Www.animationmentor.com

[clockwerkz]

Animation is a language. One can study a language locked away all day via textbooks and such. But all they’d get is book knowledge. They’d still never grasp it. And if they heard the new language in use they couldn’t follow it . The best way to learn a language is to become immersed in the culture that uses that language everyday. Soon you stop thinking in terms of how the “words” compare to a language you understand and you start to just understand the new language natively. Then once you get to that point all the subtleties and nuances of the language in use can be understood. It’s the difference between saying (or understanding) “Hello, friend.” and “Yo, wuzzup, dog?”. Both mean the same thing, one version has flavor, nuance, culture, style. So what does this dribble mean?

The best way to learn animation, to understand it, is to do it. A lot. And then ask for the feedback from others to point out what you don’t see. And then animate more. And then, animate some more. And when you’ve done that, go ahead and try to animate some more. When we start learning animation we’re struggling to say “Hello, friend.” with our work. Most initial efforts end up saying something like “Hlloeeo furoondeend?”. But keep working it and get immersed in doing it long enough and the time comes when your animation work can say “Hello, friend.”. And then after even more doing and more doing and more doing, someday (if you’re blessed with talent) your animation will say “Yo, wuzzup dog?” and people smile because your work has that spark of life. The sooner you start, the better. Don Graham (old time Disney drawing teacher from the way back days) had a saying: “Every one of us has 100,000 bad drawings in us. The sooner we get those out of the way the better for everybody involved.” That’s just as true in animation. We have HUNDREDS, perhaps THOUSANDS of bad scenes in us. Don’t wait til January to get started. That’s silly. Get those nasty bad animation tests out of your system now, not while you’re paying a significant chunk of money to be told to do it. Don’t just throw money at these guys out of hero worship thinking their greatness will rub off on you. It won’t (even though these guys are all genuinely groovy cats who are worth the admiration. ). They got their greatness from God’s hand and their own hard work. They animated. A ton. Ask them sometime about how many nights they stayed up til sunrise working their craft, even after they’d gotten professional gigs as animators during the day. Your greatness will come not from AM, but from God’s hand and your hard work. Don’t wait for AM to make you a great animator. It can’t. It can give you tools, it can give you experienced eyes looking at your work, it can give you help, but it can’t make you a good animator. That’s on your shoulders and the day to begin it has arrived, even if January is still 5 months off.

-k

Hi Keith,

I really like your analogy to learning a language. You’re absolutely right when you say that it is better to emerse yourself in the language as opposed to just reading it from books. I remember when I took French wayyyy back in high school, we watched a video of a group of students who just basically went to France and had to learn the language to “survive,” if you will.
But now here’s the catch… and this is what I’m going through… when you’re totally emersed in learning a language, you are speaking with people who more than likely were born speaking that language… the pros. I have been practicing, but I find it hard to get a good crit on my work. I don’t have any access to a decent program of study in my neck of the woods to learn character animation from. So it’s hard to learn like this because one may be doing something wrong, or learning the wrong way to do something. So of course, where nothing can replace good ol’ sweating it out practice, nothing can replace proper guidance.
Thank you, btw, for your website. Your tutorials have been very intuitive and very helpful!

cW

[agreenster]

I wish you could have all been there. We gave away a lot of mini posters, brochures, over 250 Tshirts and talked until I had no voice (haa haa, litterally. Ask Agreenster!)…The blur party ruled and it was fun dancing and just having a blast with some of the nutty folks from this list, SheepFactory, Agreenster, etc! was really a huge highlight for me.

Super-fun times man! I’ll never forget it!

Off to work on this months 10SecondClub…

[alexandrecollac]

We changed the link of the animation study group , because of organization problems.

Here is the new link - http://animationshare.proboards30.com/

Soon when we get things working we will post this in the CGTalk news to everybody knows.

See u there

[oshiroii]

Yup, we’ve got ours own little animation study/exercise forum
(don’t worry, I’ll still be here everyday )

[Bentagon]

wow, sorry alexander and oshiroii, but I wouldn’t rush this new(est) forum. I think we should keep it to the Yahoo thing until we got a clear view what we want to do. Let’s just keep a discussion about the organisation and all this on the yahoo forum, and then we’ll see what’s the best thing to do. If we go changing back and forth between those forums, we might never get there :hmm:

anyways, can’t wait for the next AM newsletter :bounce:

• Bentagon

[oshiroii]

After talking to you I must agree with you. We’re being to enthusiastic about this and going way to fast. We’re probably confusing to many people :banghead:

I think we shoul first consider some possiblities and make it all work and then announce. I’m jus too happy 'bout this.

So we should stick with the yahoo thing for now I think.

[furryspork]

Umm… okay, I think Oshiroii and I have come to an agreement that we are going to use my site until we can come to a final decision about where the forum should ultimately be.

