What area of animation do I want to work in?

My problem at the moment is that I want to try and understand almost everything and while I know the reality of working on a large production means being employed as one of many cogs in a much larger animation process I can’t imagine ‘only designing characters’ or ‘only rigging characters’ or ‘only storyboarding’ etc. I want to leave this course and be reasonably confident that I have the basic knowledge to achieve most aspects of any animation.

What I do know is that I enjoy the entire animation process from the bashing around with ideas at the beginning through to the development, production and realisation of those ideas into visuals and sound.

What I’m perhaps least interested in at the moment would be storyboard visualisation, other than to illustrate my own ideas this to me is an illustrators role and I would be neither creating the ideas or getting my hands dirty within the animation itself.

For me, stop motion animation is such a self explanatory medium that there would be no reason for me to focus on this unless an idea calls out for it before the end of my course.

I enjoy the fact that there are no rules to say you can’t combine numerous techniques to get the results you want and therefore I loved working on my Esting animation and through that I discovered more about working and exporting in and out new programs than I would have in any one package alone.

The type of areas I personally would like to end up working in are likely combine life action footage with animation, whether this means hyper-realistic or super-stylistic I have no idea at this moment but it does flag obvious gaps in my knowledge which I want to fill before the end of the course.

During this course I have gained new knowledge in Cinema 4D, After Effects and Final Cut Pro, (and had prior full professional working knowledge of all Adobe graphic packages other than the revelation of being able to animate in Photoshop). Final Cut Pro is pretty self explanatory once you understand the controls and I’m now relatively happy in After Effects although would be interested to learn what more it has to offer. But it goes without saying Cinema 4D can be an enormous and immensely intricate tool of which I’ve only just scraped the surface so far, so anything else I can learn in this program will be gladly lapped up.

With all this in mind the areas I feel I am lacking knowledge in at the moment are the following skills:

Motion Tracking

I want to learn how to motion track footage which would mean developing a knowledge in packages like Boujour or SythEyes

Texture Mapping

I know the basics for texture mapping but I’m still unable to accurately control or understand the paint and texture of more complicated 3D meshes.

Flash

I feel I simply need to have basic understanding and experience this (from what I understand to be) very basic vector based program to use but that is the very reason I feel I should have at least an understanding of how it works.