The animation with a .... je ne sais quoi!
Despite all the great online animation trainings available those days, I feel there is still space for a more individual approach to the animation education in order to answer the specific needs of students or junior animators so I decided to resurrect the “Pick My Brain” mentoring program with the help of several “new brains”.
Go check out the newly redesigned website, it is shaping up nicely.
Pick my brain with a moustache
[update] Well the class sold out in probably less than two hours, this should give some ideas to other online schools like CGMA/CGMW (I can never remember the name, but I highly recommend the storyboard and character design class). CGMA has a 2 hours live class with the mentor every week, Schoolism doesn’t. Come on CGMA, there are plenty of great Feature Animation Vis Dev artist out there.
Check this out, Bobby Chiu’s Schoolism just announced a pretty awesome online class titled “Designing with Color and Light with Nathan Fowkes”.
I have been following Dreamworks visual dev artist Nathan Fowkes for a bit and I had to rush to book the course, granted I will have a slight issue compared to other students, I am slightly colour blind. This shouldn’t be too much of an issue, some people say Van Gogh was also colour blind and this is why the palette he used seems so vibrant to non-colour blind people.
Schoolism has also a bunch of other great classes from Zbrush to Storyboarding (with Kris Pearn) I would encourage you to check out
If you enroll to one of the courses and you want to support Animation with a Moustache, please give them the following promo code 75qs0
I should use this opportunity to thanks the two people who refereed me and I would like to hear which courses you took and how you found them.
I just found a 12 minutes introduction video to an other workshop he helds in L.A. that should give an idea to what to expect from his course.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32rLWfMzHTs[/youtube]
Related search:
Schoolism
Still wondering if you should be attending Ianimate or Animation Mentor? Wait, you are forgetting Animschool! 😉
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDN1qZPzasw[/youtube]
I really want to like that school and the rigs seem like a lot of fun but I am finding the concept difficult to understand at the moment, is it an animation, modeling, rigging or a generalist school? As a graduate from Animation Mentor I might be interested to join some of the animation classes but the website is making it pretty difficult to understand whether this is possible. Also having two separate domain names 3dappeal and AnimSchool is not helping.
One thing for sure is that the guys are uber talented though and those following videos they recorded are very interesting.
http://www.3dappealblog.com/
AnimSchool, animating Appeal and Entertainment
[update May 2013]
This post seems to have attracted some attention lately so I feel I need to to make an update.
I graduated from Animation Mentor in 2008 and haven’t had much contact with the school or the current AM community for a very long time so take this article with a pinch of salt. I haven’t caught up with the recent changes at AM, well I have but I just couldn’t understand the new syllabus (actually it is not that hard http://www.animationmentor.com/animation-program/animation-basics/ they just made things appear more complicated when they announced the AMP pipeline).
Back in my days, AM was a great foundation course from which a lot of people went on to get feature animation jobs and build an incredible network of professional animators friends. This probably still applies in 2013.
If you already have plenty of animation experience though, I might direct you to other online or on-site animation schools like Animation Collaborative, AnimSquad, Ianimate and AnimSchool since those are only taught by senior feature animators and even supervising animators from top studios.
The way things are going, if you don’t go to one of those recent “polishing schools”, I don’t thing you will be able to break into feature animation nowadays.
AM logo
People around me know that AM has been for me a love and hate relationship all along and unlike some other students I didn’t get caught in the “everything is awesome” bubble that wraps most people as soon as they join AM.
I did my fair bit of bashing in the past and nearly gave up in the middle of Class 5 but like fine wine, the school is gradually getting better and better and that’s amazing for a school who has been in business for only few years. Today I wanted to share a comment I posted on the Splinedoctors blog since I have more audience here than they will ever have. Just kidding.
Is Animation Mentor expensive?.
Well that s an interesting question that deserves to be answered.
I would be tempted to say yes but looking around, how many cheaper options do you get if you are not french, already ultra talented and selected by Les Gobelins animation school?
What else do you get for those $15,000 and ultimately, how long would it take you to pay back that money if you got this animation dream job?
Personally that money was my savings to pay the deposit for a mortgage but since I was working while doing AM I could have quickly recovered the cost of AM with my new animation job. Now I live in UK, I have no clue if this applies to other countries, the dollar is at it lowest level since 1982 I am told.
After 18 month at AM and without any animation experience previously, the students who reached the upper classes, apply for jobs where we are in competition with people who had been through 4 to 5 years of university!
Foundation course: 1 year
BA: 3 years
Some guys who applied for the same job I was applying for even had Masters or Post graduate diplomas!
Does one realise how much it cost to spend 4 years at university? Think about the tuition, the housing…. Let alone the fact that most people can’t move city and have to do AM on top of a full time job.
Now don’t get over excited 😉 This doesn’t mean that you just need to pay your $15,000 AM tuition to get a job. Your mentors won’t animate the shots for you and you will still have to work realllllly hard to polish this Showreel that will get you where you always wanted to be!
Animation is hard, no matter how much you paid or what school you went to but AM gives you access to a crazy community of people who love and live for animation and if you make the most of it, you will definitely reap the rewards of it.
Animation Mentor might seem expensive at first glance, but it is not.
[update] at the moment, the Short film has been removed from the program. I am completely against the idea and I just hope they bring it back very quickly.
