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Creative Transformation: Learning for the Conceptual Age

Animation Blogs

When Blind Faith Beats Logic: An Historical Tale

By Robin King | Tuesday, January 3, 2012 at 6:07pm

Creativity is a very risky business. When you believe it essential to break boundaries and create something completely original or even just novel, there are always those who will fight change with traditional excuses and negativity.

The enormous potential of holistic strategies is often lost on formal, organizations that can’t act on transformative thinking and the kind of open-minded risk and experimentation that is essential for 21st Century initiatives. It just can’t happen with yesterday’s thinking, yesterday’s attitudes and yesterday’s rules.

Creative Blogs

The Luxury of Reflection: A Personal Journey of Learning and Transformation.

Five or six overlapping career paths and 49 years later, the reason I am so committed to new and non-traditional ways of learning is that, for the most part, it’s the path I chose and for me the rewards of alternate forms of broad and primarily informal learning have outweighed the benefits of formal education. I realize it’s not for everyone.

Blogs

Putting Creative Transformation into Practice

We are in for a revolution and it can’t come too soon - otherwise the young will continue to be inadequately prepared for the rapid changes we are experiencing and which accelerate every year. Who can predict what the world will look like in five years, let alone through multiple career paths unknown territories?

Creative Blogs

Moving Towards Transformation: Authentic Learning for the Next Decade

If we are to build learning activities and skills that can sustain us (and our students) during coming decades, they must model professional practice as well sustain life long learning. They need to be creative, flexible and enduring. This post provides a preliminary list of transformational elements of authentic learning environments.

Blogs

The Impending Death of Traditional Education: When Push Comes to Pull

By Robin King | Tuesday, February 8, 2011 at 7:27pm

Formal education is past it's "best before" date. It's time is over- it's an anachronism. So let's acknowledge the problems of past practice so that we can move forward and reinvent the learning process to reflect 21st Century realities.

Software Blogs

Instructional Standards for Maya, 3dsMax and Softimage

By Robin King | Wednesday, January 19, 2011 at 8:41am

This post describes and link to a new set of Autodesk’s Media and Entertainment Instructional Standards (MEIS) for three software products; Maya, 3dsMax and Softimage. These standards cover thirteen topic areas and toolsets and provide a ruich resource of theory, applications and exercises for teachers and trainers in animation and vfx.

Blogs

Creating Better Animation Reference Using High Speed Video

By Robin King | Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 5:56pm

While there are some great sources for reference on the web, it’s seldom exactly what’s needed and often fails to correspond to the specific needs of a shot or sequence. It’s better to create one’s own reference if at all possible. We want to teach students to be keen observers, to see accurately and be able to analyze of weight, force, acceleration, etc.. In this post I demonstrate the use of low cost, high-speed video for creating better animation reference.

Work Blogs

Tim Burton, Creativity, Originality and the Mashup Culture

By Robin King | Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 8:14am

This article argues that we need to seriously examine the relationship between genuine creative activity and the mashup culture. The pressure to produce competitive show reels and creative work can easily result in derivative results that try to short circuit the effort needed to master the core skills and personal style that distinguishes the best artistic work.

Creative Blogs

Creative Problem Solving Pt 1: Discovering originality and Value

By Robin King | Friday, October 22, 2010 at 5:09pm

Creativity is at the core of our personal and collective evolution – whether as individuals or as teams and creative ability is well understood, can be clearly explained. Everyone is capable of creative effort given well-designed training, experiential exercises and reflective practice.

Time Blogs

Four Keys to Creative Transformation: The Results of a Prototype Test in China

By Robin King | Tuesday, September 21, 2010 at 5:16pm

Creative transformation means doing it differently! This post describes a two year experiment in designing and implementing a training school based on four key principles that enhance the learning process. Based on core competencies, it used a range of novel methods to motivate and develop professionally related skills in an accelerated system of feedback loops and rapid iteration.

Blogs

You Can't Teach a Fish to Sing - the importance of motivation

By Robin King | Wednesday, September 1, 2010 at 5:35pm

Talent is important, but talent without motivation simply doesn’t cut it. Curiosity, persistence and a spirit of creative accomplishment are indispensable. It’s the responsibility of the instructor and the institution to ensure that the learning environment is one that encourages openness, individuality, teamwork, sound problem solving and creativity.

Design Blogs

Transformational Learning for the Conceptual Age

Delving into specifics programs, curricula, institutions and methods, it’s important to review the breadth of the issues we face. Every progressive, generative and future-focused learning framework (whether personal, corporate or institutional) MUST be designed, build and assessed as an interdependent system of connections among people, the environment and the process of acquiring skills and knowledge.

Work Blogs

Core Competencies - A Proposed Structure for Standards

By Robin King | Wednesday, July 21, 2010 at 5:08pm

This post, together with the last one, is intended to elicit feedback and comments from institutions and companies interested in exploring standards as a framework for further development and to promote discussion on standards development. It describes a simple standards system for discussion.

Blogs

Core Competencies - A solution for academia and production

The use of standards serves to free educational and training organizations from unnecessary duplication of effort in curriculum development, makes them accountable for quality of instruction and learning, and frees them to concentrate on the development of story, art direction, character performance, cultural and personal expression and the ability to create globally competitive content

Digital Blogs

Neurons that fire together, wire together: why transformation is so important

By Robin King | Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 7:12pm

Every day we are exposed to a rapidly changing, moment-by-moment digital media environment that demands strategic filtering and immediate response to a multitude of visual and auditory stimuli and their underlying messages. Constant digital distractions, multitasking and task switching plague our ability to concentrate, our aptitude for sustained intellectual focus and they interfere with our capacity for deep, persistent engagement.No wonder students find it difficult to focus!

Animation Blogs

Transforming Animation Education for the Conceptual Age

Today’s educational institutions are past their “best before” dates, having failed to adjust to the characteristics of today’s “digital natives” and industry’s best practices. They are incapable of modifying their methods to facilitate truly meaningful and comprehensive learning and expertise that will adequately prepare today’s graduates for tomorrow’s professional demands in an unpredictable future.