My typical day at Expression starts bright and early at an 8am class. After listening to assignment critiques and to a lecture about a topic such as subsurface scattering or creating displacement maps, we’ll break for lunch around 11am.  Lunch usually consists of taking over a table in the school cafe with my classmates or a trip to the Public Market or Bay Street shopping center, which are both just down the road.

After lunch, we’ll return for our 12-4pm lab.  My labs are spent completing class projects and assignments as well as doing some independent learning.  Depending on the class, I might be modeling a creature, animating some characters to dialog, or caching a particle simulation. If I’m lucky, I’ll have some time during lab to explore topics on my own such as creating muscle systems or playing with cloth dynamics.

Once lab is over, I head over to my on-campus workstudy job to earn some much needed spending money. After a couple of hours of job duties, I’ll either head straight back to the labs or maybe go the gym, which is also right down the street.  When I go back to the lab, I’ll find an open computer to work on projects such as my demo reel or a short film. I often find myself in the lab until around 1am troubleshooting renders, simulating some dynamics, or completing a school assignment. 

When I’m not on campus, I’m usually at home working on my own computer doing the same projects. These 13-14 hour days would not nearly be as fun if not for the laughs and jokes I have daily with my classmates and teachers. 

And in the end, with a great job lined up, it has all been worth it.