Yesterday was the start of my fourth semester at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. My first class, advanced animation 3, started at 8:30, which meant I had to get up at 6:00a.m., ouch! It actually wasn’t too bad, I got to see a pretty sunrise.

On the BART I saw an ad for Burger King’s new Whopper called the “Angry Whopper”. Bizarre.

I had a good time at my first class, my teacher Michael Berenstein seems very knowleagable. He worked at PIXAR for a number of years (I’m not sure if he’s still working there or not). He worked on Toy Story 2, Bugs Life, Finding Nemo and Monsters Inc. It’s kinda exciting having teachers who’ve worked at some of the big studios.

My second class of the day was clothed figure drawing. We did a number of two sets of 5 mins drawings, same pose, one nude, then clothed. It was a neat excercise and I was rather happy with how my drawings turned out. I hadn’t done any figure drawings over the winter break and that usually spells disaster when I start a new drawing class. Typically I feel like I’m learning to draw all over again and though it felt a little rough, I still felt there was something there.

The next day…

I feel rested up, but mediciney. I’m taking stuff for my cough and I’m feeling it today. maiki brought me along to Sufficient Grounds, a sandwhich shop in Berkeley. I’m glad I came along, now I can draw and hang out rather than just sleep ^_^

It’s tough, I really wish I wasn’t working at all so I could put all my energy into school, but I’m enjoying work so much, I’m getting to do lots of things I’m really interested in (baking, food prep and soon I’ll be getting training on the line). Bill keeps joking that Kimi and I will probably take over the Bread Workshop, that really caught me off guard. I’ve always had a dream of having a bakery/cafe/small restaurant. I’ve no idea what the future holds for me, and there’s no way I want to stop pursuing animation and art in general, but all of a sudden it seems like that dream has much more of a chance than I’d have thought. Interesting.

I have a lot of homework to get done today. YCON starts this weekend and lots of friends will be visiting. I’m starting with my 3d animation homework as I find it a lot easier to focus and get started on computer work.

I just ordered a new 24″ iMac, I’m looking forward to getting that setup. I had thought of getting a new tower instead, but the iMac includes a gorgeous monitor and has such a small footprint (I should be able to get rid of both my g5 tower and pc box), that I couldn’t resist. My work area at home isn’t ideal at the moment, I have the aforementioned two towers next to my desk, two keyboards and mice on my desk and it’s just too much. I can’t wait til it’s simplified, I think it’ll work much better for me.

I’ll still be using two monitors, so I won’t lose that functionality. I forgot to order the mini dvi to dvi adapter though, so I’ll drop by the apple store before school sometime this week.

My trip to the Berkeley marina went nicely. It was really cold, but pretty out. We also came across some guys fishing. They hooked something large as we were walking by, so we hung around to see what it was. Turned out they had caught a stingray of all things, it was pretty crazy. I got some photos.

I have a lot of content I’ve been wanting to add, just haven’t had the energy to devote to the site. I look forward to getting back to that in the next week or two.

I made it up into the Berkeley hills last week, twice in one day actually. I first went up during the day to check things out and to learn the route. Good thing too, the streets are really confusing up there. I found some nice areas along Grizzly Peak Road with a full view of the bay, it was really impressive. I look forward to making more trips up there. I want to catch it when San Francisco is being swallowed by clouds, I want to go up on a misty day and or night, and I want to make it up there on a really clear day. I’d also like to take my telephoto lense and get some nicer shots of San Francisco.

I used Hugin to stitch the separate images together, it’s a nice piece of software.