This blog is a portfolio. I won't be posting about my life per se, except on levels that show how personal experiences have affected my professional life. The title of this blog reflects that.
"Save the Girl" has become my personal mantra. I was once reading an interview with Mike Kunkel, an amazing animator / illustrator, and he was speaking to the topic of making time for personal projects. Adapting one of his quotes to put on my desktop for motivation, I came up with "If you wait until you have time for personal projects, they will never get done". Ambition finds us often lacking the time to satiate its greedy palette. Making time to complete personal projects is a huge part of feeding my ambition monster, but for my mantra, I needed something a bit more pithy.
Then there it was, I happened to put the quote on the background of an image that was already on my desktop. It's art from a game called Shadow of the Colossus.
I'm a big fan of Fumito Ueda and team ICO. I apologize in advance because I tend to gush over the art style, music and amazing, simple story.
The premise of Shadow of the Colossus is simple. You are Wander (yes that's his name) and you have entered a forbidden land to save a mysterious girl who seems to have passed away. You immediately feel Wander's pain and want the girl to be rescued from her cursed fate. Taking her to this land seems to be the only way to bring her back to life. The godlike voice of "Dormin" tells Wander that bringing the girl back is simple. There are sixteen colossi (giants) that roam this forbidden land. Slay them all and she can be saved.
See the dot in the bottom left in the above picture? That is a scale representation of the colossi and that dot is you. The game presents an unprecedented sense of scale. When you meet the first colossi, in the game, suddenly saving the girl doesn't seem so plausible.
When I view some of my personal projects I feel defeated at the impossibility of the task. Yet ambition must be fed, and goals must be achieved for one to feel satisfied with their life. So how do you do it? How do you topple sixteen colossi to save the girl? The answer is simple. One colossus at a time.
