Graduation

Graduation at an art college is much like graduation anywhere else.  You sit and listen to speeches, go up and get your diploma... or rather the leather binding your diploma will eventually be in, shake a couple hands, throw your hats, and eat food.  Sounds pretty normal right.  Only it's not completely normal.  Art colleges can have some unique quirks in their ceremonies that you often don't find anywhere else.

Firstly, there is no real dress code.  I've been to graduations from two separate art colleges and the students and professors alike ended up wearing some pretty bazar clothing at points.  I recall very vividly a school dean with a plumed top hat and a student wearing roller blades at one of the graduations.

Secondly, the speeches can be anything from normal to activist.  Artists professors have been known to make shameless plugs about their own artwork or an upcoming show in the middle of a graduation speech.  And the valedictorian is either motivational or downright activist.  The head of our class gave a very memorable speech about civil rights and getting along as a community.  Although starting a graduation speech with a movement that has long since outlived its purpose was perhaps more popular with the parents than it was with the students, no one felt it was too terribly out of place.

But by far the most different thing about a graduation at an art school is the exhibition.  Every year, art colleges will have an exhibition of the student art work that they will show to the parents.  This can either include the BFA students or the MFA students, but whomever gets the honor of showing off their work at graduation, the fact remains that there's always a show to see.

So, in the end, after all is said and done, you have a graduated art class.  Now if only finding jobs were as easy.

Art Professor Syndrome

I'm perhaps a rare case in art school, since I have explored the most extreme parts of design art, the extreme parts of fine art, and also the most conservative. So it's odd in a way, but I have been in the class of nearly every kind of professor you can imagine, and even some you can't.

I was once in a class at the state school I was attending over the summer when the subject of a professor talking about sex came up. And as I listened to these university students give this professor a dressing down, I couldn't help but mention that our art professors sometimes had entire body of works simply on that same subject alone. They were completely floored.

And while I imagine that normal professors are expected at a state college, I couldn't help but wonder about all the different types that I've encountered.

So here's my list (and I won't name names--obviously):

1: A seventy-year old hippie who loves life and everyone in it. This professor is the perfect array of helpfulness, happiness, and random rays of sunshine in his basement studio classroom. And his advice is actually helpful.

2: This man, though married, loves his students more than anything in the world (except his son of course), and is like the father of a family. He's kind, helpful, but occasionally scolding.

3: This man is young, handsome, single, kind, and loves the imagination. It's a wonder none of his students have tried to claim him yet.  He's also a little bit of a pushover.  But in relation to #2, he would be the charming uncle.

4: This man is foolish and likes to make friends with his students. He's lax on deadlines, and will take circumstances into consideration.

5: This woman is the go-getter. Unlike many, she listens (perhaps much more than she should). She stands up for what she thinks is right and expects you to do the same. She also has a harsh bark and an equally nasty bit, with an imagination that often runs away with her.

6: This woman is usually easy-going until annoyed or threatened. She then becomes increasingly hostile. She can be calculating, but like many others, she's unorganized and procrastinates horribly, so the better results of her plans are sometimes dashed.

7: This woman has no concept of reality or really the world she's in. She's a nice person when outside of the classroom, but has no patience and changes her mind frequently. Regardless of her fickle nature, she is overly harsh in her judgements, and apologizes for nothing.  She also has a nature to persevere.

8: This man is often most happy when left alone or able to explain or work in a subject he loves. He sometimes overturns safety to get a better result in technique. He expects the best from his students, but is always fair. In personality he is adventurous and daring (probably more daring than most people in the world), and yet he is quiet, reserved, and intelligent. If you ever meet him, he may also appear a little lonely at times.

9: This professor is quiet and very intelligent. She also is one of the most open-minded people that anyone can probably ever meet in their lifetime. She listens to everything, usually remaining in a calm, sunny disposition unless you get on her bad side.

10: This professor is slightly egotistical, but he loves to learn. He has a vast array of knowledge and hates when people try to cheapen that knowledge, but for the most part he is reserved, soft spoken, and even slightly dry in demeanor.

11: This man is the definition of nerd. He loves to learn. He loves to see his students learn. He constantly bombards and is bombarded with a vast array of cultural and artistic knowledge. His opinions are valuable, but attempting to sort out fact from opinion is a challenge.

12: This woman is slightly odd. She makes jokes about strange happening with herself and her life, and sees the humor as well as the crap in society. Surprisingly, she is known for being well versed in the martial arts, and displays her hardened skill and mind frame in her personality. She is, however, a kind and slightly lonely woman. If you know her for even a short time, she will remember you forever.

13: This woman is the definition of "old and crusty," without being totally unkind.  She believes what she believes and she will never change. You either conform to her ideas (and she'll love you for it), or you don't and she will genuinely hate you for it. She choses favorites and has no qualms about it.

