Entry 4 | Networking Event 1 & 2

Moving Pixels is a club at NYC College of Technology that is run by students and supervised by Prof. Kapusinski. I joined during the Spring of 2020 around the beginning of the pandemic. The club’s goal is to network with fellow motion and film students, improve skills, enhance our portfolio’s, and help out other City Tech departments. 

Event One: The first meeting was September 2, from noon to 1:30 pm during club hours on zoom. The club creative directors are Giovanna, Daniel, Brianna and Jennifer. Meeting one was introducing what Moving Pixels is about along with welcoming returning and new potential members. 

The guest speaker was fellow classmate and club director Giovanna. Giovanna’s presentation was on  portfolios and the importance of creating a professional site. She explained where and how to create a domain name. Giovanna formerly used Square space. She gave her opinions while sharing her own sites to showcase the before and current Wix interface. I learned about the importance of having a site that is mobile responsive and to challenge myself with concept projects as if it was from a professor. Often recruiters can tell the difference between what is an assignment and what is a passion project. 

Event Two: Moving Pixels meeting two happened on September 23rd. Giovanna, one of the club directors, introduced her friend and guest speaker Justin Volz. Through his presentation I learned he has an illustration background that advanced into advertising and animation. Although he started with illustration he enjoys working with UX/UI, programs like antifor https://antifor.com/. 

Justin’s dog is named River and he enjoys cross country hiking. His work experience began as an intern in productions. This is where he learned management and how a team of people were involved in creating. He moved through the ranks learning production, then management until he was hired as a clean up animator where he was able to color correct and clean up professional work. People he was driven to be like. From learning to clean up he moved to background design. I never heard of this trippy show called Superjail (https://www.adultswim.com/videos/superjail) but he worked on creating the background scenes. Justin explains there were several challenges creating the background using Flash. He continues to walk us through several case studies he worked on, Hint Water was my favorite! Justin shares other jobs that he initiated himself as well as sharing that he recently landed his dream job at Google. 

Something that stuck with me toward the end of the presentation was when Justin was casually chatting with us. He said “Artists often say they are not artists, when they say they can not, they usually can”. I interpreted this, as you will not know unless you try. Doubt is natural, keep going!

There were several other takeaways from Justin’s presentation:

1. Always sharpen your skills, take bootcamps or teach yourself from free sites
2. Never stop learning – look at it as a new unique experience vs another skill set 
3. Collaboration is often with people not in your skill set
4. Motion is not just one thing (music, 3D, tech, graphic, illustration)
5. Motivation is a wave
6. Create personal projects – show creative freedom

And lastly do not get discouraged even if you complete multiple rounds of an interview and do not land the job.