My First Week... on the 'inside'

I have finally made it!!! I am on the 'inside' *grin*

I didn't, obviously, post over the holiday season... it was hectic like most folks... and there was an issue that I needed to figure out before AM began as well.

I really didn't expect to have so much difficulty in this area, but I ended up having problems with the Web camera. I ended up buying a total of 3 before I found one that worked with my system... As they say... the 3rd one's charmed *grin* Basically it was an issue with the hardware and addressing... a hard issue to fix with parameters on your puter... it's better just to try a new camera and cross your fingers *grin* A Microsoft web cam was the one that worked for me, after having tried the AM suggested Logitech Pro, and a Creative Labs (same brand as my sound card).

AM contacted us newbie's back in December to invite us to take a brief and somewhat limited look around campus to watch some orientation videos and to have us set up our profiles. There were quite a few videos to watch. All about the exciting features that we had waiting on us to log into the campus for the first time on January 7th, 2008!

So I've dug in hard this past week. Trying to spend time clicking on every little button... seeing where it would take me *grin*

There are areas called workspaces, classrooms, forums, and training...and each of these areas are broken down into even more path choices.

Basically every student and every mentor has there own space.

Videos are posted into the space by users in order to share work that's been done for that week(whether it's animations done by a student, or critiquing of students assignments done by a mentor)... College mates (I say college instead of class... because I mean the entire school) come by your space and leave you some comments, and suggestions for your work.... and you in turn go around to some other spaces and leave comments on their work... No, of course you don't go around to every single person's site(AM is getting too big for that;)... but you try and get to as many as you can. Reciprocations go a long way ;)

There are forums that exist for you to check out... they are used for sending out comments to the community as a whole. You just start up a thread, or join into one... much similar to the way that other popular forums work... and you can also communicate to multiple folks at one time through the use of chat rooms that have been set up for just that purpose.
You can also chat singularly to fellow AMers and you can have instant chat sessions as well. You can organize the college-mates that you most frequently speak with in your "Buddies" section... similar to using other chat programs like Skype.

There's tons of video to watch to help with your training... ranging from the assignment of the week... to training on maya.... tips on animating.... guest speakers... just a plethora of stuff!!! And later on this quarter... students will have the option to sign up for even more training on Maya (which I plan to do... even though I am pretty familiar with Maya already, there have been too many nuggets of gold in the video's that I've already watched to pass up the prospect for more!!!)

And who is my own personal mentor you ask?

... Steve Cady...

Steve Cady is a french-canadian born in Montreal, Canada. He is a 1997 graduate from Sheridan College's Classical Animation programme. For the past 11 years, Steve has worked for numerous studios across north america from gaming to films. His most recent film projects have been Scooby2, Ring2 and The Chronicles of Narnia at Rhythm & Hues.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1513513/

So I've had my first class already and it was great. From Steve's own admission, and from the buzz around campus... he's not the type of Professor that will tell you 'yeah, that looks great... nice try, blah, blah, blah'... but instead he's going to be pushing to give good critique's and in turn really pushing students to dig deep to make their work stand out and develop into something amazing! That sounds awesome to me... the more details that I can get on a crit, the more things I can fix or add to my work... all the better *grin*

So, I leave you now... I will be trying to blog weekly, each Sunday I suspect. But we'll see how that goes... I've seen a lot of Bloggers go down because of the 'crunch'... I'm sure that no matter what though... at the very least... you'll see me post my progress at the end of each class.

Till next Post... Cheers!

~Net