Cultures and Connections

I came to Vancouver to learn animation. Well, that's what I thought at least. I am starting to realize that this is not the only thing I am gaining from being here.

Sure, in school I am learning all about animation, but my 3D modeling teacher made a very important point at the end of class yesterday. He said that one of the most important parts of being at VFS is our peers. Each student in my class is learning like I am, but each is also a good teacher. We can go to eachother for help when its needed.

One other thing I like about my classmates is how we are all from differnt backgrounds and cultures. We come form all over the world. There are three students who speak Spanish as their first language, but each comes from a different country. To me, a non-spanish speaker, it is really interesting to listen to them talk. I can hear the differences between Mexican spanish, Spanish from Barcelona, and Venezuelan Spanish. Its been great for me too, because I have been speaking Italian quite a bit. Two of the Spanish speakers speak Italian very well and the girl from Turkey also knows a bit. I have learned how international South Park is. I have learned three new English words (from non-native speakers), and I learned that Hungarian is probably one of the most difficult languages for English speakers to learn/speak (it is one of the few languages in Europe that is not indo-european).

Yesterday, some friends came over to the apartment. Justin, Caio, Andrej and I went to KFC. Yea, fancy. It was Caio's very first time eating KFC, so he was excited. We were supposed to go to another person's house after, but we were procrastinating. We decided to go to a liquor store and purchase some alcohol. Canada has a riducilous tax on alcohol which causes a regular sized bottle of Grey Goose Vodka to go from a normal USD price of about $30-50 to being $109.99. It was insane. So we managed to get semi-cheap alcohol, and headed back to my apartment. We played video games and watched animation things (yea, thats what animation students do in their free time) until Cecilia and Panya came over. We started to play some card games that Caio was teaching us. One was called Truco. It was quite interesting, but it was taking me too long to get the hang of it. He taught us like 50 other popular Brazilian card games after that too. It was fun.

So, here is one of the short animations we watched:

Watch falling art.divx in Animation  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Its quite disturbing, but the character design is amazing. I will look for more of the animations we watched and post links a little later.