Starting at AnimSchool

In the end of last year I took all of my half baked university animation projects that I could use and gave them some polish. Here is the demo reel that was compiled out of them and submitted to Animschool:


todorImreorov- Animschool application video
4 or 5 hours after I submitted this, I was accepted in the 3d character animation program.

Now you may ask yourself- why did I apply at another animation school when in fact I just graduated from The University of Bradford - 3d computer animation bachelor degree- with a first class honors in 3d animation? I even got an award from the university- for excellence in education.

The reason is simple. The University of Bradford is an excellent place, where you get to learn many of the aspects of the entire pipeline of 3d animation and cinema/media theory. You can not however specialize in one thing- that being character animation - the thing at the end of the pipeline. 

The University gave me the materials to do so on my own (the library and the software), but not the time -

 in every single 3d animation class we had to model the character, build the rig, optionally texture, build the background,etc etc. Leaving a week or two for animating. 

Final year was also full of too many projects to tackle. That was partly my own fault too.

So I came out of university with a lot of half baked animation shots and the SODA TRIP project- half finished as well. I didn't get to learn and practice a lot of the theory that I still need in order to consider my animation showreel worthy of a good job application.

Some old progress on the Soda Trip project - cartoony character texturing.
Note that Soda Trip is still under development - as a hobby project!

Animschool is a prestigious online course, ran by Dreamworks, Disney, Blue sky, Pixar and other big studio animators. It's a school that doesn't let you graduate if your showreel is not at a level that makes you employable. They have strict quality control and reputation - with complete focus on animation. No rigging or modelling (for the "animate characters" course, they also have a separate "build characters" course too).

From now on I am going to be placing my focus on graduating from Animschool with a better animation showreel. You will start to see more animation work related posts in the future. I know that recently I have been posting a lot of general 3d and even game/software design related stuff.
Yes, the name of this blog is animation diary after all. :)

Here are some of the other prestigious online courses for 3d character animation:

Animation Mentor- The oldest of 3d animation courses. Founded by Pixar animators.
IAnimate- Highly competitive course with a lot of good rep. This was a close call for me. They have a great "game animation" class that focuses on animation for video games.

They are all excellent choices. I went with Animschool out of a hunch really. It's probably best to research them yourself and see the differences before picking one. Please don't ask me for opinion on which is the best. They are all really really good, but also expensive and not that easy to get into. Also I can't really compare them without being in all. This is a highly subjective matter.

And finally here is something I made while playing with Renoise DAW. It's a small music piece made for fun and to learn Renoise.