about ec
ec - eric chastain
I am an aspiring digital artist in the process of completing my education in animation. My creative inspirations come in large part from my forms of personal escape when I was growing up in rural Union Hill, Alabama, where I spent much of my time engrossed in the pages of comic books and science fiction and fantasy novels, as well as spending a large amount of my time on my computer (an Atari 400, soon replaced by the much more powerful Atari 800XL).
My horizons and knowledge expanded when my family moved just outside Birmingham to Trussville, Alabama and I ended up enrolled in the Shades Valley Resource Learning Center (or RLC), a small school for academically advanced students. (Side note of pride: this is the school that expanded to become the Jefferson County International Baccalaureate School, ranked one of the best high schools in the country by Newsweek, reaching as high as #1 in the nation in 2005, and now listed as one of the elite schools that are "too good" to be considered on the list of normal high schools.)
After building up a stack of academic honors, I was offered a scholarship to attend Georgia Tech to study aerospace engineering. Despite doing well in the program there, by my senior year I was frustrated by the lack of creative expression (when you're 17 years old and looking at your future and college plans, "aerospace engineering" sounds more like "building spaceships" - fun - than "flipping through the tables for the 100th time to look up an airfoil coefficient" - tedious). Having a fair idea that this was not what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, but not quite certain what the alternative was, I took the young and stupid approach of "taking a little break for a while," until that little break had stretched into years of working in the service industry and I had to kick myself to find a new direction.
I decided to build on both my technical and creative sides by turning one of my hobbies, computer animation, into a career, and went back to school to pursue a degree in this direction. So now my hopes are that all those years of drawing and working with 3D programs can translate into a full-time occupation moving forward.
ec - evolved creations
Evolved Creations is the identity I have chosen to associate with my professional artistic endeavors. The name reflects both sides of my personality, the scientific and technical side as well as my artistic side. In addition, the idea behind Evolved Creations is to point out the personal evolution of my creative vision, which reflects the next evolution of art in my view: the ability for us to finally represent living, moving things in three dimensions through the use of new technologies.