So I recently began studying Games Development at SAE and I thought that I might talk about a few reasons of why I started studying this. Before SAE I had studied a Bachelor of Commerce/IT at UQ, which is possibly the furthest away from a creative industry I could go. I had finished my degree and have been working in a small IT company for about 6 months, I found my work challenging in which I had to sometimes come up with different and creative solutions to problems, however the overall goal for my work was quite boring i.e. staff allocations, creating spreadsheets and other web system tasks and I was wondering if IT was the correct path for me.
At the same time that I was having these doubts Game of Thrones season 6 was on and I was watching it each week and reading up on Reddit the day after to see other people’s thoughts. It amazed me to see other people’s reactions, theories and fan art about the show, seeing how passionate people were about fictional world and story created by George R.R. Martin. ‘The Battle of the Bastards’ episode directed by Miguel Sapochnik gave me the chills when watching it and it inspired me to want to create something myself that people can get excited about. Sapochnik wasn’t able to follow the head director’s plans and had to improvise what came out to be one of the most powerful episodes of Game of Thrones yet. 
“One evening I got home and I kind of knew we couldn’t finish in the time we had left so I wrote a long email to David and Dan and the other producers to suggest an alternative that I thought we could achieve in the remaining time, but that would mean going “off book” for three days. That is to say, we’d be shooting without a script. I finished the email and made a cup of tea (no whisky in the house) then waited for the response, which I fully expected to be a public chastisement and general reaming for even suggesting that (Dan and David like their scripts executed the way they wrote them, and with good reason)….
…I think that this section of the fight — in which Jon is almost buried alive by a stampede of panicking wildings — turned out as one of my favorite little moments in the sequence. No VFX, no fighting, just Kit giving a stellar performance and a crazy top shot as he pushes his way back out (we affectionately called it the “rebirthing” shot). The other reason I liked it is because of what it meant to be allowed to follow my gut and go for it. That kind of trust you can’t buy and it felt like a privilege to have been given that kind of support to go into unchartered territory by the producers in such a high stakes game.”
Miguel Sapochnik – http://www.ew.com/article/2016/06/19/game-thrones-battle-director
After this I began thinking, ‘what I can do to create something like that?’ at this time I was playing Uncharted 4 by Naughty Dogs and was completely captivated. I was amazed and by the graphics, game play, and story. The making of Uncharted 4 was something that I can see myself doing; and so I decided that is what I wanted to do and began making plans to go to SAE.
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