Sorry, Daryl can’t come to her blog right now. She’s busy writing blog posts for One Small Act about all the awesome stuff her team is doing this semester. Follow the One Small Act blog for weekly updates on how her team is installing a giant umbrella to practice kindness at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. And if that doesn’t intrigue you, I don’t know what else will.
TL;DR: CLICK HERE
During admissions, I was told that the ETC recruits 40% artists, 40% programmers, and 20% of random people that are the “binding glue.” I was to fall into the 20%, which meant 1) that it would be harder for me to get in and 2) that when I got in, I would be behind in skill sets.
When I got in, I found the latter to be definitely true.
I was assigned as an Artist in Building Virtual Worlds (BVW). BVW is a semester-long course where you work in two week design sprints with alternating teams of five students (two programmers, two artists, and one sound designers) to build original virtual worlds that fulfill different objectives. As an artist, my role was to provide art for the worlds, which meant that I had to learn to 3D model, texture, rig, and animate in one week.
I cried during my first week. I was sick. This was hard. After having been out of school for three years, it was difficult to make an adjustment back to school mentality.
I spent the entire Labor Day weekend trying to complete my first assignment: 3D modeling a dragon. Which is just about as hard as it sounds if you’ve never done it before. I spent four hours just trying to open a file in Photoshop.
While I struggled to complete this assignment, many other artists around me were done in a few hours. Some artists even made two dragons! I had strong doubts that I didn’t belong in the program.
But at the end of the weekend, with a LOT of help from my peers, I did it.
Since that weekend, I’ve become a much better artist. I modeled an entire purgatory underworld, Evel Knievel rubber ducks, and an office scene with at least 30 inanimate objects. Granted at first, my models weren’t so great (my 3D clouds looked like literal poop), I learned a ton, and I learned it really fast. I’m really surprised about how far I’ve come, and I have to thank my peers for that.
While being the dumbest person in the room can be scary and intimidating, it helps when you’re surrounded by people who are willing to teach you. One of the most valuable resources that we have at the ETC is actually our peers. While I’ve learned high concepts from my professors, my peers have been the ones to explain to me how to correctly UV map, paint skin weights, and keyframe animations.
As a lifelong learner, the scariest thing for me isn’t being the dumbest person in the room, it’s being in a place where I have no one to learn from.
TL;DR Not knowing what you’re doing is ok.
If I could describe the ETC program in one word it would be: WEIRD. And HARD.
On our first day of class, we built towers out of spaghetti. Last week, we learned how to juggle. This week, I debuted as Angela from American Beauty and learned to seduce men in improv.
Our team wrecking the competition at a spaghetti + marshmallow building contest.
I knew my program was going to be nontraditional, but I didn’t think it would be this weird.
And the weirdest thing is that the weirdness is what makes this hard. With traditional assignments, there’s usually only one right answer. But with the assignments that we receive, there’s an infinite number of possibilities. And we’re tasked with thinking of the infinite outside of the infinite, to go beyond what’s already been done. Which means that a lot of what we end up making ends up being…well, weird.
What I’ve learned from this daily exercise of thinking outside of the box is that:
Creativity is a muscle.
Being creative is not an easy task. It takes practice. I used to think that some people were just more creative than others. In reality, being creative is a muscle that you have to exercise everyday to get better and stronger. And trust me, the ETC is giving me a really good workout.
Creativity comes when you say yes.
It’s really easy to poke holes in other people’s ideas. It’s really hard to help fix them. Saying yes to other people’s ideas even when you see the flaws, can actually be surprisingly productive.
Creative potential is unlimited.
I sometimes feel like I’ve hit a wall, like I have no more good ideas left. It’s about ten ideas past that point, that I start to actually come up with the best ideas.
Although this program is a little bit painful, and a lot a bit weird, I am so excited for what I’ll come up with in the next two years. I hope it’s weirder than my wildest imaginations.
TL;DR Weird builds creativity.
During the first week of school the question to ask was: “Are you an artist, programmer, or sound designer?” To which I would answer, “None of the above.”
My background is in science education. I studied biology and psychology in college, and I loved science. But I liked talking about science, more than I liked actually doing it. I interned at STEM outreach programs, mentored students in low-income areas, and even designed my own after school STEAM program for my senior thesis. As a result, I ended up working at NOVA, the public science television program, as a production assistant for the education team.
At NOVA, I realized the power of media to educate, and saw the growing potential for games and interactive experiences to reach a more diverse audience. However, I didn’t have the skill sets necessary to build those experiences.
I discovered the ETC through coincidence. I was looking into the career paths’ of employees at companies that I admired, trying to figure how I could get there. I found Michelle Cohen, the Director of Creative Programming at the Two Bit Circus (at the time). She studied at the Entertainment Technology Center, and when I looked into it, I realized that I had actually read about the program years ago.
For my high school graduation, my dad had given me Randy Pausch’s book, “The Last Lecture,” as a guiding philosophy to starting my adult life. I had read that book with fervor, and if anyone asked, it was my favorite book. It also happened to be the ten year anniversary of “The Last Lecture,” when I rediscovered the program. It was too much of a coincidence.
Although it seemed like the right fit and there were many guiding signs, I worried that I wasn’t qualified enough. But I visited the ETC anyway, and when I walked through the doors, I knew this is where I had to be. On the admissions floor, I was greeted by a twenty foot long, floor-to-ceiling installation of an intergalactic space ship control center. I was hooked.
Now, here I am in the ETC Class of 2020. I feel blessed to be able to walk by the space ship control center every morning. And I’m neither an artist, programmer, or sound designer. But, I’m here to learn.
Me standing in front of the control center on the 5th floor of the ETC excitedly pointing to my name.
TL;DR I’m here to build cool things for science.
