Animation Mentor Announces New VFX Curriculum

Emeryville, CA – State-of-the-art online school of animation and VFX Animation Mentor [1] is now accepting applications for the inaugural Summer 2013 term of its new VFX Fundamentals [2]. Students are encouraged to visit the Registration Portal [3] early to ensure their choice of industry professional instructor and class time.

The VFX Fundamentals is a series of three 12-week courses — CG Basics [4], Lighting Basics [5], and Compositing Basics [6] — taught by industry professional lighters and compositors from Pixar Animation Studios, DreamWorks Animation, Weta Digital, and Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). VFX Fundamentals teaches the exact visual effects skills that studios seek: The ability to professionally collaborate and apply studio best practice workflows within a studio production pipeline and across multiple disciplines. Animation Mentor’s instructional design emphasizes collaboration within a production as enabled through its state-of-the-art, patent-pending AMP studio production pipeline [7]. This design replicates the current industry trend of making films within a fully-distributed pipeline.  

The curriculum teaches students how to produce great work as a team under demanding circumstances — with Lighting Basics and Compositing Basics further emphasizing collaborative workflows among students of different disciplines. Students also learn how to synthesize technical and aesthetic skills within the world of visual effects — and to secure the familiarity, comfort, and confidence to contribute within a pipeline-based workflow. Students learn leading-edge VFX software, including NUKE, KATANA, and MARI from The Foundry and the Arnold renderer from Solid Angle.

After completing the classes, students are steeped in the best practices found in most top studio pipeline workflows. Students learn to work through the same challenges studios experience when multi-discipline talent is involved to create the final image. This real studio production experience serves two purposes: 1) Students secure very real studio experience, and 2) Studios are confident that Animation Mentor graduates are truly prepared for the high demands of studio quality work.

After completing the VFX Fundamentals, students can then enroll in a dedicated CG Pipeline Production Track, with an emphasis on creating the visual images on a fully-computer-generated short film; or a VFX Pipeline Production Track, where the focus is on creating the visual images on a mixed-computer-generated and live-action sequence. The detailed curriculum prepares students to excel in the VFX industry workforce on day one, particularly in working collaboratively across disciplines with other artists, troubleshooting when shots break, and contributing within the fully-distributed pipeline.

Students receive a diploma upon completing each respective program — VFX Fundamentals, CG Pipeline Production, and VFX Pipeline Production.

Animation Mentor assembled a VFX Advisory Board [8] and worked closely with industry professional lighters and compositors from Pixar Animation Studios, DreamWorks Animation, Weta Digital, and Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) to provide ongoing consultation of the VFX curriculum and fully-distributed pipeline. Animation Mentor also partnered with leading software developers (Autodesk, Inc., The Foundry, and Solid Angle), character riggers (CG Monks), and VFX media partners (fxphd).

Animation Mentor’s new characters [9] have been developed to work in the VFX world. Each rig comes with a base high-end surfaced look development — and VFX students resource these characters [10] throughout their studies to learn VFX lighting, compositing, and rendering. This includes an exclusive Morpheus 2.0 character from CG Monks — designed specifically for Animation Mentor.