How did I get my foot into the industry I have always dreamed about since childhood?
When I was in my 4th grade, my Dad purchased a black and white TV.
It was our first Tv and I was quite thrilled to see one.
The first channel that came in after much flickering and manually tuning in the antenna was Cartoon Network.
The first ever show I watched was 'Popeye, the Sailor man'. I was so fascinated by the show and the way the characters moved.
Growing up, I was drawn towards movies that involved fantasy, magic and anything visually stunning. I told myself, I want to do the same in the fututre, be part of any team somehow that created all these fascinating stuff.
As usual, hailing from a small town in South India, I had only two options to choose from - Engineer or Doctor.
I ended up choosing Computer Science Engineering. Doing the course I fell in love with Problem solving. Algorithm and Programming became my favourite subject.
Even while doing C programming, it was in graphics that I was more interested that I always used to write C program to draw stuff onto the screen.
When I moved to a city to do my under graduation, I finally got an opportunity to enrol in a part-time animation course in Arena Multimedia.
I studied Photoshop, Flash, ToonBoom, 3Ds Max and Maya. At the end of the course I realized, I did not have the patience to sit and do either modeling, animation or rigging. ActionScript in Flash and Mel in Maya is what fascinated me the most.
I decided to combine both my passion - programming and love for vfx/animation.
I researched a few courses that might hone my programming skills particularly for VFX/Animation industry. That is when I came across MSc in Computer Animation and Visual Effects at Bournemouth University, UK.
It was an intense one year programming course. We were taught Maya, Houdini Digita Asset, write simulations in C++. It was intense.
You can find all the work I did in my Masters here in this blog.
I thoroughly enjoyed studying and listening to guest lectures from some really famous VFX supervisors from MPC, DNeg, ILM, Cinesite etc.
Today I am a Software Developer at MPC!
Find your passion, follow it and you will never regret it!
