FLIP interviews FLIP again! This time it's Alex's turn to talk. His on-line animation school Animation Apprentice is completing its fist year, and Alex agreed to be put on the FLIP hot seat for this interview....
FLIP: Why does the universe need your on-line animation school when there are others to choose from? Alex: It is true that schools like Animation Mentor do a great job, and get excellent results. But I wanted to create something that was a lot cheaper and would also help students get great results much faster. The course at Animation apprentice is only 30 weeks, and costs £3,000 ($4,500). Not everyone wants to spend $18,000 and commit to 18 months of study.
The main reason for setting up my school was that I’ve been teaching animation in various ways and at various schools since 1996 and, after fifteen years, I felt like I had finally figured out how to do it right. The course was pretty much formed in my head – it just needed some time spent on actually making it. So I spent six months on my own, thinking, recording videos, preparing exercises - and I built the online course.
The course is delivered with pre-recorded videos, which makes it much more efficient than classroom teaching. Those efficiencies are savings I can pass on to students. But the best part of the course is the video feedback. I don’t give general comments – “do this, do that, why don’t you try this”. Instead, I open up the student’s shot and fix it in real time, recording the screen so that the student can play back the video and watch the fixes. It’s like taking your car to a mechanic and having them repair it, while at the same time recording a video showing you how to fix it yourself next time.
Yesterday's post by Steve generated a lot of thoughtful opinion on what exactly a degree in animation is worth. One of the problems that Universities face in teaching animation is what, precisely, they ought to be teaching. Should they focus on academic content, mostly of a theoretical nature, or should they teach practical,
technical skills? No university likes being called a trade school, and
"training" is something of a dirty word, as it sits uneasily with the academic aspirations of a Liberal Arts education. A BA is, or should be, a guarantee of reflective, critical analysis.
In practice though, what most students sign up for (or imagine they are signing up for) is proper training in the latest technical skills. Specifically, most students want training that, at the end of three years of study, will get them a job.
So which is better? Theory or Practice? Animation professionals David Davis and Sterling Sheehy face off in the debate.
On occasion, I get e-mails from young adults looking for entry positions in animation. They see my company listed somewhere and, unaware that my studio is just me and my wife, they send resumes and links to their reels. But I'm not hiring. I don't plan to expand. So if you're an art student or recent graduate - don't write. I have no job for you.
When I get these e-mails, I check them out as long as they don't seem like spam. Sometimes, their work is good. Sometimes it is just dreadful. I got one such e-mail just this week, from a young woman who wrote, "I am a recently graduated Animation major from the Maryland Institute Collage of the Arts".
Stop right there. You may be an art major, but you really should know how to spell "college" by the time you graduate such.
FLIP has been granted a sneak peek at the latest animation app to hit the iPad - The Animator's Survival Kit. We have now road-tested the new digital ASK: below is our thoroughly biased and not at all independent view of this new electronic addition to the animator's library.
Rob Hemmings is an excellent animator with a creature reel second to none. Several years ago he set up Animation A Team - the first online animation school dedicated exclusively to teaching animal and creature animation. FLIP asked him a few questions about what makes his school unique.
Friend of FLIP Dave Pruiksma has announced the worldwide debut of The Minerd Collection - and exhibition of original Peanuts artwork by Charles Schulz as well as rare artwork from the TV specials. The show runs from January 23rd through February 14th, with a reception on February 7th, from 5 to 8 as part of the First Thursdays Art Walk in Laguna Beach.
Dave told FLIP, "This exhibit is free and open to the public. It is one of the largest collection of Peanuts and Schultz artwork in private ownership. The collection encapsulates Schulz's original strip art from every major area in the development of the Peanuts strip and even back to the earlier Lil' Folks panel cartoons. There is original artwork from numerous Animated television specials and features and original illustrations for magazines, such as TV guide and more. A rare exhibition, the owner's first, of one of the richest and most diverse collections of Charles Schultz and Peanuts artwork."
CPG Grey is an educator with a vision for the future on online education. He has a YouTube channel with a ton of tightly-edited videos and 36 million views. In the video above Grey peers into the future to reveal the "Digital Aristotle", in which the web becomes our personal tutor, just as Alexander the Great was tutored by his very own flesh-and-blood Aristotle.
