I am currently teaching at a Technical High School. It is part of the public education system, but rather than only having one school with the resources, we have a technical school where 9 schools feed into our one school offering 3D Animation. I am new in this arena, with a fine art background and a sculpture background and was asked to teach 3D Animation. Knowing nothing about it, I have been searching for any resources I can, and putting together curriculum as best I can based on books, DVDs and now your podcasts.

One of the major crossroads I am at was brought up by Eamonn. If he were to see anything taken from someone else he would never look at that artist again. One of the difficulties I have found is taking a high school student through modeling, lighting, rendering, animating, camera work, then second class, character design, rigging and then animating their own fully rigged character was exhausting. I was losing so many students by the time we got that far because their heads were spinning. One of the things I wanted to try out this semester is, to get one of these pre-rigged characters from Highend 3D and have my students go through and animate a character that was not their own. In my understanding, it would show them what a quality rig looks like and acts like. It would give them an opportunity to get in and have fun with animating without an entire year learning how to model and rig first, and secondly, it would give them fast results to get them hooked on animation.

My idea came as a result of seeing what animation mentor did, but listening to Eamonn Butler made me think this could be a bad idea. I fear that it might be seen as plagiarism, but I don’t know how you could get the same result without a student using a rigged character created by someone else. Would you see value in using pre-rigged characters in a high school level animation class? If so, is that something a student could put into their demo reel as long as they put in the credits that the character was designed by ________?

If you are interested in seeing what the students have done, and anyone interested in commenting on the demo reel and what we do well, and what could use improvement, I would welcome your comments. Here is the link to the demo reel. http://gti.graniteschools.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=160&Itemid=78

Once again, thank you for your podcasts, they are being used to define curriculum in the state of Utah where there is a fair amount of animation happening. I have passed your link on to 3 of the major universities teaching animation, and we currently have 8 high school programs teaching 3D Animation. I look forward to hearing from you or any of your listeners, feedback and input is always welcome.

I personally think chicken little would have been even cuter in 2d…. but every one has gone all “Shrekish” in their animation…. these studios, namely Disney at the moment, think that audiences care about how many pixels this and special effects that… i love innovation… but audiences… and little kids just dont care… they want good story lines and characters…. I personally think toystory is one of the best CGI movies around… but it is starting to look “traditional” with its retro, lack of depth in computer animation, large blocks of flat colour and cute generic computer patterns… but do i care… NO! because it has a great story line…. good characters and fun…

Joel - I agree. My approach has always been to attempt a job that is just beyond what I think I am capable of doing. You’ll always surprise yourself when you succeed.

It can be found here:
http://www.AnotherOtherWorld.com/

Christian - Thanks for the info. I didn’t know what Felidae was about until now. Feel free to comment any time. It’s not spam at all.

-Clay

I finally managed to watch Felidae, which wasn’t hard to track down thanks to *m*z*n. It’s a well done thriller, the characters just happen to be animated cats. Quite gory, definitely not for kids. Nice to see an attempt at animation for an older audience ouside of Japan, although that probably hurt it at the box office. I think the feline animation was well done and pretty consistent (If I counted correctly, 5 animation studios worked on it - but I don’t know if all of them did character animation).

So much for “Spot the Eamonn in the credits” - I did my part, will you do yours ;)? May be Ron and John will elaborate on a new cat mystery in an upcoming podcast (is there any hope for “fraidy cat”)? Anyway - I’ll stop spamming your talkback now and order a new head.