14: This woman is kind and happy in every definition of the word. She loves to explore and to learn. So much so, in fact, that she always appears to have one foot in a completely different world. She appears meek, enthusiastic, and careless with half-baked teaching methods. But truly, her students learn tons by the sheer curiosity and enthusiasm that she sparks, rather than the threat of difficult testing or punishment.

15: This man is extremely reserved, pushed into an environment where he doesn't quite ever fit in, except among the students he teaches (who share his enthusiasms). He is always helpful, always patient and willing to repeat things again and again without fail. He also has no need to pile on the extra work. He believes that understanding comes with time and practice.

16: This woman loves to learn about people, and about cultures. She will speak to anyone in any language, and has a twinkle in her eye when she learns something new. Trying to convince her you don't understand, though, can be a completely different matter.

I'm sure I am forgetting a few people, but here you go... the professors at an art college.

Senior Thesis

Among all the insane projects and crazy hours that you spend at an art school, there is one project that is more extensive and taxing than any other--the BFA Exhibition Project. For the BFA, a student must create a large scale project that ultimately signifies what he/she has learned while in school. Unlike the normal state college Bachelor Degree program, the BFA project is a requirement for Undergraduates too. And unlike your standard 50-150 page thesis paper where you hand the end result in to your professor and it gets shelved somewhere (or if you're very lucky, published), the BFA project is viewed by the entire college, your family, and most likely all the employers of the jobs you apply for in the next two to five years. No pressure.

What makes the BFA in my college so hard to manage isn't just the project itself (although that's a good part of it). It's also the extensive paperwork and the concept behind it. Getting two separate professors to sign off on your idea is hard enough. Trying to convince them time and time again that the idea is good and when it's done it'll be even better, is harder.

For this reason, around the start of the Spring semester, every Senior starts to freak out. For many, they worry about what kind of idea they should use for their project, what medium it should be. They worry that it won't be good enough, and that maybe they won't have the slightest clue what to even begin making. For my department it's different. We start a semester before. By the time the rest of the school begins to start thinking about the BFA show, we're already Animating/Filming on our projects. That doesn't keep us from freaking out though. Instead of flipping out about concept and ideas, we lose our minds over execution. Can we get the piece done in time? Will it be good enough? Did we make everything that needed to be made before hand? In the end, we can only hope that nothing goes wrong and everything pays off. And when it's all over, we can finally take a few days and sleep. Thank god for the small things.

~C.Mitchell

Never Ending Revisions

So anyone who has ever been in art school knows that unlike papers that you write, read through, edit, and then turn in for a grade, never to be touched again... revisions to art pieces never really end. Grades or almost completely subjective in Art School. Sure, you can do the work and give it your best and sometimes that's good enough, but most of the time it's not. You may walk into a classroom with what you think is a finished project, and by the time you walk out, you'll have a hundred things to change or have to start over completely. It's almost enough to make you crazy. So how do you keep any inspiration when you have professors who throw your hard work back in your face time and time again, or tell you that you're idea is crap or the person you're drawing can't physically bend that direction in real life?

Well... sometimes stress is your only sense of inspiration, followed by frustration and humor. And sometimes there is no motivation. Nothing is harder than working on an art project where you're asked to make your own concept and you're mind is grinding on nothing. You have to work, because the project has to get done... But you have nothing to say. You have no message to give anyone and no motivation. In those situations, coupled with a mass amount of sleepless nights, sometimes will power is the only fuel you have left. But at the end of it all, you're still alive, and somehow most of the time, you pull through.

So that test that you never studied for, or that paper that you wrote in a night... well, we'll let it slide this once, because lets face is, Art School is hard. And when we are inspired, and we do have the time to really buckle down and act like a normal college student, we might just surprise you...

Natural Habitat

The rumor that animators are actually a bunch of 20-40-year old men that spend half their life in a secret cave and huddle close to their computer for light and warmth is an exaggeration, but not by much.

You see, animation, film, and anything related to making something move on screen is hardly ever just a job. It's a lifestyle. You can send someone home from work to rest, and while they're at home, they may just sit there and edit their own work related to the exact same media. Or while they're resting, they watch other movies and get inspirations for future projects. It's in our blood. We speak in Adobe program terms, and any normal person just stops listening when you start to mention words like "CGI" and "b-roll." It translates into a foreign language that only people in your field understand.

In fact, I recently found myself with family during the Christmas holiday, and it was ultimately frustrating to me, because we all studied different professions. My mother being a minister, my brother a preservation architect, and me a filmmaker/animator. The frustrating part was that I'm not interested in old buildings, my brother's agnostic and therefore not interested in religion, and my mother has a hard time with technology. Learning to deal with frustration is key really. So, how do you communicate with the outside world after a while if you've been so specifically educated that you can no longer think in the same context as the rest of society.  You talk about things you all can relate to.  For my family that usually equates to food and the weather.

