Well, we’ve finished up another year and are now excited about all of our new goals that we hope to accomplish in 2009! I hope every enjoyed their holiday season. I know I did.

I’m currently staring outside at the snow coming down in lovely Columbus and am just thinking about how beautiful it is and how much I definitely feel like its winter again. You know, its funny that a lot of us in the northern part of the states always complain about the cold winters and talk about how much we’d like to be somewhere warmer, but when I slow down and actually enjoy the winter instead of looking at it only as a nuisance standing in the way of my next destination, I recognize the softness and miracle of it. Winter brings so many magical thoughts. For many children, they dream of reindeer and Santa Clause. For me, I think about things I enjoyed as a kid. I think about the Grinch and Will Vinton’s Claymation Christmas. I think about how much fun it is to roll around in the snow and go sledding. It really is something wonderful and we should all take the time to slow down and enjoy it. Instead of complaining, we should take advantage of it and do only the things we can do during the winter, like skiing. Anyway, I encourage everyone to enjoy the snow and winter as much as they can. I always enjoy a brisk walk through the snow-covered woods.

Now moving onto more relevant, animation thoughts. I started my second to last class (class 5) at AM last night. I really think I’m going to enjoy this class. It is all about story. We will be creating the story for the animated short that we will animate in class 6. I think there should be a lot of really great discussions to help flesh out ideas and contemplate reasons why some stories and story elements work and why others do not. Last night, we had a great couple of mini discussions about Kung-Fu Panda and Wall-E and I look forward to the rest of the Q&A’s being that interesting! I look forward to exploring my ideas in this class and hopefully becoming a more entertaining story-teller and animator.

By the way, I changed the look of my site. Did anyone notice? Hopefully over the next few weeks I’ll be able to find some time and tweak the look even more.