Another semester over in my career as a student. A lot of things happened, and I learned quite a bit. I worked on a couple of shorts for a professor to pitch to PBS, I made a short comic for a student anthology book titled Reality Not Included (which I'll start posting once I've got access to computer with Photoshop), I went to CTN, and took on 14 credit hours with projects that I'll post once I've gotten a chance to polish them to my liking.

CTN was a fun and informative experience with a lot of cool opportunities. I got to see Rise of the Guardians at Dreamworks and Wreck-it Ralph at Disney, attend panels given by experienced people in the industry, and show my reel to representatives at Disney's booth of the expo floor, thanks to a friend who lent me his MacBook to do so. It was also a bit of a wake-up call. For one, using a USB-drive to hold my portfolio was a terrible idea since those reviewing my portfolio to have a computer to bring it up on (being my first CTN, I didn't know what to expect so a lot was done last-minute). I also realized that I need to devote more time towards my focus than just working on a wider variety of areas in animation. I don't have much of an interest in shader programming, and my work in that class wasn't all that great and it ate into time for projects in other classes that I wanted to put more effort into. I also should have taken the animation track for the 3d Animation class instead of taking the modeling and rigging track.

The lack of a portable computer issue has been resolved, at least. I've ordered a Samsung ATIV 700t, a Windows 8 tablet powerful enough to run Photoshop and Toon Boom, and has a Wacom tablet sensor for pressure-sensitive pen input along with regular touch input. It will be especially useful these next few weeks as I am home for the holidays and don't have access to my desktop PC.