Hello my name is Dzhantam Warren and I am an inborn artist and aspiring 3D animator. I was born in the Bronx and currently live in Brooklyn New York. My immediate family are scattered throughout the five borroughs, but most of my extended family live in the south in areas like North Carolina & Geordia.
During the course of my life I have
searched for the perfect career to
complement my natural artistic abilities. It couldn’t be just any
graphics field, it had to be something specialized that would allow me
to bring my art into reality and breathe the movement of life into
it. Well maybe not ordinary reality but most definitely virtual
reality. Therefore seeking that goal, I choose to embark on entering the
career field of 3D animation and modeling. I quickly became interested
in the 3D animation field having seen its effects in just about
everything around me from movies, to commercials, to the very TV shows
that I watch everyday. Few art forms have the universal appeal of
animation art. Thus choosing this field felt like the next logical step
in moving my work towards the vanguard of visual development.
I wasn’t one of those kids who went to college straight
after high school. Instead I followed the founding words of my
father,”Don’t go to school to learn, go to get a degree and build upon
what you already know”. I was soon too find out how true those words
truly were. I witnessed the failure or career confusion of many of my
friends that stayed in school and continued straight to college. They
either had degrees that they couldn’t use because they were in job
fields that have no market demand or took anything as a degree and were
lost when they entered the real world job market. So I decided to join
the Army National Guard until I could find what it was that I really
wanted to do with my life.
I later acquired proficiency skills in the Microsoft
Office and other desktop publishing suites and began my first
outside job career in developing presentations for different corporate
entities either directly, as an outsourced employee, or as a temp from
an agency. This gave me an opportunity to get a good taste of where the
use of graphics was in the corporate world. In the beginning, my
presentations were basic. But as my skills rapidly increased so too did
the impact of the presentations that I produced. I began to incorporate
flash animation, 2D & 3D art and animation, and digital photo
manipulation & editing.
My presentations were soon classified as
high-end, which now carried an increased dollar amount with it. Even
so, it soon had become apparent to me that even though my success was
growing, my satisfaction wasn’t. This was because not all companies
required the high-end flashy presentations that I was now fond of
producing. They much rather preferred the more bland and monotonous
layout of the older and more familiar presentations that they were used
too. That didn’t sit well with me because if I can’t enjoy my job then
I begin to loose interest and motivation in doing it. Seeing that this
was the road that I was traveling down, that’s really when I decided to return
to school to pursue my true dream of becoming a 3D animation master.
My first step in manifesting this endeavor began by
practicing 3D animation and modeling over the course of a four year
period. I acquired 3D animation programs such as
LightWave 3D and Maya in order to expose myself, as much as possible,
to the tools of the 3D industry. Secondly, “What was the best schools
to go to in order to prepare for a career in the 3D animation field”, I
asked myself? In-turn I began vigorously searching for relevant
information in locations such as the internet and 3D animation
magazines, like “3D World” and “The Post”.
I have found, in current research, that the 3D animation field and its counterparts in the other three computer animation areas, such as the games, movie, and architectural design industries, are showing good signs of long-term stability, even if not in job security at the moment. Further restructuring of in-house operations will hopefully -
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