Online animation and visual effects school Animation Mentor is now accepting applications for the inaugural Summer 2013 term of its new VFX Fundamentals program. Students are encouraged to visit the Registration Portal 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, Lighting Basics, and Compositing Basics — 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, AMP studio production pipeline. 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 how to work with leading-edge vfx software, including Nuke, Katana and Mari from The Foundry and 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 offers students authentic studio experience, and allows studios to be confident that Animation Mentor grads are truly prepared for the high demands of studio quality work.
Students receive a diploma upon completing each respective program — VFX Fundamentals, CG Pipeline Production, and VFX Pipeline Production.
Animation Mentor has assembled a top-notch VFX Advisory Board and worked closely with industry professional lighters and compositors from Pixar, 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).
For more info about the program, visit www.animationmentor.com.
