A Year At Animation School

Hello everyone. I have just completed my first year at animation school, so today we’re going to talk about what that was like. For the past… several years, I have been an entirely self-taught animator, but no longer. I have been studying at Yoobee Colleges. I have talked a little about this in a couple of videos in the past. The first semester was split up into a few different courses. This included ‘Creative Studio’ where we experimented with various tools and techniques, narrative, where we a

nalysed various films and shows, and finally developed our own stories, then visual art, where we developed our drawing skills, and went on to develop concept art and storyboards for our stories, and finally academic practices where we analysed how others go about making animation. (mostly writing essays) In Creative Studio, we started by making a series of small, experimental animations, including this one visualising the taste of water, using 3D to emulate 2D, this one depicting a childhood me

mory of a classmate, and this one warping time to tell a story. The skills we developed through this were then used to create a more ambitious project. In this case, a 3D animation made to appear stop motion. I made a video about this project, which was a lot of fun, so make sure to check that out after this video. This culminated in an even larger project. This is a PSA about using Soap while washing your hands. I really pushed myself here, creating my first-ever 3D facial rig. While all this w

as going on we were also learning about common storytelling techniques and applying them to our own narrative. My one is about a close-minded little blue penguin, who, while on a search for his lost brother, learns to become more tolerant of other world views. I learned a lot during this course. Having only ever made stories by myself, I had never really examined other films or their creators in a way that could improve my own stories. Alongside this we also participated in an art course, starti

ng off by developing our drawing skills. This included exercises of drawing lines, cubes and cylinders. It seems really boring… and it kind of is, but I would highly recommend doing something like this, it’s amazing how much my drawing skills improved over this time. We went on to life drawing, drawing people, and animals. Using these skills we then went on to create concept art and storyboards for our narrative class. Academic Practices In academic practices, we mostly wrote essays, talking abo

ut projects from other studios, and how these practices could be implemented into our own projects. The second semester was split into two main courses, creating a 2D animation, and another creating interactive projects, using 3D animation. The first of these courses constituted taking the narrative and storyboard created by another student, and completing two shots. I did this using Blender Grease Pencil. I don’t have a lot of experience with hand-drawn 2D animation, focusing more on cutout ani

mation and 3D, but I gave it my best, and though… there are certainly aspects that I’m not happy with, overall I’m fairly proud of the end result. And I certainly learned plenty that can be applied the next time I tackle a similar project. For the second of these courses, we worked in groups, the first group work of the year. The first assignment was to reproduce a scene from a narrative, in Augmented reality, using the Unity Game Engine. My group chose to use my narrative about a penguin as a s

tarting point. The shot involved the penguin and a Kingfisher wading through a swamp, all the while a Stoat stalks them from the bushes. Working in a group was a really valuable experience, and it was fun seeing my own work being expanded upon by others. For example, someone in my group created the model sheet for the penguin character, I then modeled it, another person textured it, and it was passed back to me for rigging and animation, and I just think that’s awesome. I’m really happy with wha

t we came up with. Using the same assets as a starting point, we then had to create a new experience using Virtual Reality, through the Unreal Engine. This was also a lot of fun, creating assets for this post-apocalyptic mixed with sci-fi world. I particularly had fun making this gigantic Pukeko skull. This year was amazing and I learned so much. We’re lucky enough to be in this amazing field of animation, where you don’t need a degree, or formal education to get work, however, I can’t overstate

how much I have learned this year, and how valuable an experience it was. Simply having a dedicated space and time to work on amazing projects is mindblowing, coming from High school where all my animation had to be done in my own time. Not to mention the amazing tutors, and fellow students that I’ve met and worked with. Something that I didn’t mention was that, because I had plenty of experience with animation coming into this year, I was able to skip the first year of this course. This means

that I only have one more year before graduating, and so I’ve been thinking about my future. I’m super excited to keep working on even more ambitious projects next year, but beyond that things are a little fuzzy. Long term I want to form my own animation studio, creating films, adverts, and more. Before that though, I want to gain some experience working in a more traditional animation role, at another studio, and I intend to document this entire experience, from the rest of my degree to buildin

g my own business, here on this channel. Let me know what you think, thank you all for watching, and I will see you around.