Nathan            To know anything, you must think about it first.  I know that I am an animator but how?  To understand anything about me, you must first know how I see the world.  There are two types of people; my dad knows things and my mum thinks things.  While my dad is learning and memorizing what he knows to be true, my mom is thinking and imagining what things could be.  I grew up somewhere in between.  Since I was young, I have gathered information and I recognize, not what things are, but how things are defined by each other.  I cannot recognize the elephant in the room without also recognizing the room that the elephant is in.  Thus it is required that I think about whether the elephant is comfortable in the room before knowing that it is,  in fact, an elephant.
            I grew up in a world that did not appreciate art but rather saw it as a craft.  My father taught me about sports, math, and language while my mother taught me about efficiency, work ethic, and flexibility but I always finished my day by escaping into drawing and creativity.  Knowing that I am a creative person became clear very quickly.  In pursuit of knowing who I was, I joined creative experiences and created art-clubs and eventually chose three classes in the Academy of Art Experience in 2004.  I tested myself in this new environment and watched as I found a place where the elephant fit in.  It was not in the streets of editing and motion picture, and while the desert of 2d animation was comfortable, I thrived in the forest of polygons and rivers of animation curves.
            In four years I learned about Maya and, like a sculptor, I chipped away the parts of the process that were not me.  While modeling did not feel fluid enough, texturing felt too rigid.  I need to be where the actors interact and where the silhouettes lead the viewers to what is important just as the silhouette of my life lead me to animation.  I needed to see my creations walk and take on their own personality and their environments just as I have taken on mine.
            Just as I had found myself, my environment denied me.  I graduated in times of uncertainty and doubt as the elections transformed my environment and left me with a year of unemployment.  I did not change fast enough so I made the decision to return for my masters degree and found myself again in this new environment.  I started as a game designer in hopes of discovering myself in a field that had more job openings before returning to animation where my skills could get me a job that fits the effort that I put into my work.
            In graduate school, I found that the years of animating at a computer resulted in bad habits and health problems.  In desperation, I started running, my environment had become too slow and I had discovered that the environment is effected by the individual about as much as the individual is effected by its surroundings.  I started to run, increasing my pace every day, reaching for an environment that accepts me as much as I accept it. 
            I am now an animator who has chiseled his art down to animation and rigging organized in such a way that I am running after a dream that is close to my fingertips.
All images, videos, and scripts copyright Nathan Bryan 2007