Getting into Gnomon

So today I went to see Brian who is the head of student services at Gnomon. I tried originally to get into 3 year program (Entertainment Design & Digital Production)  but was not able to because I was not good enough. It hurt… A lot… because I spent ~5 months working on my submission portfolio and the thing you don’t want to hear is your not good enough espetioly when they did not tell you WHY.

So I set out to find out WHY I was not allowed in and in turn I decided to pursue the 1 year program to get better at my fundamentals called “Entertainment Design” track which is a discount rate of the first year of the 3 year program so not all is lost. So I went to see Brian who was SUPER nice and helpful and in the end he brought up some great points. I also recorded this interview with him so you can listen to it and learn from it also J The long story short is that I needed to study the fundamentals and develop them more I have the creativity and I have skill he said but I needed to bring all these elements together. I will keep seeing him each term to check in and show some work to see what direction I need to go to get into the 3 year program which will be just 2 years as long as I get a B- in all my classes then they transfer over and the price is discounter on the classes. It will be more money in the long run but at the same time it’s what I want to do to get BETTER.

Here is the images I submitted for my portfolio and also the audio file for the talk we had together I will try and clean it up some time when I don’t have so much homework I need to get done. Any ways the long story short if you’re going to apply for gnomon and want to know what to show in your portfolio is this:

1) Stick to traditional means you can pain in Photoshop just don’t throw at them your 3D work they can teach you that what they want to see is your traditional skills with your Artist Identity put on it.

2) Don’t be afraid to talk to their admissions staff set up a meeting with them and show them your work and get feedback asap. There all there to help and want to see you succeed and they will brutally honest with you from the get go. Suck it up and take the time to really have your work shredded to pieces in front of your eyes.

 Crap I lost some of my portfolio :( Computer hard drive FAILS! So here is some of the pieces that survived my computer drives death that I backed up on my NAS:

Now remember you can submit 10-15 pieces... always do the more and always do the BEST.WORK.EVER no half ass stuff.

Here is the adio file of the talk with Brian:

My First Week

Hi there internet world. I desided to blog about my time at Gnomon school so that future students and professionals can take this information and decide if this is something they would want to pursue. I looked for blogs about Gnomon when I was trying to decide if I wanted to go to the school and found only one that had any bit of contents and found it HIGHLY usfull in making my choice.

My goal is to come up with a non biased blog that tells you my personal feelings about the life at gnomon / students / teachers / student services. So lets get into it!

Here is my class schedule for my first week at Gnomon:
Perspective on Frieday taught by RPastrana
Figure Drawing  on Wedday taught by Van Arno
VisualCommunication1 on Monday taught by MHannah
Art History 1  on Monday taught by JGotts
Overview VFX Games on Thursday taught by TBoubeau
Photoshop DigitalPrd on Sunday taught by MColborn
DP/EDDP Studio Lab on Saturday
DP/EDDP Studio Lab on Sunday

Now I cant post all the information about the school because some of its protected by law and cant be released to the public but after doing this for a week I got to say I am impressed and enjoy it. All my instructors either currently work in the Entertainment Industry or they did for 10-20 years of there life and are just picking up contract work at this time.

Now there are classes I do hate, Visual Communication 1, but its not because of the instructor Mark Hannah is a AMAZING artist to say the least! But what I do hate is redundent tasks like Draw 15 boxes in 1,2,3 point perspective this assignment almost took me 15+ hours to do because I did 25 box per page and you had to start with rulers go to mix ruler and free hand then do all free hand and you had to do them GOOD.

Let me say this Gnomon is not a PUSH OVER SCHOOL this is not what Gnomon is and ever will be. Your here to learn and your here to work your ass off. You are spending a lot of money (1 year track right now for me is $16,500 out of pocket!) but it is well worth it so fare.

I will post some of my class work on here and answer any questions you post and please post them on the blog so other people can see them /read them / learn from them if not shoot me a email and tell me if its ok to post it on the site or not. I think we all should learn from other peoples experience. Now I need to go rush off to my Art History class so chow internet world!