Well the stress dreams have quit... because I have three jobs.
At the moment I've cut down my hours at the hotel to 24 a week. I'm working grave shifts on the weekends (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights), and during the week, I'm working another 40 hours at an animation studio! Phew. I was hoping that would come around, and it did. Nondisclosure agreements mean I can't talk about it, but it's stop-motion, and I'm excited. I've also been hired as an on-call animator for when they start shooting, which is good too. Perhaps I can do some rigging as well, since that's fun and interesting sometimes.
Stop-Motion seems like it's the most MacGuyver-esque kind of animation there is. It's all about fixing weird problems with duct tape and paper clips (really; I rigged something for those Bing commercials a while back with just those things), and the puzzle solving involved is fun. Also, they want me to animate, so hey: awesomeness.
The third gig is a freelance job doing a web comic. This is awesome on many fronts, not the least of which is getting paid to do comic work. Also, I just have to be the art monkey. There are a couple of other people that take care of the hard stuff like script writing and social media. Phew.
There have been a couple of small freelance animation gigs in the last couple of months also; one of which I enjoyed immensely, and the other of which the client dropped off the radar completely. That was odd. The fun one though, that one will hopefully turn into a series, which should be even more fun. It taught me what I'd forgotten about flash, not the least of which was that flash is a buggy, cruddy program in so many ways. Give me illustrator for vector drawing any day! It did, however, give me a basis for learning Anime Studio Pro, which the boyfriend was wonderful to give me as a graduation present. So far, that program is flash minus the annoying bits. I'll probably have more to say on it as I practice, however.
I also got a Wacom Inkling from my mum and pop for a graduation present, and I've been exploring its potential as an animation tool. It saves layers which easily export to photoshop with the press of a button, so I've done a few experiments with animations done on one sheet of paper. It's a little weird to use for some things... because there's a gap between the pen tip and where the censor actually picks up the pen, it's not a great tool for finished line art unless you are extremely careful about how you hold the pen, and even then it's not perfect. It is, however, really good for concept sketches. I've used it with both photoshop and illustrator, and there are awesome things you can do with both. Photoshop gathers the pressure sensitivity, and Illustrator (with a 95% smooth on the lines) ends up with pretty passable lineart that doesn't need much tweaking after some practice. I should have been typing up my thoughts on it here, rather than facebook perhaps... but that's the gist of what I've learned about it.
I got another free ticket for E3 this year. The boyfriend was trying to get one too so we could both go, but he got turned down the other day because he has no purchasing power for Apple. Bummer. I'm still going to go, though, and pass out business cards like crazy. Maybe that'll get me some more work once the animation gig is over, again. The last thing I did a bunch of work on, video game-wise, was for Doctor Who Worlds In Time. That was a blast to work on both because I loved the art style, and I love Doctor Who. Go play it: it's free and a fun adventure/puzzle/mmo type game. You can play it here.
Lastly, I've been teaching my friend Becky jujitsu. She wanted to learn and I wanted someone to practice with, so I'm calling it a win-win scenario. Teaching is one of the best learning tools ever. She's forcing me to remember things I hadn't had a lot of chances to practice, since I haven't had anyone to practice with since I've been in Portland. She's also my height, which is awesome. It makes throwing each other much easier on both of us. Unfortunately, when showing her what she was doing wrong in a slap fall, I managed to hurt my wrist a bit. ("And this is why you don't do this!" she says, with a wrist brace on. D'oh.) If I can remember to quit putting weight on it, it'll be fine in another week though.
Well, thankfully I get to do four tens this week at the studio, which means when I get off work at 7 am on Monday, I can go home and sleep instead of going straight to the other job. That's a bit wearing; I've been zombified the last couple of Mondays. It still means I have about an hour gap between jobs on Friday, but I'm used to being up all day Friday before work anyway.
It is ironic that all of this means my stress dreams have quit. It's probably because I feel like I'm doing something useful now; something that I've always wanted to do. Yay life.
