3D animation entered my life on an ordinary weeknight. I sat down in front of my computer to play a game, but before launching it, my eyes stopped on an icon sitting on the desktop. That small detail would change the course of my life forever.
I’ve always been involved with the arts. As a child, I spent hours copying Monica’s Gang comics and Dragon Ballstickers. At school, my friends and I created our own comic books and even dreamed of becoming manga artists in Japan. Before long, however, I realized that it was only a sweet illusion. My parents couldn’t afford to send me to the other side of the world, let alone support me there. So I understood early on that I would have to work in order to pay for college.
College
Even though I knew which path I wanted to follow, I still had to take a few detours. My father used to say, “If you can’t get there in a straight line, take the longer roads.”
Keeping his advice in mind, I enrolled in an Advertising and Marketing program at a college in a neighboring city. At the time, it was the degree that came closest to my life goals. It was the necessary detour on my journey. That didn’t make it easy, though. Those five years were incredibly demanding.
During my final years of high school, I carried a deep sense of anxiety fueled by the claustrophobia that the school environment caused me. It seriously affected my academic performance, and because of that I was admitted to a private college with a score barely above the minimum requirement. Even so, I refused to give up.
I can’t fully describe how much that period damaged my self-esteem.
One Year Earlier
One year before I started high school, my brother, who is two and a half years older than me, began working as an instructor at a computer training school. To teach his students, he installed and tested software on our home computer.
Among those programs was a 3D illustration application that was widely used by television commercial directors at the time. It was the icon for that software—the one sitting on the desktop—that caught my attention that evening.
At that very moment, I knew with absolute certainty: I wanted to become a director of 3D animated films.
Production Company
Since then, a lot has happened. Next year, my production company, ALUF Pictures, will celebrate five years of producing corporate films for national and international clients. Along the way, I achieved another dream: living as a digital nomad, traveling across Brazil and, soon, the world.
