When I was in the Singapore Poly in 2001, I remembered after my first modeling exercise in 3dsmax 4 with Ahmad Al-Mahir At SP, I went home and cried. I felt all the hardwork I had done at Secondary School didn’t prepare me for this. I saw my friend Darius Chen breezing thru the exercise.

I on the other hand was totally lost. I didn’t know what I was doing and felt so stupid. I felt like I was back in Tamil class where my various Tamil teachers used to humilate me for my atrocious spelling and for not being able to enunciate words correctly.

Then I saw the Lord of the Rings later that same year with my best friend Mathivanan. I become curious as to how they did everything in that movie esp that balrog ( Sean Lewkiw ). I vowed to get better and maybe someday I too, could work on shows like this.I went to every library in Singapore, borrowed all the books, ripped every tutorial I can find on those topics and found Gnomon DVDs.

These guys were the best. Their tutorials so advanced and provided wicked insights. Being a noob, I used to watch them in 0.25x speed and studied which icons they clicked. To me, Gnomon was the benchmark. The School to beat. The best there was, the best there is.

For the past 5 years, despite everything Lost Boys did, we would lose out Gnomon in the Rookies. Always by a few points.

Then today, we beat them! We beat the MIT of VFX! Damn it! It feels so good!

We did it with programs that were half as long as theirs to boot too! Yes, I know these school rankings are superflous and gratuitous but it was always been my goal to have Lost Boys talked about the same reverence as Gnomon.

And I think they do now!