Tuesday, April 12, 2005

The Mentors Are Coming!

Many of us Animation Mentor students in the San Francisco bay area and Sacramento just met in person for the first time at a cafe in SF over the weekend. It was all fun. Bobby Beck, one of the founders of the school and super ninja animator from PIXAR, stopped by and hung with us. We are all still buzzing from our get-together Saturday and now the school is already beginning to buzz again.

This time it's because our first ever Mentor ECritiques are starting to appear! These are video reviews of students' work by their individual mentors. The mentors make suggestions by actually marking on our assingment images that we upload for each week, while they describe their thoughts on how to improve. Since everyone is able to see all the other student's critiques, we all benefit from the critiques of all the mentors. I've viewed a few of some other students' critiques and this is way too cool! My mentor will be giving his critiques very soon, too, and I'm anxious to get his advice and see what he has to say about the other students in my group as well.

Of course, with a forum that already has more than 3,500 posts, lecture videos, assignments, Ecritiques, and many of us chatting and blogging, I don't know when I'm going to get any sleep. But it's fun, and the energy of the mentors and founder-mentors is contagious, as is the buzz of excitement we all seem to share about the level of learning we're getting from this school.

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