So yesterday I had my last two classes.
They were...interesting.
I like my Electronc Publishing teacher. She's a nice, wacky woman even if she is a bit of a flake. For example: I had emailed her when I signed up for her class to tell her I missed the first class and to ask her when I could get an syllabus. She emails me back right away to set up an appointment. I agreed to it. So an hour later she emails me to tell me that she forgot that she had a meeting at that time and suggests a time to reschedule. I agree to that time as well. A little while later, she calls me to say she realizes that she also has a meeting then, and asks if she can drop it off in the new media office, where I can pick it up from the receptionist. I say that's fine, too. I go to the receptionist twice over the course of a week, but she never drops off the syllabus. So in class yesterday, when taking roll, she recognizes my name and says "oh did I talk to you on the phone?" but apparently remembers nothing but my name. She promises to get a syllabus to me by the end of class. Eventually, I get sick of waiting, find her folder in the shared server, grab the syllabus and print it out myself.
At one point, she admits to having done this week's handouts in an older version of pagemaker and says that she can't open it. So, I go in and click on it and open it just fine. Of course it goes through the usual mac substitution questions(i.e. should it open it in this version instead of that one, substitute this font for that one, etcetera), but otherwise I have no problems.I point this out to her. She says that I must have been opening the file that was done on the newer version, from last week. I say no I opened up this week's. So, she tries it and manages to open it this time.
The class in Mickey Mouse. It's a pre requisite for just about any design program, so I'm forcing myself to trudge through it. But I'm taking two courses which this class is a pre requisite for at my school already. Anything that she's likely to teach I've already had to figure out on my own to get my higher level assignments done. Additionally, since its an entry level class, she's having to pander to those small town folks that don't want to live on the farm anymore, and hear that computers are "the next big thing" and think that design will be easier than programming. (They seem to also be oblivious to the fact that the market is actually pretty soft right now, and that you actually have to be good to stay afloat.) Most of these people have probably never turned a computer on before or, if they have, it was to access their AOL account, and probably won't be taking this stuff next year. They'll have switched to something like nursing or automotive technology. I can say this in confidence, since I have seen and talked to the upper level students, and can tell the contrast between them and my classmates in electronic publishing.
But I digress. My point is, students come into that program with such a minimal knowledge of computers that my teacher actually spent the better part of a half hour explaining to the students about how to save something to disk. She spent another half an hour showing the class how to create a folder, move a folder, delete a folder. I can't help but wonder if there isn't a basic computer literacy course for stuff like this, and I really hope that the pace picks up in this class. There are few things I hate more than having to be held back by people who don't know the bare basics of something.
But it's an easy A, and will be good for my GPA.
And then there's my Drawing for Animation class...
The teacher isn't bad. I mean, he seems to know what he's talking about, but he really is annoyingly LA-centric. He talks about how we should go through the program then transfer to one of those great west coast schools. I ask him about schools on the east coast or in the midwest. I truly loathe southern california with every fiber of my being. Furthermore, there's some big names in New York for animation (Nickelodeon, MTV, just to name a few) so these west coast folks who can't imagine that an animation world outside of southern california (who has something like 40% unemployment in the industry) or maybe Toronto (who is notorious for not paying a liveable wage) really bug me. Yeah, it's more television than movies, but turn on your television any day of the week and watch the ads. Go ahead. Do it right now. Okay, sit there for an hour or two. Now, count how many ads you see for animated television series versus how many ads you see for animated films. Yeah,my point exactly.
At one point, when he was going on his California hype, I asked him about schools in the midwest and east coast. I might not think much of the art schools in Chicago, but I know quite a bit of a talent that came out of them. And New York schools like Pratt, NYU and the like are pretty notorious. Well, he then started bragging about Valley, how the president is committed to making the school a national center for animation.
A center? The school doesn't have any film classes, they dropped the lightwave class because the software was "too expensive" (they do have 3d studio max but no other packages. 3d studio max is pretty much the default software that every community college in the country has) they don't have maya, and the drawing for animation class just barely made the cut. They almost didn't have enough students to fill the class. In fact, probably the only reason I was allowed into the class (it requires two general drawing courses and a life drawing class as a pre requisite.) was because if it didn't get enough students, it was going to be cancelled. All over school there are animation and web design classes getting cancelled because there simply aren't enough people to fill them. Hell, Oakton Community College has a stronger 3d animation program. Not to mention that there is no animation industry in Western Michigan. Just how is this school going to make it as the national center for animation? Of course, the school is bragging about their animation festival that they're holding this May, but it's going to take a whole lot more than that. Chicago holds film festivals every year, and you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a school with an animation program there. Kalamazoo is going to compete with that by having a certificate program, when the town doesn't even have an art house?
This is my teacher's first semster there. Fifty bucks says that he's one of the many west coast animators that got laid off and grabbed the first job he could find. I think it's only a matter of time before he starts making the cruel realization that many who move here do, which is that this town basically sucks and that the town is still pretty much stuck in 1986. It's only a matter of time until he realizes that he only has to go two hours to find the same classes that getting cancelled here getting filled a couple months in advance there.
The funniest part is he's trying to pull this line of "this will be a demanding class. Pretend you're working in a studio. It's going to be run like a studio." Yeah,except that at a studio, we get paid and we don't have to pay all our own supplies. It's so ludicrous when teachers try to pull that sort of thing at a school like that. This isn't an art school where students pay $1-2 grand to take a course, it's a community college in a midwestern farm town.
On the bright side, the class itself should be fun, even if the teacher is a bit of a dink. I actually am enjoying the assignments.
Oh, and I'm going to leave you with one more picture. I promise I won't start doing this every day, but Illustrator and Photoshop just arrived, so I've been doing some fun experiements...