At the very least, it’s easier for everyone to discuss and leave suggestions about where the pre-AM group should be on my site than it is on Yahoo, because on Yahoo, we can’t even separate the posts out into threads!

I’ve changed the preferences on my forum to allow guests to post at least for the first couple of weeks, so that everyone can post their suggestions without having to register for anything else. This should make things easier, since a lot of people just registered at Yahoo in order to be able to post there, and this way they won’t have to register for something else which may or may not be the permanent home of the group.

I see that oshiroii and alexandrecollaco have discussed and agreed to this idea on the Yahoo group already. Sorry for all the confusion!

[daraand]

Rock on., Good job Furryspork, and oshiroii! After all this I thought the forum would die but I’m glad its alive

[Holyvirus]

My first post here

I agree that a forum is much better then the Yahoogroups.
Thanks Furryspork and oshiroii for making it possible!

[JoshBowman]

Is this the calm before the storm or has everyone just shifted to oshiroii’s other forum?

[Bentagon]

well, we’ve been doing some things on oshiroii’s forum, and we just got really started, but we aren’t doing anything there that we would otherwise be doing here. I think there won’t be much of a discussion in this thread until the next newsletter arrives… which will hopefully be very soon

• Bentagon

[BadMange]

I apologize if this has been asked/suggested before, but I was wondering if there will be a less expensive, less involved version of AM online where you could pay a monthly fee to gain access to the discussion forums, view the exercises and possibly post your animation to get one of the AM online instructors to give a generalized critique? Or buy credits to download the videos from the site?

I just forked over $40+K for art school, my loans are going into “Collect!” mode, the wife and I are buying our first house and expecting our first child, and I’m freakin’ broke! And I want to attend AM Online almost as much as I want to be a character animator. So a lesser version of the AnimationMentor experience would suit folks in my shoes pretty well, methinks.

Any comments from the masses/AnimationMentor gods?

Thanks for reading,
-Bad Mange

[keenasmustard]

Bad Mange: I do vaguely remember someone else asking a similar question to this. (I think it’s a great idea.) I think they mentioned the idea of charging a “subscription” to the areas of the site you mentioned. I think I also vaguely remember one of the AM guys responding to it, saying that they’d take it into consideration. (I could be wrong though!) Check out this link, if you haven’t already: http://home.netspeed.com.au/mlanham/am_faq.html That’s a link to the FAQ’s from here that one of the members kindly typed up. The answer to your question might be in there. It’s a pretty huge read, but worth going through anyway.

[oshiroii]

BadMange, I don’t think they would do that. The things you list is AMonline, except for the video lessons. So I don’t think it would happen. You might get acces to the forum, but I don’t think instructors will personnally comment anything for you, except maybe on the forums. But you never know, they’re really nice guys so there might be a chance :hmm:

I think it would be better if you’d just wait until you can afford the whole thing. You don’t have to subscribe know, you could always join next year or something like that.

[alexandrecollac]

Hey Shawn, Bobby and Carlos. When we are going to have another newsletter??

Waiting anxiously for updates:thumbsup:

See ya

[BadMange]

I think it would be better if you’d just wait until you can afford the whole thing. You don’t have to subscribe know, you could always join next year or something like that.

:rolleyes: Heh heh, you obviously don’t have huge school loans, a mortgage and a baby on the way.

[animboom]

Hey, guys. Bobby Beck here from AnimationMentor.com

Lots of great things going. The unoffical AM online forum seems to be going well. Carlos and I have been popping in from time to time as well. But our main focus right now is in getting AM online ready for the upcoming launch Date.

There will be a new newsletter shortly. It will be a pretty small one as most of the more important announcements will come in October. So stay tuned.

It’s important to note that things have changed for the better since we announced the site back in June of this year. From the feedback from our Mentors and fellow Forum Junkies we learned more of what people want and more of what WE want from the project.

So (BADMANAGE) to answer your question if we are going to offer a subscription based membership we will not be offering this. At least right away.

At AnimationMentor.com our major goal is not to stuff everyone into it. It’s to take a student and help them individually get better and focus their talents and skills. To be a part of AM online will hopefully be a very special experience. Not everyone will be able to get in, but for those who do we really expect great things. So with that in mind a subscription goes against what we want to offer. When someone gets into the school they will understand that their experience will be focused and solid. It will become more clear to the students when they actually see what’s in store.

Anyways, keep swimming, and keep rockin’!

-BOOM

[Cyro]

For those who didn’t get in because of the limited seats, hopefully there will be a download section where we can try out the tutorials first and be prepared for the class once it’s re-opened, since tutorials are pre-recorded anyways. I guess that’s the main idea behind a subscription membership. Sorry if someone already metion it but this is a really long thread so I didn’t read all of it.

[ASteele85]

Can anyone give a rough estimate as to how much a 12 traditional art class schedule costs? Thanks in advance.

[mmkelly011881]

guys… nooone has gotten in yet… registration doesnt start till december!!