ones that come to mind this instant. I've met people doing jobs I didn't even know existed and loved them.

Now for most of these there are some skills I really need.

1. Ability to teach myself new media fast.

*a good example of this was seen at the most recent wedding Expo I attended. You didn't have to look hard to know which businesses were new and thriving. The new ones were very in tune with digital photography, photoshop and digital distribution.

Then there were a few older Japanese men who have been in the business for 20-30+ years but their portfolios looked much worse after their switch to digital because they could now learn the new media. The new companies were the ones people were looking at because they were offering DVDs, video, slide shows. Myspace and FB and other services as well.


2. 1337 Skillz.
*For this I references some artists I follow out of sheer "Holy crap they taught themselves THAT?"
:iconukitakumuki: :iconleventep: :iconandreeWallin: :iconastrokevin: :iconOmeN2501:
If, after my 4 years of college, I'm *half* as good as these guys at painting, I'd be more than happy.

*This also goes into basic skills such as color theory, life drawing, drawing in anatomy, composition and basic drawing skills that I just don't see available as a form of rigorous study. There are maybe 1 or 2 classes related to this which have unrelated prerequisites and teachers who's main talent is in another field.

*For Example I took the only 2 lifedrawing classes my college offers. Both of which had no instruction in anatomy and were taught by an abstract installation art teacher and an animation teacher.

*In the first class we learned about perspective, 1 and 2 point. (not even 3 point) Seriously, wtf, I taught myself that shit in 8th grade when I was into drawing architecture and designing houses. And that not even really for life drawing.

*The second class was pretty good as the teacher was a CalArts grad and successful career artist, but because classes are limited in time we didn't get to draw much. (3 hour classes 2x a week instead of 6 hour drawing sessions with actual lighting equipment offered at CalArts.) We were also given nothing but a room and a chair and easels. No lighting equipment, no props, no funding. We had to provide all that ourselves.


3. The Ability to network.
*I have come to the understanding that no matter how good you are, unless you're like a God, other artists will get the job instead of you if that artist has better connections and personal references.