Beyond Cartoons Destroyed My Life.

Here is a note that I wrote on Facebook about my visit to the Art Institute here in Texas.The AI has been the college I've been wanting to go to.By "wanting to go" I mean I saw there ads and thought "Hey! Look! CGI frog! Cool!".I also wanted to be an animator at the time so my parents began looking in to the school.Of course now I have no desire to be an animator (Besides Pixar,none of the animation studios interest me.Especially now that 3D CGI is the"new" standard) instead I want to be a full time cartoonist.The tour of ther institutes open house made me re-think my options.Here's what I wrote.Also some sketches I managed to save on my flash drive and send to my computure before my flashdrive went missing.

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So last time I wrote the note to nowhere,I talked about my lack of drive for thinking about what college I wanted to attend.Well now that I'm officially going to be a senior I thought I would re-visit the subject again.Especially since I just visited the Art Institute of Houston's campus today.My mom has always said that whenever they were hosting an open house that we would go but...we never did....until today.

So anyway we get there and surprisingly the staff there is incredibly friendly and helpful.Seriously.Were talking five star Hyatt concierge service friendly.One of the administrators took us on a tour of the whole building(All 3 floors! Get it? Because there's actually 6...) and showed us some of the class rooms and the library.I would have payed more attention,except that,there were two teenage girls standing behind me and giggling,which,piqued my interest for most of the duration.

however one thing I did notice was,how serious these guys are about art.They absolutely love it.The hallways were filled with both traditional and digital artwork,mannequins wearing stuff from the Fashion Design class and pictures of students cooking from the Culinary Institute.It was simply incredible to look at.It definably had a creative "flow" going on (Artists probably know what the crap I'm talking about.)

Anyways after the tour we decided to go to one of the classes where they glorify about your
education,while neglecting the fine print.Instead of "Graphic Design" I decided to choose "Media Arts Animation" even though I have no desire at this point to be an animator.However the first part of the animation course deals heavily with 2-D cel animation,which I'm a big fan of(Versus 3-D.) and that many of the first semester courses deal with "Body Anatomy","Storyboarding",t

hings that even cartoonists have to learn.As well as lessons heavily dealing with Photoshop.Still I was virtually unimpressed.I didn't want to learn the 3D modeling and structures,or anything else for that matter.Also I learned that I couldn't pick and choose how many of the courses I wanted to take.If I wanted to do Media Arts Animation it would be the WHOLE course and not just half.The guidance counselor and made that very clear (And then gave a helpful analogy of how I could become a cartoonist for Disney and make animated renderings of machinery for Oil Companies,while never calling my parents asking if I could move in with them).

So in short maybe the ATOH is not the place for me afterall.Even if I went to the Graphic Design classes that's still chunking Harrahs casino-esque cash down the toilet.Later in the day my mom found several colleges that specialized in a degree of cartooning specifically.Unfortunately both of them were in Washington and New York.New York wouldn't be so bad.I could get an internship at DC Comics! But that's a whole different story.

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