Ben Weeks

I was awarded a full scholarship to join the small class of people hand picked from around the world. ATTIK was an agency that had started in that town and expanded to NY, SF, London and Sydney at it's peak. It'd gotten seed funding from Prince Charles so the two young punk guys who'd been doing chalk artwork bought macs and started doing campaigns for Nike Europe. Even winning US business from Toyota. So it was great to work with those guys after I was selected from the rest of my class along with 1 or 2 others to work at the agency. After I returned to Toronto the owners sold it to Dentsu for $30 million. And they remain close with the now King Charles. The CEO who helped them turn their finances around told me "you're the real deal."

We did a lot of life drawing. In a fundamentals year I worked with black and white film camera in the studio and did some nice portraits. Gradually I learned how to not suck at drawing and thinking visually. I always had advanced standing in the computer graphics classes as I'd taught myself advanced photoshop in high school, had run a BBS and made a geocities site, met with 2600 dudes. Later I went on to teach at Sheridan, was on their program advisory committee and chaired judging for their graduate exhibitions. Huge honour. I really enjoyed my time there and am grateful to everyone who was there. Some of my classmates I still hang out with. The weirdest especially. Who is probably the most successful it turns out.