The Animation Workshop in Denmark has announced a new Graphic Storytelling Programme starting in September 2013. This is excellent news from a school that is already in my opinion among the very best English-language schools for animation anywhere in the world. They produce world-class talent; students who are pretty much production-ready as soon as they graduate.
The new programme aims to focus on "drawing, sequential storytelling, lay-out, scripting, story boarding
for films, cross media and developing original graphic universes". Students will also learn about "working as a freelancer and starting
up your own company focusing on graphic storytelling".
I've been fascinated for some time now by the tremendous power of online instruction to improve the way that we learn. Especially impressive is the work of education entrepreneur Salman Khan, who has set up a free online academy, and whose work you can see here at YouTube.
Khan's philosophy - in brief - is that traditional classrooms have it all backwards. Students go in to a school room and listen to a lecture, then go home and do their home work, by which time they have forgotten half of what they learned, if they understood it in the first place. Much better, he argues, to watch the lecture at home, online, and then do the homework in the classroom. That way the teacher spends their time doing what is really important - helping students individually to solve problems.
A year or so ago I took a course in visual effects at Escape Studios in London, which offers a mix of classroom teaching and online pre-recorded content. Right away, I found that the online content was much more helpful. Missed what the instructor just said? just re-wind. Have to go and collect the dry cleaning? Just press pause. Late for class? Doesn't matter. With online tutorials, you learn at your own pace, at your own convenience. It was a revelation, not unlike the moment in 1996 when I first bought a book at amazon.com.
The problem I find with teaching animation is that, in a classroom, it is almost impossible to keep the whole class with you. Someone is always late, others will fall behind, and as a teacher you end up spending precious minutes repeating yourself and trying to help each student who missed the main bit of the lecture or didn't understand. But what if the students had already watched the lecture before class? That way you could sit down with each one and go over their work, help them individually to get the best results.
A new way to learn animation
So, this year, I have built a new animation school online, www.animationapprentice.org, teaching character animation and creature animation, and incorporating all the lessons I have learned in the classroom over the years. Animation Apprentice relies almost entirely on pre-recorded content, broken down into theory lectures (general theory), technical lectures (how to use the software) and tutorials (how to complete the weekly exercise).
It was a lot of work to build the site, but the beauty of it is that I never have to give the same lecture twice - a huge saving in time and effort. Instead, I get to spend my time going over the student's tests individually, and delivering back to each student a bespoke critique showing step by step how to improve the shot. We don't do Skype calls - there is no need. Much better to watch the process by which the shot gets improved. And the irony is, I get to spend way more time with each student than I would in a classroom. Plus it's more fun too, because I don't have to spend my time on the boring stuff - repeating myself giving the same lecture I gave last week, or last month.
So far, I love the results. A small group of students have been testing the course for me and their work is better even than I had hoped for. I think that online learning isn't a substitute for a classroom, it's better than a classroom. And I believe that this is the future of education. Just as amazon.com revolutionized the book trade (and shopping in general), so online learning will change the way we learn, for the better.
On Friday, July 13, as the San Diego Comic Con rages downtown, animator and South East San Diego native Jerry Brice will host and moderate a panel of animation artists and business professionals for the children and teenagers of the South East and inner city communities of San Diego, California.
This is
not a Comic Con event, but that’s partly the point. “The San Diego Comic Con is
an exclusive event that is hard for even the professional artist to get into,”
says Jerry, “so this panel is an effort to extend the excitement of the Comic
Con being held downtown into the neglected neighborhoods of South East San Diego, and inspire a child to dream,
and to let them know that we do, in fact, care about them.”
Jerry
continues, “The goal of the event is to introduce to at least two hundred inner
city kids to the very real possibility of pursuing a career in the animation,
comic, or game art fields. Guest panelists, whose roads to success started in
similar circumstances, will tell the kids how they got to be a pro, and let
them know what it took to overcome obstacles, and to achieve their goals in a
very competitive and specialized talent-based industry.”
This will
be a lecture-style panel, with projected samples to highlight verbal
presentations, with Q and A time to follow.
