Year 3 - Time to practice. October 2001 - April 2003

For the next year or so, I lived with my parents and got a normal job at a bank. During this time, I practiced constantly, working on improving my abilities and understanding the tech. It was during this time that I started coming here to SimplyMaya!

I remember that I installed a visitor tracker onto my site because I was curious about where people were linking to my site from. I had several tutorials by this time and saw that I got a large influx of visitors from one of my tutorials being mentioned here on SM. So, I started coming by and became a normal member of the forum like most of you guys. Eventually, the guy who used to run SM (Kevin back in the day) asked me if I was interested in making some videos for this site and during that time, I made several.

I must have cleaned out all of my old work and started fresh on a new portfolio several times. I even scrapped my old show reel that I made in college. It was a really awful reel with really awful work. I never bothered making another show reel again. I might change my mind and try putting one together now that I have several years of professional work behind me, but at the time, I needed to focus my time on the actual work and not a reel.

During the year of 2002, I began shopping around for a job with the new work I had accumulated. I sent out resumes to hundreds of studios all over the US and around the world. I remember that I saved all of my sent emails in a folder so that I could keep track of who I applied to (so I wouldn't accidentally double email someone... not that that still didn't happen sometimes... how embarrassing!).

Eventually, I literally had over 1000 emails in this folder... not kidding, it counted them. I remember doing the math... Out of 1000 emails, I had about 100 replies. Out of 100 replies, about 90 were form letters and auto-replies. Out of the 10 personal replies I got, 9 of them were telling me that they either weren't hiring or they weren't interested in me. Then I got THE ONE.

Around December 2002, I got a response that didn't dismiss my application. The instead gave me an art test! I was thrilled to get the test and worked on it the best I could for about a week. The assignment was to create a character based on a drawing that the studio provided.

After submitting my results, I got a phone call. They wanted to interview me over the phone! I was ECSTATIC! And incredibly nervous! I talked to them for a good hour and ended the interview feeling excited. A day later, I got another call requesting an interview IN PERSON! The studio was going to fly me up to interview me over the course of two days!

I'll have to continue in the next post!