How it all started…

Once upon a time, there was a little girl who loved musical theatre. One day, when looking up musical theatre gifs on Tumblr she stumbled across an animatic of “Defying Gravity”. She. Was. Shocked. How could this be? Someone could put pen to tablet and turn a song into animation???

Thus began a lifelong dream to work in animation.

Four year later, I was accepted into a top animation program in the country!

I packed up from Sykesville, Maryland, and traveled over 1,000 miles to Sarasota, Florida, to pursue a degree in computer animation.

The first semester went great, though art school was tougher than I thought. Then, in 2020, a little thing you probably haven’t heard of happened. A GLOBAL PANDEMIC! I was shipped back to Maryland soon after my first spring break of college.

As everyone in the world had to, I adapted. I then started my sophomore year, which is when I learned how to animate in Maya for the first time.

Animation 101

My first major project for Computer Animation 1 (CA 1) was a ball bounce. We were required to have a “live ball,” a ball that could move on its own, and a “dead ball,” a ball that functioned like a real ball or object.

As the TikTok-obsessed nineteen-year-old, I chose to do a trick shot animation.

The second project involved designing, modeling, and rigging a two-legged character (no arms allowed!) My idea was to create a worm trying to get a book from a high shelf. Spoiler alert: the book falls and scares the worm.

Everything you see in the video, from the character to the set, was created by me. This explains why there are some literal holes in the set and why the light randomly moves on its own.

SO BAD AT ANIMATION
SO GOOD AT ORGANIZATION

Emma, why are you showing your animations? They are terrible.

I made them! I spend countless hours working over a very hot laptop, clicking away to make them.

I learned my most valuable lesson taking CA 1: sometimes your greatest failure will lead you down a path you would never have taken otherwise. At this point, I didn’t even know what a producer did. I pivoted to being an Illustration major for a semester before pivoting a third time to starting a business major in my third year of college.

Everything I learned in computer animation has helped me become the best producer I can be.