Mwende Says: Stop Procrastinating! Your Portfolio Will Open Doors in 2012!

by Mwende Hahesy, BAVC Enrollment Advisor

You gotta have goals for 2012. If one of your goals is to get a job (or get a better job) in video, design, or the digital media world, the one thing that will have you standing out from the crowd is a solid portfolio. Employers tell us that the portfolio is the single most determining factor in whether they will even give a candidate an interview!

Take Casimir Fornalski. We met him pretty much straight outta art school hoping to be a director. Although his portfolio demonstrated great artistic vision (that is, if he was looking to work on the set of Evil Dead), it didn’t say “I can do what you need me to do” to prospective employers. He was applying for creative jobs and not hearing back and had resigned himself to taking a job he knew would pay the bills but leave him feeling unsatisfied at the end of the day. That’s when he came to BAVC and enrolled in a Certificate program that included portfolio building and mentoring.

BAVC instructor Adam Shaening-Pokrasso took one look at Casimir’s portfolio and told him the hard truth: you’re never gonna get a job until you show them what they want!

Casimir took the classes he needed and then, hunkered down and put in a few months of hard work on his reel. Turns out, he fell in love with motion graphics and he was good at making them. Even though he didn’t have many real work assets to show, he made a 1:43 second reel with conceptual samples--you can check it out here. It didn’t take him long to get where he never dreamed he’d end up—as an animator at Google.

Google’s latest innovation is maps for indoor spaces and Casimir just completed this animation showcasing the new Android app.

Casimir says, "...come February I'll have been at Google for 2 years now as an animator and designer, all thanks to the skills and contacts I gained at BAVC."

If you want to tap into this great resource, sign up for the first Portfolio Development class here. Still have questions? Email me directly at mwende[at]bavc[dot]org.