Image courtesy of Deron Yamada. © 2004 DYA367.

Education and visual effects. Well, now there’s a subject near and dear to my heart. Having been involved in the education end of our fabulous industry over the last decade or so, I’ve developed quite an opinion of art, work, students’ work (and some of the schools out there). Though I wasn’t involved directly with recruiting, I watched many, many reels; some good, some decidedly not. It was clear that some schools produced great students, and others didn’t. It was also clear that some students are great regardless of their affiliation. They’re just great. A bit erudite, but applicable: Poeta Nascitur, Non Fit — A Poet is Born, Not Made. It’s an inevitable fact of creativity: gifted artists arise regardless of formal education, though even the most talented artists may benefit from exposure to the basic techniques and tools. In many ways, though the industry has matured, very little has changed. Art and technology need each other.

For those years that I worked as an education manager, my peers and I answered multiple requests for curricula advice. Schools’ coffers had just been filled with the promise that technology would enable them to churn out talent as fast as they could power up their PCs. These administrators and teachers were so ready to buy the fastest computers and the best software that they forgot about the fundamentals; they forgot about everything that makes a great cinematic experience: storytelling, mood, expression, character, dramatic composition. They forgot about teaching aspiring artists how to create with simple tools: how to write, draw and animate. At our studios, my educator friends and I were faced with the challenge of integrating third-party software into proprietary pipelines. There were still many, many studios that used completely proprietary systems. Once the software was mastered, though, there was still the fact that these fabulous geeks had to understand the nature of light, or the way dust looks as it’s being blown in a desert or the way the ocean rages in a storm. And the overriding obstacle was how to convince company executives to spend production time and money on drawing classes, anatomy, color and light. (Production schedules have a way of impeding the course of education!) At the time, when visual effects films were exploding onto screens faster than the explosions were detonated within them, it almost made sense that schools made their fortunes on the backs of software. Almost. It’s even less justifiable today.

Back in the 1990s, our industry was fast becoming a multi-billion dollar juggernaut; effects artists who worked away silently were emerging from the shadows of makeshift laboratories and soundstages and model shops and backlots, and signing autographs: it was amazing. The geeks who labored in their bedrooms making horror-show masks, or blowing up stuff in their back yards had fans, lots of them. And it came at such an interesting time, a period when automotive factories were closing and the aerospace industry was in serious decline. Seeking to create jobs and rescue the economy, they mistook our exploding industry for an opportunity to retrain widget makers into artists. After all, both disciplines used technology. As with so many who wanted to understand the magic behind the morph, they missed the art completely. It was easy to do: at the time, we few but mighty studio-based educators were figuring how to meet the needs of our rapidly expanding studios, involved with teaching our new-hires how to use our studio’s proprietary tools or communicating the integration of those tools into the quickly developing third-party applications flooding our studios.