The
confirmed panelists are:
Denys Cowan - legendary DC Comic book artist, founder of Milestone Media, former Senior
VP of animation for BET, producer of Static
Shock, Boondocks
J. Jones III - music supervisor, composer, producer, writer for Nick Cannon's Ncredible
Entertainment
Roland Poindexter - experienced network executive and former Senior Vice President of Original
Programming, Animation at Nickelodeon
Matt Allen - Senior Executive Director of Strategic Marketing, NBC Universal Digital
Entertainment
David Brown - educator, publisher, author, NAACP Image award winning editorial
cartoonist for the LA Sentinel/Watts Times
Julian Chaney – veteran storyboard artist in the animation field, worked on The Proud Family and the new Adult Swim
series Black Dynamite
Brad Constantine - Senior Artist/Animator at Sony Online Entertainment and San Diego
native.
Jerry L.
Brice – educator, animator, director, and producer for Brice Productions
Several
of Jerry’s former animation students who are currently professional artist will
be in attendance as well. Jerry is
hoping for some surprise guests as well.
If you're going to the Comic Con and would like to join Jerry as a surprise guest, or if you have questions, e-mail him chacta@gmail.com.
The Inner
City Comics, Animation, and Games Art Panel
Friday,
July 13, 2012 1:00
to4:00pm
Tubman/Chavez
Center
415
Euclid Ave, (on the corner of Market St. and Euclid Ave.)
San
Diego, CA 92102
Two
hundred seats are available on a first come basis. It is a free event, courtesy
of Brice Productions.
Jerry Brice
Says
Jerry, “I just want to transform any issue a kid may have for not moving
forward with their dreams, while at the same time acknowledging some of
their personal and financial hardships, because I can relate. Some of the
panelist are from this community, or got into the business with my assistance,
so we can track it all back to what happened for me here.”
Last week, I was in Hollywood visiting friends and taking in some sights with my family. One of our last stops was a trip north to my old alma mater, CalArts. It had been at least twenty years since I last set foot on campus. At the gatehouse, I showed the guard my old ID. He laughed, said "This was three years before I was born." and opened the gate. Asshole.
Seeing the campus was like taking a time warp from 1985 into the 21st century. There's the original buildings, same old parking lot, same old eucalyptus trees, but it's dressed up with new stuff. There's a funky performance hall for the music department with a small outdoor amphitheater just to the left as you drive up.
The main entrance steps are where I once met Terry Gilliam, who was screening his new movie "Brazil" at the tiny Bijou theater on the second floor. I couldn't get in, there was such a crowd. But Gilliam was standing out on the front steps having a smoke. He chatted with me and a couple of other guys about his battle with Universal over the film cut. I thought my geek head would explode. That's the kind of cool stuff that happened at that school - geek moments with great artists.
Walking through the main building, its almost exactly the same - same signs, same color coding for the different floors. The sub-level was still covered with graffiti. The students still had that unfed, unbathed look.
The second year Character Animation room still had sophomores in it, but no animation desks. They were working on Cintiqs atop two rows of fold out tables. It was Sunday morning, so only a few students were up and working - they had clearly been up all night. One student was asleep on her desk. Another student was nice enough to listen to me yammer on about "Well in my day, we used an Oxberry!" while thinking, "I have to finish my film by Friday, please shut up, old dude."
The dorms were mostly the same. The jacuzzi's been filled in - no doubt by the health department. One the east side parking lot, the sprawling lawn has been replaced by ugly, pole barn style buildings with industrial metal siding. They're small sound stages.
Driving off the lot, I thought of my old teachers: Jack Hannah, Bob McCrea, T.Hee, Hal Ambro, and Elmer Plummer, all gone now. They worked with Walt Disney himself, and often treated us to personal anecdotes about The Man.
As I drove down Lyons Ave, to the strip mall where Vincenzo's Pizza and Mongolian Barbecue still catered to student appetites, I thought of my classmates: Brenda Chapman, Fred Cline, Butch Hartman, Tim Hauser, T. Dan Hofstedt, Mark Kalesniko, Dan Jeup, Kevin Lima, Rob Minkoff, Kirk Wise, and many others who have gone on to be industry leaders. CalArts was as much a growing up experience as anything else. I didn't fully appreciate it then, as I was too busy being a "stupid animator" as we were often called by the other departments. We were goofy, travelled in packs, and totally immersed in character animation, 24/7. Paradise, man!
