Planning a portfolio

I’ve been working on how to go about planning my portfolio recently and I have to say that simply deciding on where to begin has been a challenge. I like the idea of working on so many different parts of creating a short animation that it is hard for me to focus on doing just one thing.  I like the idea of being a generalist that knows a bit about all of the stages in a pipeline so I’m going to start off by making a list of everything that I’m interested in here and hopefully I can build some momentum on a portfolio from that.

Areas of Focus

• Storyboarding
• Modeling and Rigging
• Animation
• Effects
• Lighting and Rendering

Ok, so this list is so broad that it can’t really be called focused now can it? You can see my problem. I like all of these things yet each one takes a fulltime effort for an artist to really get good at it. I’ve tried bits and pieces of each of these and I like them all.  I haven’t found one to focus on yet that urges me to forget the others.  I’m going to try spending my time telling some really short complete stories that touch on all of these areas and see where that takes me.