Graduation Speech :: Graduation Speech, Commencement Address

On behalf of the class of 2006, the second graduating class of Digital Arts at George Cogswell College, we would like to welcome you. It is an honor for us to have you here to celebrate this special day with us. This is the last day of our school year and the beginning of our professional life. It is also a day that we have worked very hard for and we know we could not have done it without your help. We have studied diligently in these past three years and experienced many changes in the digital technologies. Some of us had no idea what we were getting into. We had to deal with both the creative side and the technical side of the digital arts. The creative side was always fun! We had fun designing characters, and then animating them. We had fun analyzing filming and audio techniques, we had fun listening to each other's scripts. Acting class was most amusing! I will never forget our storytelling class. We came up with various weird and fascinating movements for our classmates to act out. But when we applied all of this creative fun stuff digitally, the technical side tormented us. There was always new software to learn, especially in animation programs. Our 3D animation classes were excruciating; we had to memorize more than a generous amount of technical terminology and a myriad of short-cut keys. We had to learn to think in 3D, to understand the relationship of our model from top view to side view and front view and pay attention to every detail; practically everything from modeling to material, texture, and animation. If we were not careful, our character's hands and feet would disappear into cyberspace! Besides that, there were computer problems to worry about. Some of us had experienced system crashes through power outages during the storm season. Others experienced file corruption a few weeks before the finals. There were many sleepless nights. In fact, one of us broke the school rules and stayed overnight just to get some work done, disregarding the alarm in the hall. After this incident, every night at closing time, the on-duty instructor walked around the computer rooms many times to make sure that no one was hiding under a table. I'll never forget those moments. (Now the school has installed alarms in all computer rooms at the new building; there just is no excuse to try to stay over night.