Just finished my the first year of animation at RIT.

Verdict? Pretty decent.

I've learned a whole lot while being here, and enjoy animation very much. With my background, I'm able to pull everything that I've picked up so far and apply it in some way (which is a big reason why I decided to pursue this field). There are quite a few professors that are fantastic at teaching their corner of the film & animation world, such as Brian Larson, Peter Kewitt, Jim Downer, Mark Reisch, Charles Bandla, and Dave Sluberski (Yes, the few RIT people who are subscribed to this may want to argue about a few of them, but these are who I get the most out of). The quarter film has definitely been the most fun so far, and has done a good job of teaching me what needs to be done in the animation pipeline. With the rundown of animation principles, etc. from other classes, I'm also getting much better at picking out why animations have problems, where they are, and how to fix them. Self-improvement ahoy!

Also: having 24 hour access to a grad-student-only computer lab with good equipment and people to bounce ideas off of is awesome.

The undergrad program at RIT seems to be stronger than the grad program. Part of it is that undergraduates have four years to really explore the medium and develop, while graduates have only two years to cram everything we think will be useful into our schedules before our thesis year(s). This is particularly a problem since I'd like to get into stop motion, which crosses into requiring knowledge of live action things like lighting, etc.  I simply don't have the time (or alternatively, have the stamina to take 6 or 7 grad classes at once) to get all of this in. This is a bit annoying, since the undergrads often don't realize how much they have available and aren't tapping in to. The classes also seem to have too many small exercises for my tastes, rather than a slightly smaller number of slightly larger projects that can stand on their own as shorts.

Another part of my problem with it is that a few of the "required" classes get in the way of actually learning animation or film. It only tends to be one class per quarter, but it's enough that it's frustrating. We've had a class that I've gotten nothing out of except finally seeing a few "classic" movies, and one that was completely redundant to a prerequisite class. One more was... well, I don't quite know what that class was supposed to focus on, but I did get a neat sand animation out of it. There was just a review and switchup of the program, so hopefully this will start to straighten itself out for future students.

In other news, I finally went ahead and got an animation-enabled account here. So far it looks like whatever processing dA does makes some things choke and stutter, but hopefully it doesn't become a problem on anything else I submit.


This summer I'll be returning to Tucson. I'm hoping to do a few personal animation and music projects while there. We'll see how that works out.


And I've also learned to be careful with how many music composition projects I take on at once. It made the past two weeks very hectic.