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A portion of Tahnee's winning essay:
Once upon a sunny day when I was a mere munchkin of three years old, my mom took me outside with a bucket of chalk sticks and drew some cartoons on the back patio for me. Excited to try for myself, I took a powdery stick in my small hand and drew my own cartoon of a mother butterfly and its babies. Surprised, my mom immediately recognized artistic talent in me and encouraged me to draw with whatever drawing utensils I could get my hands on—pens, pencils, crayons, and markers. And one day, I found myself watching a Behind-The-Scenes show on the Disney channel about Beauty of the Beast. One of the animators had a couple of drawings, one stacked on top of the other, and flipped back and forth between them quickly, giving the illusion of them coming to life. Intrigued by this simple concept of animation, I set out with my pens and markers and made some feeble attempts at getting a butterfly drawing to flutter its wings. Needless to say, at that age I had trouble even counting how many wings a butterfly had. Still, my images conveyed a sort of movement that I would later build upon in more animation experiments. In kindergarten, one of the parents brought in a couple of young musician boys. Their instruments were ruddy brown with a black neck, topped with a swirl. The instrument was played by a wooden stick with white hair, which was drawn across four strings of the instrument. The boys played simple, recognizable songs like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on their violins—intrigued to no end, I threw questions at them and wanted to learn more about playing it. I started taking violin lessons that summer, and became a hard-practicing musician, in conjunction with my artistry. In my early elementary school years I became proficient at making complex flip-books of my own cartoon characters. I developed stories along with my cartoon characters and illustrated small books to go with them. From a young age, I had a yearning to write and tell stories. I would also sometimes make paper models of my characters, based off of my 3D concept sketches. I had visions, and I made them come true! When I was eight, I had a hankering to start playing more instruments. But I saw the logic in learning to play a piano or any keyboarding instrument—when digitized, I would be able to play synthetic sounds of any instrument in an orchestra I wanted. So I began playing piano in addition to the violin. Little did I know that ten years later I would take a class where I would compose my own music on synthesizers! At middle school talent shows, I gained a lot of respect for my musical enthusiasm. My art wasn’t so established due to improper instructing. I was now looking forward to a bright future possibly in being a concert musician.
High school rolled around; I was immediately enrolled in Honors classes, which soon consumed most all my time at home; weekly musical lessons became unpracticed appointments. My musical side took a major blow when I lacked the free time to practice in. However, I took an art class and was introduced to proper drawing and coloring techniques. This was something I could spend my class time on; homework was a rarity in that class. My interest in digital multimedia perked with web design; I taught myself HTML and CSS and was able to design my own websites with my own hand-drawn graphics. Web design has been a side hobby for me ever since. My following high school years were challenging, as I took more Honors and AP classes. During my Junior and Senior years I took more art classes, and achieved a 5/5 on the AP Studio Art Exam. My friends were fans of my cartoon drawings, and by now I was designing the colossal pep rally posters for the high school. A few of my friends suggested that I not only play piano for Fallbrook High’s first-ever talent show, but that I also attempt to make an animation. After much thought, consideration and a sore hand I had completed a 762-frame-long hand-drawn digital animation called the DVD and Sock Stealing Gremlins. I was surprised at how successful this short film turned out. My friends urged me to take a path down my art making. By the time I graduated high school, I knew I wanted to go back to my original passion: drawing the whimsical things that came to my mind. I enrolled in Palomar College as an Illustration major. I was dissatisfied to find that they had no traditional 2-D Animation classes; everything was for 3D modeling instead. Whilst completing my general education and maintaining a 4.0 GPA, my art instructors saw that I had a lot of dedication and talent. Being my major was Illustration, I had plans to graduate Palomar with an AA in hand, and seek freelance illustration jobs for magazines, websites and children’s books. While I have succeeded in illustrating one upcoming children’s book (Beautiful Things by Albert Heefner), I realized that the illustration industry is vast, with cut-throat competition and assignments that likely wouldn’t sit well with me. I wanted to make my own ideas come to life. So far the only place I had freedom of creativity was in local art shows and Palomar College’s annual arts and literature magazine, Bravura, both in which I had received first prizes for my art. And then I realized that Palomar would not be sufficient in getting me where I wanted to be. Even though it has an amazing art department, I had the urge to move on to a formal art school. All my life, people had told me I would end up a student at CalArts for their music department. CalArts is very well-known for their animation department, which was Walt Disney’s main focal department when he co-founded the school. Deciding to go back to my first desire to create animation, I got superb advice from my Palomar professors and put together a fifty-piece portfolio of life drawings and illustrations. I applied mid-November and on March 15th, I received my letter of acceptance. I will begin classes at CalArts beginning September 8th as a Character Animator. This selective school not only has visual arts and music, but also has a dance, theatre, writing and full film program. This will be a chance to further explore my musical and writing sides; creative writing has been another recent ambition of mine, and I may minor in it while I’m a student there. CalArts is going to be the perfect opportunity for me to mingle with other artists that have my same ambitions and interests. Cartooning and life drawing reign supreme at their tip-top animation school. During summers I plan on doing internships for studios like Pixar and Dreamworks. And after four years of competing with my class (of about forty-five students) I’ll likely plunge into a career doing character design or conceptual art and animation for a big animation studio (most preferably Pixar). Down the line I would imagine that I will break away from the big studios and will be producing my own independent works.
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