Hey
there, no worries, I’d be happy to give advice. Yeh I applied for this
September and was accepted, but unfortunately I had to cancel due to
unsuccessful funding. Which leads me to my first piece of advice, know
how you’re going to pay for it haha. As an international student, you
have to prove you have over £40,000 in the bank ready for the entirety
of the first year ONLY, to prove you are able to fund yourself.
So, how
I prepared:
The summer before I started to put my portfolio together (about now a
year ago since I decided really late that I was going to apply) I
looked at my drawings as critically as possible to find where I needed
to improve, I’m quite good at self critiques so I knew where I needed to
improve, so if you need help, ask lecturers or anyone you know related
to the animation industry, I’d be happy to help as well so let me know
if you want me to take a look.
Once I knew what areas I needed to develop, I took some time for
myself and went on a 10 day holiday just drawing. I started loosening
up, looking at gesture and simplifying the forms, getting used to
drawing with pen ect.. Once I got back, I started looking at developing
my longer drawings, I used
http://artists.pixelovely.com/ to practice 5/10 min poses when i didn’t have a model, but tried to draw from life as much as possible.
I was able to use my university course work as the majority of my
‘other work’ portfolio as well which helped hit 2 birds with 1 stone.
But I spent a lot of time working on life drawing and other stuff to
prepare my portfolio which put me behind on my course, so if you are
studying, try to use as much work for both if possible and keep an eye
out in case you fall behind.
Another thing that helped was although I knew I’d apply for the later
deadline (December/January time) I aimed to get a portfolio ready for
September one so I then had 4 months to critique it, see what was week,
what I was missing, and develop that to make it better.
All in all, go out and draw from life and let your imagination go
wild. Pull stories from daily events, draw interesting gestures of
people going about life, paint that building you’ve always loved at
different times of the day. In essence, try to project as much of
yourself as possible into your work. At the end of the day, they accept
people, not drawings. And remember to play with lots of different
media’s, not for them, but for your own enjoyment.
CalArts love artists, not animators!
Good luck and have fun :)
