The first day started slowly with a first lesson from PIXAR story internship, which Anthony was part of last year at PIXAR. So students have a chance to work on specific exercises to improve their storytelling and storyboarding skills, which is useful even to those that “just wanna animate”. And it was an exciting assignment to choose 1 photo or illustration and come up with 5 consequent images as a suggestion of a sequence. The next day, we have learnt who can draw and who has ideas. The results impressed Anthony significantly and got more enthusiasm to continue.
The course aims to provide participants a unique opportunity to take direction in animation, meaning that we have organised a two week course, which itself is very precious achievement alone, original sets of CG characters (rigs) in collaboration with Rigging Do Jo, a story script to an original short film that Anthony brought with him, an environment where animators are encouraged to think as part of an development of a short film so they could take an initiative and use these assets and a two week dedicated event to come up with anything that fits the story theme and consult it with Anthony. Such setting we believe is best for learning to take direction and take advantage of time and opportunities.
Since there is a mixture of talent in the class, some like to storyboard and tell a story, some like to animate more then others.
Anthony prepared a document with character profiles (descriptions) so animators can grab the character rigs and come up with an idea for a quick moment that defines a character personality / reflexes / thinking and style etc, and show it to Anthony to consult his director’s vision for the character. So they could take practice in development of characters via animation.
Others have the short film story available that Anthony is working on, they can follow the story direction and influence it, help Anthony to correct weak spots and or introduce new ideas. In collaboration with others and the director, who is responsible for the vision, they participate on direction of a real story.
And Anthony shares more PIXAR story internship assignments. So the class is full of “direction” opportunities and team collaboration.
As I like to say often in recent years, animation is for entrepreneurs that can think independently but in collaboration with others.Having original characters and a story with a director from PIXAR that can consult anything they come up with is key to learning and working in animation. Just take the initiative and exploit it when you have the time that is limited only by 2 weeks.