Breakdown

Last week was not easy.

They say that when it rains, it pour….and to me it defiantly seemed to pour last week.

Now keep in mind that it has only been a few days after I was told that I have to go back to my old story for seminar/thesis prep, essentially tossing out everything I’ve done for the past month or so.

Add on the first day of modeling in Maya where, though exciting, is beyond frustrating because all the keys are different from Cinema 4D and I can’t figure out where anything is located.

Sprinkle in Teaching where I finally get that hand out outlining what my final paper is to be about. Then the teacher suddenly realizes that I’m not in the Saturday Art School class where everyone else is gaining practical experience interacting with their classes and guess what? The paper is about you observations on the evolution of 2 of those students! On top of it the paper, that I have no idea how I will write it, is to be at least 20 pages. 20 PAGES!!!

To top it off in Model Shop we finally got homework that had to be completed in the shop. There is no way around it. The teacher does the demo of the different tools we will need and I figure it will take 20-30 minutes to do. I ask him to leave out the router since I decided I would just do it then. So I went to check out a tool and a technician come over and starts asking if I was certified.

“Not at Pratt, but at my last 2 colleges and my high school, yes.”

“Well did you take the class here and get the sticker?”

“What. Sticker?” (I said turning to look at my teacher who finally came over)

A lot of back and forth happened in which my teacher didn't really participate. The jest is that I apparently needed to take a 6 hour safety course to get a sticker that would allow me to be in the shop and use the tools. I told my teacher the first day I hadn’t been in the shops at Pratt and he said nothing so I assumed I was fine since I had done it so many times before hand. 

Apparently not.

I was told that the last safety course happened last weekend (of course) and that without it I wasn’t allowed to be even in the shop except for class time let alone use the tools outside then to do homework.

After this, I broke.

It may not seem like something that should have been that big a deal to break as badly as I did….and trust me I cracked hard. I called my sister cry like crazy and freaked out to her about Shop, seminar….everything. It took about 25 minutes to calm down enough to eat my dinner take was getting cold and another 30 to be able to think of anything with starting up again.

It didn’t help that it was by then 9pm and I still had a ton of boards to finish for the next day.

Breath.

Now a few days have past since all that. I got permission to take the safely test and, provided I passed, get permission to use the Shop for the semester.

I passed.

1 problem solved.

I’ve also talked to my sister to try and fix my thesis since no one liked what I was trying to do in the new edits. The story is much better and I was able to create a decent animatic in time for class…..but all the boards need more character detail, I need to figure out color, need to fix lots of camera angles and framing, and need to find a better scratch audio narrator.

So problem 2 isn’t quite fixed yet.

As for the Teaching issue, the problem isn’t fixed yet. I have the class tomorrow so hopefully the teacher will have thought of something. 

The stupid cube I had to make fro homework that tipped this breakdown.

Other than that things are okay. Maya is still driving my crazy with it’s impossible interface, but I’m getting to the point that it doesn’t take 5 minutes of internal debate with myself to move one thing.

The highlight of the week was my Uncle Michael coming. He was playing in Brooklyn and we decided to meet up for lunch (he plays the violin for a living). He bought me lunch and I got to sit in on the music for an hour before I had to get back to homework. I even had time to do a doodle of the church we where in.

Now hopefully I don’t have another breakdown this semester. There is a ridiculous amount of work that needs to be finished in the next 3 weeks though and I’m not sure there is enough hours in the day.

Art school. Don’t ya love it.