Review of 2011

This might be a bit late, but I liked the sug­ges­tion to do this by Zen Hab­its, so here it goes…

Accom­plish­ments:

1. Got my Bachelor’s degree
2. Star­ted learning to paint with oil colors at Andrea’s stu­dio
3. Redis­co­vered my love for life dra­wing, visi­ted the course at school more often
4. Star­ted stu­dy­ing cha­rac­ter ani­ma­tion at Ani­ma­ti­onMen­tor
5. Crea­ted 7 short 2D ani­ma­ti­ons for the web­site of a cli­ent with Oli­ver and Peter
6. Rela­xed in the Carib­bean only to find the real para­dise months later and much clo­ser, in Croatia
7. Made avail­able my first open source pro­ject, based on my Bachelor’s thesis
8. Did much of the orga­ni­zing for the class reunion
9. Taught my cou­sin about video edit­ing and shoo­ting, which hel­ped him to create his video on buil­ding a typo­gra­phic chair
10. Moved own of my parent’s home and star­ted a flat share, which was a well-needed chance and lots of fun. Living right outs­ide the city cen­ter is nice too!
11. Star­ted exer­cising and run­ning regu­larly with trai­ning buddy Chris, lost about 3 kg so far and fee­ling much better
12. Star­ted keeping a pri­vate diary
13. Took a leave of absence from stu­dy­ing; did free­lance work in the areas of web deve­lop­ment (made peace with it) and cha­rac­ter design (chal­len­ging but fun)
14. Finally star­ted making some indie games myself

Mis­ta­kes:

1. Let­ting my pro­cras­ti­na­tion get out of hand at AnimationMentor.
2. Not asking for help when I nee­ded it.

Les­sons learned:

1. Doing some­thing regu­larly instead of in short bursts leads to grea­ter results. It’s also less stress­ful than working really really hard just on the day of the dead­line. It feels so good to know that you’re pro­gres­sing all the time!
2. Old ideas for pro­jects never die. Some­ti­mes they just need some extra years before they are ready to be executed.
3. Per­fec­tio­nism gets in the way of just doing fun things. Not ever­y­thing needs to be living up to high stan­dards and be all serious. Just do!
4. The prin­ci­ples of ani­ma­tion can be applied all throug­hout the arts, like in oil pain­ting (exag­ge­ra­tion) and life dra­wing (weight, squash & stretch).

Con­clu­sion

There were many many pro­jects I worked on this year, most of which aren’t finis­hed or never even got really star­ted. But just the fact that there were over 4 times more than in 2010 is a really good sign!

There are, of course, many things I want to do in 2012. Only thing I know for sure is that I will spend the year stu­dy­ing at AM. I want to be able to regu­larly exer­cise, study, work on hobby pro­jects and do stuff with fri­ends and family. Some­thing that is really close to my heart: Finally star­ting a web­co­mic. And com­ple­ting One Way Trip To Hell and Back.