My New Year "Animation" Resolution

I have declared to myself and a few others that this Christmas season is to be my last one in the retail business. I want to concentrate and really focus on my animation next year so I can get one step closer to achieving my lifetime dream of working in the animation industry. In no particular order, here are my resolutions for 2010:

Tighten up my demo reel. I received some notes from a few friends on how to tighten up the whole thing. I will be cleaning up a few scenes and reworking some others.

Finish up work on the scene's for Dana's short film. I have two new scenes to work on for my mentor Dana Boadway. This makes a total of four for the whole film. She didn't really give us a deadline for animation, but I need to make some progress at least every week.

Continue work on my Bowfinger scene. I have a scene from the movie Bowfinger that is still in the stepped blocking phase. The tough part is turning out to be the dialogue. One character is speaking so fast that it is going to be difficult to match up the mouth movements to make it seem natural.

Compete in at least one of the 11 Second Club monthly competitions. This is a great website that provides dialogue for animators to animate. At the beginning of the following month, everyone gets to vote on which ones that like the best. December's selection was really good. Even though the month is almost over, I still want to animate that piece.

E-mail Robin Linn and the recruiters at Reel FX. I had such a great meeting with Robin in San Francisco, that I was really expecting to hear from them rather soon. Nothing happened. I later see on their website they were actually hiring for animators. I quickly applied and am still waiting for a response. I will e-mail them soon to follow up. I do plan to sometime next year take a trip up to the Dallas / Fort Worth area. Not only to hopefully get a tour of the studio, but to visit some very dear friends that I have not seen in quite some time.

Keep checking the Animation Mentor job board. I haven't checked on it in a while, but when I last did there were several studios hiring. I did apply to a couple but, again, still waiting. There are a few other studios here in Texas that I would also like to follow up with.

Become more familiar with the Flipbook program. One of the programs I purchased when I first started Animation Mentor was a 2D animation program called Flipbook. It is an easy way to do a "pencil test" of your animation before going into full production in Maya. I have some ideas that I would like to try that I cannot yet do in the Maya 3D program.

Purchase animation paper to experiment again with traditional 2D animation. This is something I've wanted to do for a while. When I ran out of animation paper, I didn't know what to do. I have this really great lightbox here in the studio that is literally collecting dust all over it. I want to get back on there and get back the feeling of WHY I fell in love with animation in the first place. There was something about flipping the pages and seeing the drawings move that was simply magical. Out of all of these resolutions, I think this one is the one I am looking forward to the most.

Well, that's it. My 2010 New Year Animation Resolutions. Wish me luck.