Big College update
So I've been looking at colleges some more. The big talk around the apartment water-cooler these days is some place in Portland Oregon, Rachel found it and turned Raney onto it, and Michael and I have both kind of listened with perked ears. Once Rachel talked to me about it for a while, I liked the idea. Portland is a pretty cool place, close to Seattle and California, both pretty big and well known cities with a lot going on. Also, the weather is nice, and the scenery between the beaches and mountain ranges would be wonderful, not to mention Portland itself is sizable, but not intimidating. The more we talked though, the more I realized that Rachel had compared prices, housing, percent admittance, freshman class size, scholarships, and everything you could feasibly think of, EXCEPT for the actual degree plans and education quality. Her take is that anywhere you go you're going to get about the same education, just coming from different people. I kind of understand that, but in my position, I have to totally disagree. She's just trying to get away and do something, so any education is fine with her, as long as it isn't here, so her goal is to find the most feasible and reasonable education possible. I, however, am rearranging my whole life, so I want some degree of knowledge that I'm doing it for the best possible reasons, ie, an education most fitting to what I really want to learn.
That said, as much as I've seemingly fallen in love with SVA, I have certain problems with the degree plan. I think that if I went there, I would have to major in animation, just because, damn, that's cool. EVERY class on the animation major requirement sounded like my biggest geek dreams come true. The problem with their illustration and cartooning degrees is that they are both a bit stretched, and the cartooning degree seems to cover so much, and I'm afraid my actual interest in comic books as a whole covers very little. Not to mention they don't necessarily emphasize getting you a job out of college right after you get your cartooning degree. Animation appealed to me here because you work with animators later on, and directors, and you actually take classes on how to get jobs and secure jobs in the field of animation, and SVA has people work with you when putting your senior port folio together to get a job out of college. That sounds awesome. But the more I looked over the courses, the more I started to wonder.. Do I really want to be an animator? I don't know. My interest in the field of animation is that of story-telling, of creating. Animating, purely, just seems like doing the dirty work. There doesn't seem to be any classes on story-boarding or directing or writing or anything implying more than making a character go from point a to point b. That's one of the things I REALLY liked about the minor they offered at Ringling.
Sure it's just a minor attached to an illustration major, but the courses you take are so versatile, you take a class on film and video language, a class on story-boarding, classes on character design and development, environmental expression, and so on, still preparing you for the animation process, but more on the initiating and creating level than the nitty gritty down to business level. That kind of conceptual creation is a lot more what I'm looking for, rather than just making art move. So I don't know, while SVA might secure me a position in the animation field, would it really be a position I would want? Would it be the type of position I could climb the ladder in? If I got more of the education I wanted, such as at Ringling, would I really be able to use it? I don't know, there's still a lot of looking to do. Another bonus to Ringling is that if I don't immediately get a job in the field of animation out of school, I still have the illustration major I could fall back on, which would help me do things like independent comics or children's storybooks or other odds and ends, whereas if something didn't work out with my animation degree at SVA.... oh well....
So Anyway, I've still got a lot to look into. Although I've only really looked into 2 or 3 schools I guess, they've helped me a lot in thinking about what it is I'm really going to college for and what I really want to get out of it.
That said, as much as I've seemingly fallen in love with SVA, I have certain problems with the degree plan. I think that if I went there, I would have to major in animation, just because, damn, that's cool. EVERY class on the animation major requirement sounded like my biggest geek dreams come true. The problem with their illustration and cartooning degrees is that they are both a bit stretched, and the cartooning degree seems to cover so much, and I'm afraid my actual interest in comic books as a whole covers very little. Not to mention they don't necessarily emphasize getting you a job out of college right after you get your cartooning degree. Animation appealed to me here because you work with animators later on, and directors, and you actually take classes on how to get jobs and secure jobs in the field of animation, and SVA has people work with you when putting your senior port folio together to get a job out of college. That sounds awesome. But the more I looked over the courses, the more I started to wonder.. Do I really want to be an animator? I don't know. My interest in the field of animation is that of story-telling, of creating. Animating, purely, just seems like doing the dirty work. There doesn't seem to be any classes on story-boarding or directing or writing or anything implying more than making a character go from point a to point b. That's one of the things I REALLY liked about the minor they offered at Ringling.
Sure it's just a minor attached to an illustration major, but the courses you take are so versatile, you take a class on film and video language, a class on story-boarding, classes on character design and development, environmental expression, and so on, still preparing you for the animation process, but more on the initiating and creating level than the nitty gritty down to business level. That kind of conceptual creation is a lot more what I'm looking for, rather than just making art move. So I don't know, while SVA might secure me a position in the animation field, would it really be a position I would want? Would it be the type of position I could climb the ladder in? If I got more of the education I wanted, such as at Ringling, would I really be able to use it? I don't know, there's still a lot of looking to do. Another bonus to Ringling is that if I don't immediately get a job in the field of animation out of school, I still have the illustration major I could fall back on, which would help me do things like independent comics or children's storybooks or other odds and ends, whereas if something didn't work out with my animation degree at SVA.... oh well....
So Anyway, I've still got a lot to look into. Although I've only really looked into 2 or 3 schools I guess, they've helped me a lot in thinking about what it is I'm really going to college for and what I really want to get out of it.