Happy New Year!

OK, right off the bat, I'm lying. It's April 5th, but I want to log some stuff that happened back in March. I guess I could have just dated this in March, or said "Back in March..." but I thought a clean new blog would be a nice way to start off the new year. My New Year's Resolution: stop lying about what day I'm posting to this blog.

So happy new year, and welcome! I'm Ian Etra, and I am currently enrolled in the Masters (MS) program in Digital Imaging and Design at New York University's (NYU's) School of Continuing and Professional Studies' (SCPS') Center for Advanced Digital Applications (CADA) -- in my opinion, the best graduate program in New York City for animation, by virtue of acronym length alone.

The purpose of this journal is to record my progress as I go about the process of creating an animated short "film" for my thesis project, which I plan to complete in May of 2005. This a little bit of a daunting task for me, as I have never worked on a single project for this long before, nor have I managed to regularly keep a journal for any length of time. But I like the idea of having a record of this time in my life, and a concrete indicator of my progress -- plus it's required as part of the thesis documentation. So why not. I am looking forward to the challenge! I will be posting notes from meetings, schedules, screenshots of work in progress, and other stuff that will only be of slight interest to faculty and close friends.

The MS at CADA is a four semester program (full-time), and I'm currently in my second semester (though I'm working part-time in the industry). At the moment, the thesis process is as follows: a proposal is submitted during the third semester, a treatment is submitted at the end of that semester, and approved at the beginning of the fourth and last semester. This leaves approximately three months to storyboard, model, texture, light, rig, animate and render a project single-handedly.

Any animator would tell you that this is not nearly enough time to complete a project of quality. I agree with that hypothetical animator -- it's not! My goal is to submit this project to the Computer Animation Festival at SIGGRAPH 2005, and I have a pretty good idea of the competition. There is fantastic work coming out of schools like Vancouver, Ringling, and Supinfocom in Valenciennois -- where three students work for a year on a final project. Conclusion: I need to start now if it's going to be un against trois.

So I am quasi-unofficially beginning now, in hopes that the process changes by next Spring. (Not unreasonable, since CADA is still a fairly young program and the rules are changing every semester -- fortunately, in my experience, for the better). I will run every phase of the project past the faculty of CADA to make sure they are all aware of what I'm doing, and should have a pretty extensive journal by the end of this whole process. And if by next Spring it turns out that I can only officially start in my last term, then I have three words: search and replace.

So once again, Happy New Year 2005!