With a redesigned and re-engineered website that takes e-learning to the next level, online animation school AnimationMentor.com begins its winter 2006 term. Four hundred-nineteen students from 37 countries will study character animation with 45 of the industrys top working professionals from studios such as Pixar, Disney, DreamWorks and Blue Sky. They will experience a virtual campus supported by new technologies that deepen the educational experience and that incorporates the best of online social networks to enhance the schools community.
Every AnimationMentor.com student is mentored by a studio animator, who provides personal, weekly eCritiques. They will partake in realtime, online classes (Q&A sessions), and learn from professional training videos, animations, their fellow and from a wealth of information on the AnimationMentor.com site.
Among the new campus features that strengthen AnimationMentor.coms online community are: onsite instant messaging and buddy lists; video journal entries, where students share video footage on their profile page; and Cruise the Campus, with easy links from the schools forum to its workspace and from student-to-student.
AnimationMentor.coms technological additions include higher resolution training videos; an enhanced, proprietary tool that allows mentors to draw on top of (and critique) students work, frame-by-frame; and expanded eCritiques, in which students can view their mentors video explanations side-by-side with their own work.
Said Bobby Beck, ceo/president, AnimationMentor.com: We have brought together the best suggestions from our mentors, students and staff to improve every aspect of AnimationMentor.coms site. Our goal is to train the finest animators for studio employment and we are succeeding in doing just that.
Based in Berkeley, California, AnimationMentor.com (www.animationmentor.com) is an e-learning school at which top working professionals teach the art of character animation to students worldwide. Opened March 2005, the school offers an 18-month program built from the ground up by its founders, Bobby Beck, Shawn Kelly and Carlos Baena, whose combined credits include FINDING NEMO, THE INCREDIBLES and STAR WARS: EPISODE III REVENGE OF THE SITH.
Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.