Food is a topic so neutral that just about anyone can talk about it and still appreciate either the thought of tasting it, or the mechanics behind making it.  And then there's the weather.  In our family, the weather becomes a good topic because we all live in different climates.  My mom lives in tornado alley with a climate that's the normal, blazing hot in the summer and frigid in the winter.  I live just a couple states further East in a climate that gets a lot of rain and remains fairly mild in the winter, but very warm in the summer.  And my brother lives much further North where it gets extremely cold in the winter and only mildly warm in the summer.  So, it makes sense that weather would be a good conversation topic for us.  But at the end of the day, if you're an animator or a filmmaker, because your profession is visual, your family is going to want to view your work.  So, I suppose the lesson of this story is that even though other people may not understand your secret coded language, animators and filmmakers still have the privilege of being able to let other people enjoy their profession through their creations.

~Celia

Video Games (Christmas Break Special)

So, for those who don't know, many art students (when we aren't dying from lack of sleep and overwork) are totally into video gaming. I recently started getting into it with the help of my boyfriend. So, while there are maybe only one or two games that I'm really any good at, I can say that I'm starting to get a lot better as a whole. So, I thought I'd take the opportunity to list some of the humorous and interesting things that I've learned from video games...

1. The Soul Calibur universe believes in big boobs, magic incorporation to all types of martial arts, badass/totally unpractical attacks, and S&M.

2. Throwing a grenade at a closed window will not shatter the glass, but it will make for some laughs

3. The double-tap rule almost always applies in zombie games unless you use a sniper rifle or a rocket launcher.

4. Crazed men chasing you with chainsaws make normal zombies look like Bugs Bunny

5. According to Bayonetta and Donte, all demon-killing must be done in style.

6. In Mass Effect 1, you are guaranteed to spend at least a half an hour just figuring out where you're supposed to be going.

7. Men in Skyrim are much more polite to you if your character is a woman.

8. Dragons in any game are always cool and hard to kill.

9. The name Ezio is to always be highly respected.

10. Leon and the merchant from Resident Evil are actually the same person (now we know how he randomly pulls out rocket launchers).

11. Men in video game world usually have two things - dashing good looks & impossible bad ass moves

12. Military character customization for women equals a choice between ugly and uglier.

13. Women in video games (save for Bayonetta) are usually grossly underestimated.

14. Death is made funnier whenever Toby Turner is the one playing.

15. The meaning of life is a moldy squid sandwich.

16. Cool characters usually have issues

17. You can build anything.... and I mean anything in minecraft.

18. (in response to 17) said object built in minecraft may end up crashing your computer.

19. If your character can jump, the laws of gravity don't usually apply.

20. The hero can fly before laying down an amazing and outrageous finishing move.


So, I think that's about all I have. :) Merry Christmas, guys!

~C.Mitchell

Internet Censorship

I hesitated spreading this post all the way to this channel because I wasn't sure it's appropriate, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that it couldn't be more appropriate. The internet is the artist's life blood.

This is a very important issue guys. There's a bill thats on its way to passing that will take the free Internet from Americans and flush it down the toilet. It will ban certain websites w/ copyright content and throw certain people in prison for use of copyrighted materials (including people who make amvs, mmvs, and any other fan based video that holds copyrighted content.). Here's why you should be concerned:

If this bill passes, here are some of the things you may want to expect:

- If you're an amv, mmv artist, expect to have your video channel banned at the very least, and prison time at the very worst. Up to 5 years of prison per video.

- If you read copyrighted materials online (manga for instance), expect those to get banned

- If you watch anime online, expect that to go away too

- You'll have to watch what you post: No longer will you be able to freely post copyrighted images as examples if you're an artist (this will be a big issue even for professional artists who keep a blog).

- Anything: video, web page, etc. with a copyrighted music track could be at risk for being banned.


And yet though the worries that have caused for this bill to be proposed are not unfounded, there are even bigger reasons to oppose it. Namely because everything in our society is a remix of something else.


Everything Is A Remix: THE MATRIX from robgwilson.com on Vimeo.

Everything's a Remix - Part III: The Elements of Creativity

Furthermore, it would give the government the confidence to start proposing other bills to take even more freedoms from us. And if you think it isn't possible, look at our current government policies regarding airport search and seizure, detaining of possible terrorist members, and phone and e-mail tap procedures. If the government isn't stopped here, with this bill, there is no telling what they may take next.

Don't let it happen without a fight: StopCensorship.org

And on a note of rather negative practicality... The nerds who spend their lives on the internet enjoy a free atmosphere. If you put a limit to where they can go and what they can do, organized criminal hacking is not far behind. This is a serious matter. Don't let it get that far:

For a more thorough explanation of what exactly this bill will cover, go to the article from the Verge