An update

Sorry I've been so quiet on the personal blog front, guys.

On the plus side, I've been very busy over at my professional site. It is a little animation and art-centric, but you might find something there you like, no?

We had a creativity class yesterday, where we had to keep changing teams and see how we worked with different peoplew.

The exercises were:

1) think of a story from scratch,
2) given a specific character, think of three different stories with that character in it and no one else,
3) given a set of random words, tell a story on the spot using those words,
4) make up a character and a story using only a sock and a balloon (mine was a very angry doggie), then
5) use that character to interact with other characters, and
6) given a specific product, think of a way to sell that product to a new market.

This was meant to teach us the following lessons:

• We will frequently be asked to create things on the spot, and given no guidelines whatsoever.
• We will often work within limited parameters, like client preferences and set budgets.
• We have to find new ways of thinking up ideas, using word association, or by mixing up different random elements and forcing ourselves to use these elements.
• Working in a group can lead to creating ideas, characters, and stories, that you would never have thought up by yourself.
• Anyone can think of next year's trend, simply by looking at this year's. To stay ahead of the crowd, you have to think about what's going to be needed/wanted in a future beyond that, five to ten years from now.
  
• We will often be required to think of a new way to sell something old/existing.
  

Some of my classmates found it difficult, but I loved it! My adrenalin was up and truly (warning! Warning! Overused cliché approaching!), I have never felt more alive. I was a junkie, high and hooked on creating new ideas, thinking on my feet, and bouncing these ideas around within a group. (I do a lot of my best work under pressure.)

I never wanted it to end, and all the little stories we came up with held such a seed of promise that I wanted to make them all into short films. OK, so Miss Bossy here may have railroaded some of her teams into picking her idea, but they were all so awesome!

In a nutshell--I had a great day. This is the life for me!