WOW!!
The Game Developers Conference in San Fransisco this year was AMAZING!! It was a very large learning expierience for me as a individual who is trying to break into the field. I met about 15 Art Director's from animation studios from all around the world. I applied at about 30 studios and companies total and I gave out about 11 Demo Reels and 30 Resumes. Now first off let me state that this one of my biggest learning expieriences of them all. I should have taken 50 Demo Reels and 100 Resumes. But next time I will be more prepared. That's what this is all about. SIGGRAPH is coming up so now I have a good idea of what to expect as far as caos and comotion.
On the bright side there were SOO many companies out there just waiting to show you the greatest up in-coming stuff from Blizzard and Midway etc. I was shocked to see how friendly and easy approaching everyone can be. It felt really natural to introduce myself and share my passion with them. I also got some REALLY!! good critique on my portfolio from the Art Director from Midway. They were some really eye opening comments that really made sense and needed to be said and heard by me. It was a like a Flanagan critique :-) It felt good to finally here that stuff again. I learned that I need to have a bunch of seperate demo reels when I go down to GDC next year that are tailored for each company.
For ex: Midway makes a lot of Wresteling games and fighting games now and so they wanted to see more characters colliding and showing impact. I plan on bringing a 20sec animation to Midway next year that shows PURE IMPACT!! :-)
I ended up going down with Desiree Ford a 3d Artist from school. We had a good time other than the fact that I was pretty sick to my stomach the whole trip :-(. But I tried to make the best of it and held my composure as much as I could. We took a cool little train that was held up on rusty ol' disks it was soo cool. We were chattin with this gangsta driver that had a ol school BEN DAVIS shirt on :-) and he was like " YO! man you a artist or WhAt?....... Man.... I couldn't even draw a crook-id line.. :-)
