Guest Speaker - Andy Peers

For this weeks lecture we had a visiting speaker, Andy Peers who worked for Love Enterprise. He spoke about how it was important to have your own values and to let those values guide you in your work. At this stage in life you don't really have a clear set of values that you work by, without recognising it you will never know. Andy got us to write down a few values we thought we would work by and it turns out that the first ones that came to my mind were, honesty, dedication and loyalty. To be honest values may be all well and good, however I found it hard to really get my head around some of the questions he asked us. It was almost like he was putting us in a future setting and wanted us to decide right away within 30 seconds with what we would do say 'if we could change one thing about the world and how would be go about it within our specific field of study'.

What grabbed my interest more was the fact that he went on to talk about how important it is to recognise your own potential, but yet again to know your limitations. By knowing this you are able to push yourself to your full potential, without straining yourself too far and getting stressed with not being able to achieve something. Everything takes dedication and commitment, if you're going to do something, do it really well. I found this as almost a motivational push, to try even harder on my course. Growing up I have always been told to do the best I can and never give up and hopefully one day that will pull off.

Another thing Andy mentioned was about networking, you need to grab the person's attention, you need a statement to draw people in. That got me thinking a lot about if I ever go to a networking event, what would I say? When I went to BAF and met the Pixar animator Andy Schmidt, I got really nervous trying to ask him the simplest question. I definitely need to build up my courage when it comes to talking to people within the industry, I just never know what to say when starting a conversation. I guess I just have to bear in mind that they are all just ordinary people like myself and they may have once been in a similar position to me.

I have found this lecture quite helpful, maybe not exactly in the way of values, but more in the sense that I need to really push myself. I think I also will try and start emailing some animators and see if they have any advice or tips for a student like myself; and try and contact some of the people I met at ThoughtBubble in Leeds as some were doing quite interesting work.