A Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with Half a Dozen or So Steps
I’ve started my Animation Mentor blog about 6 weeks before actually starting Animation Mentor. I was accepted to the school on April 14th, 2009. Since then, I’ve been going stir crazy. I want to know everything that will happen, and when it will happen. There are tons of Animation Mentor blogs out there, but I’ve found very few that talk about the stuff that happens before anything happens. So, I’ve taken it upon myself to document this part of the journey for future students. May it be of some use to you. Here’s a brief summary of what’s happened so far:
Some time before April 11 – Decided that I couldn’t possibly live any longer without attending Animation Mentor. Convinced my awesome wife of the same.
April 11 – Applied to School
April 14 – Accepted to School. Acceptance email said I needed to send a copy of my college diploma, and to email Victoria about how to do this (even though this email was from Victoria), and I had to e-sign the Enrollment Agreement, which was also not sent. So, I emailed Victoria about this. A couple of days went by and I hadn’t heard anything, so I just emailed the diploma to her.
April 24 – Got email telling me how I could pay my tuition. At this point I was still debating this question myself, so I held off.
May 1 – Enrollment Agreement sent.
May 10 – Paid 1st term tuition. Signed Enrollment Agreement. Time gap was due to me figuring how the finances were going to work. Also, I went to LA for a film festival and Alaska for my day job, so that slowed me down a bit.
May 11 – Animation Mentor signed my Enrollment Agreement. Everything’s official now, I guess!
May 12 – Got an invitation to participate in “Coffee Talk with Victoria,” which seems to be an orientation done Q&A style. I’ll be attending the May 20th session of this, and it will be a discussion with Victoria about what the school will be like, and she’s going to show us our calendar, an eCritique, and what the Forum is all about. It will also be a chance for us to ask her questions. Jimmy said they didn’t do anything like this for him when he started, and he wished they had. I’m very excited about it.
In other news, I emailed Victoria and asked her when I’d get the information I need to purchase Maya at the student discount rate. She said that I’d need my student ID for that, and it won’t be issued until Orientation starts on June 10th. Seems like a long time to wait, but I have a new Pupsock & Wendell project that I need to get done (a major studio actually wants to see it!), so I should really be focusing on that. Which, clearly I’m doing right now…..
In the meantime, she gave me a link to get the 30-day trial version of Maya to play with. I registered for it, but the download didn’t work from Firefox. So I had to open up IE and re-register. I started downloading it yesterday morning, only to discover that it had gotten stuck at 81% for over a day. I paused it, waited a while, and restarted it. It went from 81% to 99% pretty quickly, and stalled again. Hopefully I’ll have the last 1% in the next few days.
So, I suppose there won’t be any AM related news until the 20th. I’ll keep you in the loop.
Also, note that this is pretty much just my Animation Mentor blog. For news on my professional projects, watch my Poem Pictures blog. Thanks!
