0n April 15th, 3D Arts Advisory Board Panel spoke to students at Full Sail Live. My entire class went to the event. The speakers were: Shane Cook from ILM who was working on Transformers which is now being released in theaters, Russel Barton who works at EA Tiberon for the Madden series of video games, Nate Home, Ryan Boyle who is working on Microsoft’s Video wall, Keith Guerette who works at Naughty Dog and is a lead effects artist, and Ryan Watson from Ubisoft. The leading consensus among the panel was that getting into the industry takes lots of perseverance and constant work. They each had setbacks and struggles. With CG work it isn’t uncommon to loose a days work when a computer freezes up. They have to shrug off the loss and feel that the next pass would be better than the first.
I was surprised and pleased to hear that they all cherish traditional drawing as a way to quickly relate ideas. This is something I stress often with my students but too often the use the computer as a crutch to execute unclear ideas. I met a student on a flight back to Orlando from Virginia. She was ecstatic that one of the panelists told her that she was hire-able. Those encouraging words will go a long way towards lighting a fire that needs to burn bright for the duration of any career. I found it visually funny that the circular patters projected behind the panelists made it look like they each had a black halo.