Another awesome student film from The Animation Workshop - the hilarious Space Stallions, produced by another talented crop of recently graduated Danish film-makers. I have been coming to teach at the Animation Workshop in Viborg, Denmark for many years now, and I always love coming back; the school has a terrific energy and has become one of the best places to study animation in Europe. All classes are conducted in English, and international students are welcomed. The school has recently added a CGA (computer graphics art) course with a strong emphasis on technical skills, and the CG artists work together with the animators in their third year to produce a "bachelor project" - a final year film which aims to combine excellent animation and story telling with a high level of technical skill. Every year the films seem to get better and better, and the recent results speak for themselves. Enjoy! - Alex
I have been doing some teaching lately at the University of Kent at Canterbury, where my old friend David Byers-Brown runs an excellent Msc. in Computer Animation, a course which he built from scratch. It's a one year graduate course on a 1960s campus a short cab ride out of beautiful medieval Canterbury, where David's students are producing some amazingly sophisticated work. David and I worked together many years ago on The Thief and The Cobbler; he animated lots of excellent shots of Zig Zag the Grand Vizier, and later went to work for ILM where he seems to have mastered most of the elements of digital film-making. His students are not just trained to be animators but rather emerge with all-round skills in Maya - an excellent training for work in the visual effects industry in London. You can see their website here - check out in particular the excellent short film "The Raptor Hunter", created and animated by the very talented Dariusz Szczuraszek. - Alex
Now and again I teach animation classes at the wonderful Animation Workshop in Viborg, Denmark, a school which I think offers one of the very best English-speaking undergraduate animation courses in the world. The school has a great spirit, marvellous dedicated staff, and produces excellent work. A couple of years ago I was working there as an artist in residence when one of my students, Benjamin Kousholt, pitched me his idea for a student film. It was all about Vikings. "Oh no..." I thought, "here we go..." Vikings? (yawn) Going to Valhalla? (double yawn). I thought: When will these Danes stop banging on about Vikings? It's like the Norwegians and their forest trolls - time to stop digging through the cultural attic in search of antique furniture and do something new.
How wrong I was. Benjamin and his team of animators and visual effects artists put together one of the best student films I have ever seen. It's beautifully designed, well animated, very funny, and has over a million hits on YouTube. I salute their hard work and a wonderful result. - Alex
Animation takes too long. Animators spend days or weeks (months even?) polishing our work. If I look back on the shots I am most proud of, they are usually scenes that took forever to get right. I have a sense of achievement looking back on them - but I've mostly edited out the pain that went into them.
So it's a pleasure to come across work which didn't take weeks of graft to perfect. Evgenia Golubeva is one of my super-talented ex students from the character animation course at Escape Studios. Evgenia animated a short film titled "Hold Me Clothes", a stop-motion film written by her, and animated in just one day at a film festival in Italy.
Hold Me Clothes is sweet and funny and completely charming. Her work is a reminder that good animation is as much about storytelling and an eye for comic timing as it is about polished technique. Congratulations to her on a delightful film. - Alex
Animation is a complex craft and it takes a long time to master. The only exception to this rule - the only animator I can think of who seems to have emerged into the industry fully formed - is James Baxter, whose first animation test I still vividly remember seeing on "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?". It was a short test of Thumper the rabbit shaking his head and looking up at the camera - and it was so good that it immediately earned James a spot on the animation team. It also made me think I would never, ever have the skill to become anywhere near as good as that.
Twenty years later not much has changed, except that these days I do a lot of teaching - especially at the excellent Escape Studios in London - and I spend a good deal of time trying to figure out what should go into a really good animation course. How does a school get its students completely up to speed - ie to a professional level of skill - within the shortest possible period of time? Many students seem to emerge from 3 years of animation study at prestigious schools with only basic skills, which most likely says more about the quality of training they received than it does about them.
At Escape the animation courses are just 3 months long, which is a very short space of time to cram in as much as we possibly can to make the course as effective as possible, to get the best possible results. This means we can't spend long on any individual exercise - no more than a day or two. One week max for the final acting exercise. In a way it's a good thing - everyone works like crazy and we don't waste any time. Every hour of every day is precious and the challenge is to figure out the fastest and most efficient way to get the best work done. Here's a link to the latest student reel - most of the students here had absolutely no knowledge of Maya before they began the course.
-Alex
Editor's Note: In September 2012 Alex launched a new online animation school - Animation Apprentice, incorporating many of the lessons learned at Escape Studios and elsewhere, with a view to bringing high quality animation training to students all over the world.
