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I spent most of my adolescent years convincing myself that I could become a professional gamer. That didn’t quite pan out. Fortunately for me, I didn’t walk away from gaming until I had already invested a significant amount of time practicing and competing. Why fortunately? I was able to walk away from competitive gaming with a practical set of skills.
Graphic/Web Design: With no HTML experience and very limited Photoshop experience, I managed to put together a website for my first amateur gaming team. Really, I approached building my first site the same way I approach building anything online now. While I now have a wealth of experience in the Adobe suite, I still have very little understanding of coding languages (languages that have changed significantly since I first started). I approach each project with a general idea of what I’d like to accomplish and then I look up how to achieve it if I don’t already know how. Understand that when I built my first team’s website there were far fewer resources online than exist now, so I also had to learn a lot by trial and error. I spent weeks obsessing over my first website. Most days I wouldn’t work on our site at all. Instead, I would try to recreate elements of my favorite gaming websites. Eventually my first website went up and, while I don’t (but wish I did) have a screen shot, I can still remember various design and code elements that I borrowed from other sites. It ended up being the first of many team sites I would put together. With each new site I would become more comfortable in my own abilities to not only recreate something I had done in the past, but also seek new design techniques that I wasn’t previously aware of. I probably built half a dozen websites (and continued to tweak them) as well as countless assorted graphics for my teams. Towards the end of high school, one of my teachers (who I am still very good friends with) recognized my experience and put me in touch with a company that hired me as a freelance graphic designer. I was in!
Video Production: The first video I put together was a compilation of in-game “footage,” edited in the very primitive Sony Vegas software over a series of up-tempo rock songs. Though I only worked on one, I found video editing to be the ultimate challenge. Editing allowed me to use my limited experience in graphic design and also forced me to consider elements of sound design and music composition. It was extremely challenging but I gravitated to it. Following my first and last gaming video, I took courses in high school that allowed me to shoot and edit my own projects. I was so enamored, I decided Radio & Television would be my field of study in college.
To make a not-so-long story even shorter, I graduated high school and went on to study Radio & Television at San Francisco State University. I worked as a freelance graphic designer and eventually started producing videos for the same company. Thanks to competitive gaming, I was able to build a foundation upon which I would build and refine my skills in graphic design, motion graphics, video editing, and production management. Thanks to my professors and the opportunities they presented me with, as well as my fellow students (some much more creative and talented than myself), I was able to use this foundation with a relative degree of success in college. I was even lucky enough to get a job in my field after graduation!
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