semester sum-up

History of Character Animation
Basically we watch a ton of animation from 1918 to the present tracing the history of animated characters in film and television. It's a great class and I' ve learned a lot from it. The teacher is the Director of my 3D Graduate program and he's been around, worked for a while at ILM and has met many of the animation greats. Really digging this class.

Storyboarding
This is more like a story theory class and less of a storyboarding class. Meaning that we're learning a lot about story structure and plot points than how draw and visually solve problems. Still a very important thing to learn and definitely a good tool for putting together my senior thesis which will be a 1 to 2 minute animation.

Maya 1
The teacher is good but sometimes he gets bogged down in tangential details which is easy to do because Maya is such a complicated honkin piece of software. The modelling bores me but the animation is fun.

I have to rant a little about this new product Yahoo! is promoting the heck out of on their frontpage... Yahoo! Answers. Why would I ever use this? If I want to know about something, I SEARCH for it. SEARCHing for it is pretty simple: you type in a keyword you get results. With Y! Answers there are at least two more steps to complete to get an answer! And then it's from a human being...!?? This probably sounds ironic but I trust a search engine more than a human because the human could be an idiot while I know the engine is just an engine. With the engine I have more control to decipher the results, with the human I'm taking my chances.

Before I left in 2001 there was Y! Experts and this looks like a revision of that same product. Dude, Y! Experts sucked. You know why? You had to trust that the human on the other side knew what they were talking about. Why not browse search results and decide for yourself whether the links are trustworthy or not - a much quicker proces.

I would LOVE to see the stats on this product and get a sense of how it's doing. I'm really at a loss as to why Yahoo! would be promoting it so heavily. If anybody has had a good experience with this product please let me know.