In eighth grade, an instructional book for English, my native language, fell upon my desk. Fitting the typical sardonic teenager response, I felt insulted when I realized this was required reading. Despite my initial reluctance, The Elements of Style soon obliterated my perceived grasp of rhetoric, and I became obsessed with the complex machinery that is the English language.
Like a machine, the perfect sentence is functional and contains no needless parts. Unlike a machine, the perfect sentence can bottle the raw essence of humanity to impact readers throughout eternity. Fascination with such power has led me to pursue a degree in journalism. I am intrigued by how words can persuade, inform, disgust, and romance a reader.
After years of meticulous creative writing, I served as journalist and editor for my college’s newspaper. This job experience plucked me—a solitary, meandering writer—from the masses and dropped me at the head of a demanding writing team. I developed vital skills like teamwork, communication, and meeting deadlines. Personal writing helped my self-discovery. Interviewing people and collaborating with journalists taught me the importance of engaging with different viewpoints and community.
Over the years, my career, education, and hobbies all centered on writing, animation, and film. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I worked almost exclusively on screenwriting, graphic design, motion graphics, 2D/3D animation and editorial design.
After struggling to get my script developed, I remembered the animated films of my youth that made me fall in love with movies. It all clicked for me when I saw Watership Down and The Pixar Story documentary for the first time. I loved the style and more serious story of Watership Down and was inspired by seeing the similar problems and feelings I had were the same as the creators of Pixar.
It inspired me to embark on making my own animated film.
More to come …