The online animation school founded by former Pixar animator Bobby Beck's at a glance.
April, 17th, 2006, by Raffael Dickreuter
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| Animation Mentor teaches you animation from the ground up. | |
Being part of the first AnimationMentor, or short AM class quite a few things have changed for the better since the very beginning as well.
Founders Bobby Beck, Shawn Kelly and Carlos Baena stunned many digital artists in the industry when they announced to offer a new way of learning animation, people wondered if they could they deliver what they promised. After studying a year at this online animation school you can safely say they didn’t break any promises, but let’s have a close look what it means to study at the world’s first online Animation facility.
The concept behind the school is basically based on a few key components that will let you teach you animation, but also let you practice on your own.
Every week you have video lecture with learning material. This is basically a video that features top animators talking about a certain concept or technique. These weekly lectures are usually between 20 minutes to over 2 hours long, depending on the subject and the semester you are in. On average you can expect a one hour move to watch every week and progress step by step. Another corner stone are the Q&A sessions, that also take place once a week and usually have a duration of one hour. In these sessions you will meet your mentor as well your fellow class mates. A mentor usually takes care of around 10-15 students. Students as well as the mentor are present with webcam and audio, so you can see and hear them. The teacher is usually addressing a certain issue and the students can ask directly. Only one student can talk at a time when activated by the mentor. Mentors often also share personal experiences in these issues and you get a chance to learn more about your mentor as well as your fellow students.
The video lectures and the Q&A sessions are the learning material you are being provided with. Every week you have to do an assignment and master a specific task. In the beginning this is about handling a bouncing ball and improving your shot to handling multiple characters when you get to semester 4. Your mentor will then give you a video critique every week on the work you handed in and point our errors and what you should improve. When you receive a critique you can see and hear the mentor in one window and in the other see your work, on which the mentor can also draw on with a pen to illustrate which issue is being discussed.
Animators from Pixar, ILM, DreamWorks, Weta, Disney, Sony and others fill hundred of hours of video lecture.
Every student has his own profile page, where everyone else can come and see the current animation and leave comments on it.
AnimationMentor also has a community forum, where all the students can talk about animation all day long, get to know each other and help each other out.
In the school trailer it says that you will only focus on Animation and you don’t have to worry about anything else. The school provides you with all the necessary rigs, so there is no need of rigging or modeling knowledge. While the software that is being used is Maya and also is the only one that is supported by the school you will see on the community forums that all the rigs have been transferred to packages like SOFTIMAGE|XSI or Animation Master by students. So if your prefer to use another software you could use these rigs. AM also has a couple of video tutorials that teach you the fundamentals about Maya and how to use the Fcurve Editor, timeline and just the basic tools you need to animate. While this might help you getting started if you are coming from a different background or different software it shows you quickly that good animation isn’t about the software, it’s much more about the principles and the art itself and that what the school is focusing on. While you might see the instructors sometimes showing animation step by step with 3d software, more often they will talk about it and show you real life examples and get you to understand what a certain principle is about.
Video lectures focus on all aspects of animation including story telling.
Each semester lasts 12 weeks. Let’s have a look in more detail what the different semesters teach you.
First Semester: Fundamentals
The first semester is all about the fundamental principles of animation, you learn about timing and spacing, anticipation, squash & stretch etc step by step, one after the other. You start with a bouncing ball and trying to make your first steps with timing and spacing, then you move forward to add more personality to it. Besides working with a bouncing ball you will already get a full character, however for posing. By posing your character in various assignments you start learning about body language and the importance of it show not only personality but also mood and weight.
Second Semester: Body Mechanics
This semester is probably the most important one of the entire course, focusing on body mechanics and covering a lot how to give a character proper weight, personality by starting with a simple two legged character. By now you will try more and more to use animation principles such as anticipation, follow through and exaggeration to give your character personality. While at this point you mostly focus on a character that has a body with two legs, it’s an important foundation for everything else to follow in later classes.
Mentors send you a video critique to your assignments every week. - DreamWorks Animator Melanie Cordan.
Working with a full character makes animation now much more complicated to get things right. Not only will you focus already on personality through body language, but you also start working with dialogue. This let’s you dive also into facial animation and conveying emotions through important parts such as the eyes.
Fourth Semester: Advanced Acting Techniques
In this semester you will learn also to animate multiple characters together and make sure they have interesting relationships to each other. Everything you learned to this point is being put together to create advanced acting scenes.
Video lectures show many examples also from hand drawn animation as well as acting from life action movies.
Let’s have a look at the learning material what it means being an AM student.
Video Lectures
The video lectures are of very high quality. Every week you will get top animators from major studios such as Pixar, ILM, DreamWorks, Weta and others to share their experience, talk about common mistakes and teach you the principles of animation. The videos are very well presented, well edited and of great visual quality. A broadband connection is required anyway and the streaming works usually well. These videos can last from around 20 minutes to over 2 hours. Some show a lot of examples, others are more hands on where an animator like Victor Navone or others will walk you step by step through animating a shot.
