Before anyone says anything - or takes points off for spelling - it is "theatre." "Theater" refers to the actual building while "theatre" refers to the art. At DSA, we have to choose two art pathways. When I was making the choice, my dad said something along the lines of "well, do you think you'll be doing it for the rest of your life?" With that logic, I probably would have tried to opt out of history class, but he did have a point. As you can guess based on this website and the title of this post, I chose game design and theatre. Game design is pertinent to one of the paths I could possibly take in the future, but theatre isn't quite as much, at least at surface value; I'm not planning on being an actor. Yet, I think that my experience with theatre is helpful with other arts, including many aspects of game design.
The first three weeks of this game design class has been creating infographics, and at the end of the week, presenting them. Well, I'm a pretty socially anxious person, which does not bode well for me doing things in the game industry since pitching games and presenting ideas is a key part of the work. This is one of the main places theatre has helped me. Aside from the obvious things it has helped me with - giving me practice speaking in front of an audience, practice projecting my voice - it also taught me to take risks and be more comfortable in myself. While my presentation skills still aren't great, I think they are getting better, and theatre is a big part of that. In my last post, I also mentioned that animation is a career I am looking into. If this is character animation, then it's clear that studying how people express emotions would be very helpful. However, I've also helped out with many different tech crews before, which also holds many valuable lessons. Set crew can teach a lot about staging objects in your scene, as well as "camera angles" because of how much you have to consider where the audience is. Most recently I've been working on the marketing crew which has helped give me practice in graphic design and advertising. Since animations are basically drawn films, it makes sense that acting and tech that goes into creating theatrical shows would help with animation. In another small way, theatre helps because of the memorization skills it teaches. Learning lines quickly for a show can teach you to memorize other things quickly as well. This is helpful for photoshop shortcuts, or common commands in coding. Even if your memory isn't very fast, you do learn how to memorize better for yourself. Likewise, this, along with doing any piece of a show on a tight schedule, can help improve time management skills. Also, when working with so many people on a show, your communication skills are going to improve. Basically, for me, theatre is helpful to game design because:
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Having to single in on just one career is difficult, and this was the first year when discussing careers we had to pick just one. Choosing a career is something most high school kids are expected to do now as they look for colleges, but most of the time it's just in terms of choosing a major or general field. We had to find a game design career that we were interested in, that we thought we would be good at, and that we would like to take on the roles of in an upcoming group project. I chose animator, but it took me some time to get there. We had a series of jobs to pick from, and a series of quizzes to tell us if we would be a good fit for each other them. However, the quizzes were missing animator and game developer, but there were quizzes for sound designer, game writer, producer, and programmer. All of my quizzes came back with the underwhelming result, "You might be good at this, but it's not a perfect fit." Because of this, I was planning to go with producer since I was getting sort of Jack-of-All-Trades results. However, in the end I decided to go with animator, not because I'm great at art, but rather because if I'm honest with myself, it's what I want to do as a job, even if I don't yet believe I'm talented enough to. Here's the infographic I made to represent animation and why I would be a good fit for it. The first box has some basic facts, I used two things that animators need to understand to incorporate graphics, and the last box for qualities that are nice to have as an animator. As I said earlier, I'm not a perfect fit for this career: I'm not great at 3D animation by any means, and my communication and time management skills could probably use some work still. However, I feel like if I do put in the work, my skills can get there, and I already have enough passion for it to make it work. I got information about animation from www.thebalance.com/animator-career-information-525982 .
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AuthorHi, I'm Abi, a DSA student who likes games, drawing, writing, and acting. Archives
February 2020
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