Reflections
At the start of this project, my original plan for my life after university was to start aiming for a job in the animation industry; mainly for jobs revolving around preproduction such as character designer and storyboard artist since I had heavily enjoyed those tasks when working on my previous university and college projects; as well as knowing those jobs typically lead to getting my dream job of creating and directing my own projects, (Rebecca Sugar and Dana Terrence for example). But I would spend the first six months out of uni as time to build up my portfolio and skills.
However, ever since the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic, I realised that I didn't feel ready to go straight into the industry; especially with the knowledge from these sessions where a studio/company may not respond to your CV or letter of interest, which would just make me overall anxious and have low self-esteem issues. And after learning about their benefits from this course, along with family and tutors, I changed my plans to go and get a master's degree in one or both of those job roles; not just because the degrees would make me more appealing to studio so they would hire me, but also to take some time to let the virus pass so by the time I finish my degree, things should be normal again and it would be easy for me to start applying for jobs.
But as a my safe alternate, I'll do some freelance stuff such as art commissions and any fun mini projects and collaborations on social media such as Youtube; within my own small studio my family would help me with setting up.
Future Goals
So within the next few months, mainly after the winter Christmas break, I will mainly be researching on the different master degree courses in London compare and contrast them with each other, so I would know which one to apply for. The things I would need to look at is their location, the cost for the course, how long the course lasts, what kind of environment it has physically and, the most important to myself, what kind of support they would have for people who are disabled (with me being on the autism spectrum) so I would know I would be getting a safe and rewarding educational environment similar to the one I've spent the past five years in.
With the work I need to complete for after University, naturally I would have to make sure my Final Major Project is completed as it would be the final result of the five previous years of learning and what my work could look like for various employers to see and decide if they would want to hire me or not. But, I would also need to complete a showreel of all of the animatic storyboards I have made for various projects in the past, since I would applying myself for master degrees revolving around that job role; as well as collecting any storyboards I can gather from college/uni sketchbooks and send them to those schools for a physical look at my work. And alongside with the gathering of storyboards, I would also gather any of my old character design sketches from course projects and revise them to full character reference sheets and drawings to show more of my character designs; either in a sketchbook or on my portfolio website.
I would also take the advice of Emily's from last week and have a small sketchbook based around life drawings and some drawings based around different mediums such as watercolour paint and charcoal in order to show how I can use a variety of mediums rather than just sticking to one style in case there isn't any open roles in the industry for me.
In order to complete the work in the paragraph above, I would need to gather the resources that would be needed for them to be completed. These include sketchbooks, software subscriptions and maybe some new social media platforms.
I would need the sketchbooks in order to create the drawings for the life drawing sketches, along with the different medium paintings and storing the physical copies of the character designs inside just to be safe if the digital copies get corrupted or lost.
Another thing I could possibly need after Uni would be subscriptions for different softwares commonly used in the industry (Storyboard Pro being the main one), since I would need access to them at home just in case lockdown returns again or even to be able to work on projects from home. Plus, having it at home would help in getting me to become more used to the softwares so when I go into the workplace, I would be able to go straight into work.
And the only final resource I would need would be to get a few more social medias such as Youtube. This is mainly to help in building up a audience of followers to give myself a secure platform for when I'm doing freelance in between industry contracts, as well as being a safe place where I could store my animatics for both public viewing and to be a copy of the animatic in case the animatics stored in memory sticks get lost through me simply losing the USB stick or the video files corrupting due to age.
Now, while money would be a problem normally; but thankfully for me there is a possibility that our university would give up equipment worth £1500 due to the possible cancelation of our abroad trip to Japan or New York thanks to the pandemic; so I could use that money for the more expensive resources (the digital art softwares and subscriptions) as the other two needed resources are either free or in between the terms of cheap and accessible in stores.