The statement should be a 500- to 750-word overview of the applicant's academic and professional accomplishments and should demonstrate a high level of interest in and a highly developed understanding of the discipline.
My statement:
It was Christmas and my family was reunited at my grandma's house. The TV was on, and since I wasn't participating in the adults' conversation, I tried to watch a movie: Toy Story. It captured my attention right away because I felt just like Andy. I loved playing pretend and creating my own stories and worlds. Finding out I could make a career out of my imagination led me to design and now I want to focus on the creation and development of characters for animation and illustrated books. Being accepted at the MFA in Illustration at SCAD would help me discover my own voice and thus express my imagination to create deep and complex universes.
Following my dream of working with creativity, I enrolled in the Design undergraduate program of the Federal University of Pernambuco, in 2014 and it gave me the opportunity of learning a variety of subjects. With a flexible structure and evaluations based mostly on projects, the program contributed to building my time management and teamwork skills. Two disciplines were decisive for my learning process of how visually communicate, Social Semiotics and Narrative Artifacts for Children's Books. The latter covered all the process of making illustrated books. We learned different techniques of coming up with ideas and selecting from them, how to plan book layouts, image composition and choosing appropriate fonts for children. For the final assignment, I created my own story and went through the entire process. Holding the finished book in my hands was very rewarding. The former gave me the understanding of image as part of a visual language, with its own grammar and particularities, created to convey a specific message. I was profoundly fascinated by this subject and became a teacher assistant for this subject during six months.
Being passionate about learning and feeling the need to understand more about the software I would have to work within the industry, I enrolled, in 2015, at the course Start (Saga - School of animation, art, and game) which gave me a vast understanding of Adobe and Autodesk software. It expanded my range of possibilities to create and become competitive in the field. With this acquired knowledge, I worked as a freelancer on interesting projects. The first as a volunteer for tmy never-ending search for learning.he Project Management Institute in which I created the initial piece used for advertising the X National Congress of Project Management. In the following years, I worked for social projects funded by the government, creating visual identities and all the printed material, social media posts and T-shirts for those projects.
Having experimented multiple areas of design, illustration remained my passion. However there weren't Illustration specific classes at the university, therefore, I began taking classes with Rosinha Campos and Anabella López, two professionals I deeply admire. I've already completed 8 months of study about character design and narrative. In class, image stereotypes and cliches were deconstructed while we came up with new, refreshing and efficient ideas. In this course, I also obtained a better understanding of the illustrated book market, since the professors have many years of experience in the field.
Several years have passed since that special Christmas, but the desire to create a story so fascinating as the one I first saw, and like many others I had the pleasure to watch over time, remains intact. Even stronger, I would say. Being accepted into the program would be the next step in my never-ending search for learning. It would give me not only the possibility to contribute to major studios such as Disney and Pixar but also independence of working as a freelancer, another dream of mine. Both outcomes would be one step closer to make my stories and worlds become reality and make people from different ages, backgrounds, and places feel connected and represented as I felt that day.
My statement:
unforgettable Christmas
It was Christmas and my family was reunited at my grandma's house. The TV was on, and since I wasn't participating in the adults' conversation, I tried to watch a movie: Toy Story. It captured my attention right away because I felt just like Andy. I loved playing pretend and creating my own stories and worlds. Finding out I could make a career out of my imagination led me to design and now I want to focus on the creation and development of characters for animation and illustrated books. Being accepted at the MFA in Illustration at SCAD would help me discover my own voice and thus express my imagination to create deep and complex universes.
Following my dream of working with creativity, I enrolled in the Design undergraduate program of the Federal University of Pernambuco, in 2014 and it gave me the opportunity of learning a variety of subjects. With a flexible structure and evaluations based mostly on projects, the program contributed to building my time management and teamwork skills. Two disciplines were decisive for my learning process of how visually communicate, Social Semiotics and Narrative Artifacts for Children's Books. The latter covered all the process of making illustrated books. We learned different techniques of coming up with ideas and selecting from them, how to plan book layouts, image composition and choosing appropriate fonts for children. For the final assignment, I created my own story and went through the entire process. Holding the finished book in my hands was very rewarding. The former gave me the understanding of image as part of a visual language, with its own grammar and particularities, created to convey a specific message. I was profoundly fascinated by this subject and became a teacher assistant for this subject during six months.
Being passionate about learning and feeling the need to understand more about the software I would have to work within the industry, I enrolled, in 2015, at the course Start (Saga - School of animation, art, and game) which gave me a vast understanding of Adobe and Autodesk software. It expanded my range of possibilities to create and become competitive in the field. With this acquired knowledge, I worked as a freelancer on interesting projects. The first as a volunteer for tmy never-ending search for learning.he Project Management Institute in which I created the initial piece used for advertising the X National Congress of Project Management. In the following years, I worked for social projects funded by the government, creating visual identities and all the printed material, social media posts and T-shirts for those projects.
Having experimented multiple areas of design, illustration remained my passion. However there weren't Illustration specific classes at the university, therefore, I began taking classes with Rosinha Campos and Anabella López, two professionals I deeply admire. I've already completed 8 months of study about character design and narrative. In class, image stereotypes and cliches were deconstructed while we came up with new, refreshing and efficient ideas. In this course, I also obtained a better understanding of the illustrated book market, since the professors have many years of experience in the field.
Several years have passed since that special Christmas, but the desire to create a story so fascinating as the one I first saw, and like many others I had the pleasure to watch over time, remains intact. Even stronger, I would say. Being accepted into the program would be the next step in my never-ending search for learning. It would give me not only the possibility to contribute to major studios such as Disney and Pixar but also independence of working as a freelancer, another dream of mine. Both outcomes would be one step closer to make my stories and worlds become reality and make people from different ages, backgrounds, and places feel connected and represented as I felt that day.
