Originally published in Portuguese on August 16, 2022. Read the original.
I finally finished my design/animation thesis, and I think I achieved what I wanted with such a complex project. Let me walk you through what happened from the very beginning.
Grab a seat, story time
I got into college in 2017 through the waiting list of Brazil’s national university admission system. At the time I was working as a waiter in São Paulo and taking odd jobs here and there (I was even an extra in a Fox series). I hoped to study Advertising or Design at Belas Artes in São Paulo, but I didn’t get a scholarship. When the final results came out and I had made it into the Federal University of Technology – Paraná (UTFPR), I was ecstatic: I was going to study design without paying tuition. Then came the classic broke-student drama: working while studying. I moved to Curitiba to study and, in the meantime, worked in sales at a coworking space.
Design school has one particularity compared to other courses: LOTS OF PROJECTS and FEW EXAMS, which means you have a ton of work to do outside the classroom. When I took my technical course in electronics in high school, you could just study the day before the test and ace it. That’s much harder when a project is done in a team and has to follow a brief. So I never managed to make a project I was 100% proud of, because my time was always split between work and college.
The consequence
Which brings us to the thesis. I couldn’t finish college — such an important milestone in a young adult’s life — without a project that made me feel “wow, I made something awesome”. Combined with my desire to make animation, that sparked the first idea for “Se flopar, nunca postei”. I spent a year developing it, as a one-person team (with help from my boyfriend on the series’ marketing).
I even tried to write a blog series here on the site documenting my process, but there was so much going on that I couldn’t keep up with writing while building the series. I also have a few videos I made along the way (one from before I had even started writing the thesis). If you’re curious, click here.
The presentation
On presentation day I went from hell to heaven in a matter of minutes. I had already posted the animation on YouTube, but I had never watched anyone watching it. I was scared of being judged (the room was packed) and of messing up the presentation, but people’s reaction couldn’t have been better. The other students loved it and the professors’ feedback gave me a lot of confidence to pursue a career in animation. I’d love to go back in time just to watch all those people laughing at the same time at a joke I wrote for an animation. IT WAS SO COOL — and of course, I got a perfect score (and I’ve now submitted it to several festivals).
Wrapping up
Building this project mattered because, unlike the industry where every deadline is “yesterday”, a year-long project is a chance to discover yourself and sharpen your skills. I learned to apply different methodologies across several fronts, to write a sitcom script, to animate in Toon Boom (thanks in part to Combo Estúdio’s course), to use Notion (which I love — that app is my life), and to do all of it under the stress of a pandemic, not knowing whether the world was going to end.
But I think my biggest lesson is not to doubt myself: if a complicated project shows up, a few sleepless nights and you can make it happen (crying-laughing).