Pixar Animators Carlos Baena and Victor Navone discussing a shot.
The Q&A’s can be very helpful, but also have their downfalls. Depending on who your mentor is you will might learn about how Gollum or The Incredibles characters were animated and what creative decisions were made. Some mentors might share some of their tricks on how to solve some common problems. Q&A’s have the problem that they can be a hassle depending where you live. If you live in the USA/Canada time zone you don’t have to worry to much as your Q&A will most of the time will take place in the evening. However if you are coming from Europe it can easily happen that your session will be at 5 o’clock in the morning. While AM started addressing the issue in the last semester it remained like this for quite a while. Of course passionate animators have no problems getting up at that time to study animation, however it can easily interfere with your life besides animation. While the reason for the early Q&A’s are the time zones and that almost all mentors live and work in the Pacific Standard Time it nevertheless can make it hard for you to attend all these sessions. Sometimes technical problems with webcams or audio can make these sessions fail, however most of the time they are useful and work well.
ILM Animator Delio Tramontozzi - Q&A sessions let you talk directly to your mentor as well see your fellow students.
Be aware that you have to hand in assignments every week by Sunday. While this might be easy at first it can easily become a problem if you are a busy person besides studying at AnimationMentor. Depending on the semester you are in your assignments require more and more attention. Some of the AM students do this full time, whereas others are working full-time and even have a family to take care of. Often you can tell the difference between the students who do it full time. Just be aware that AM can become very stressful for you if you are working full-time and also have a family to take care of, because you will most likely have to invest a couple of hours every day to keep up. This goes from watching video lectures and attending Q&A’s to actually doing your assignments which results quickly ten hours or more of work you have to deliver in a week. Taking AM as a full time program can be recommended, doing it par-time is not impossible but can put a lot of stress on you both your student work as well as your social life. Keep that in mind.
On the campus you can check out every others students animation work as well watch their received critique.
Mentors
While all the mentors have a proven track record you will find that some or better teachers than others, some ore more passionate than others, but overall you will learn a ton from all of them. Some are more technically savy, while others have strengths in areas like drawing. Every semester you get a new mentor so you will get input from a variety of people.
Vacation
While it is possible to take some time off if you go on vacation or you are sent abroad for work this can be a major issue with AM. Not necessarily because the school isn’t addressing it, but more because of the nature of the assignments. Remember that a semester has 12 weeks, in each of them you have to deliver assignments etc. If you are doing AM for a year this is 48 weeks where you have to be able to pull that off. Again if you are doing this full-time this shouldn’t be a problem, however if it’s part time besides working maybe in production with 10+ work hours and a family this can give you some headache. If you want to take some time off you have to let the school know beforehand. Now if you are gone with let’s say two weeks you will end up with a huge workload when you return as you have to make up for the assignments you didn’t hand it. So instead of just one you will end up doing 2-3 assignments as week, maybe besides work, that can be really tricky. While the school is supportive and tries to handle it in an acceptable manner you will still end up with the enormous workload. Again if you are doing AM full time you should be able to handle it with some extra effort, but for a person working full time this can be very tough. Ideally you would not go on vacation or be gone when studying at AnimationMentor.
The Animation Mentor program focuses on the art of animation, what software you use doesn't matter.
Community
When studying at AM you will find a large amount of talented and very passionate people all in one place. You will meet quickly animators from all over the world who have the same dream as you, becoming a character animator. You will get great support from fellow students, however only if you are a very active person in the community yourself. Some students get far more feedback than others, which seems connected to the quality of their animation, but also how active they are and how many people therefore check out their profile page. While it’s great to see such passionate people in one place, you will also see some where the passion almost goes too far. Overall there is no better place to connect quickly with that many animators and learning together about the craft.
Price
Doing the entire AM course of 6 semester will cost you around US$14,000 or US$2,050 for the first four semesters. The short film classes are a bit more expensive. Depending on where you live this a steep or cheap price. If you live in the United States and compare it to the very expensive art schools this is almost a bargain price, considering you learn from the industry’s top animators and you can study for 18 months, paying the price you could easily spend in just one semester at an art school. If you live in Europe where art education can be much cheaper this looks pretty expensive. Considering the fact tough that you get access to some of industry’s leading animators and you don’t have any other chance to just learn half of the stuff the offer seems much more appealing.
Some video lectures focus more on principles and concept of animation, wheras other show you step by step how to animate a certain shot.
On the right Pixar Animator Andrew Gordon.
Learning experience
In conclusion AnimationMentor is a great and also unique learning experience. This online animation school is at the forefront of e-learning, providing first class learning materials, industry leading animators mentoring you and a passionate community and staff behind it that make this school a winner. If you are truly dedicated in becoming a professional character animator there is no better place to learn everything about the craft.
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