Sony Pictures Imageworks Selects Animation Mentor for Academic Excellence Program

Have you heard the great news yet?... Check it out!

Sony Pictures Imageworks Selects Animation Mentor for Academic Excellence Program

+ Berkeley, CA – July, 2007 — AnimationMentor.com, the online animation school® where all of the teachers are working studio animators, has been granted membership into Sony Pictures Imageworks’ Professional Academic Excellence Program, IPAX. Animation Mentor joins a select group of top-tier educational institutions accepted into the program, which is a wide-ranging knowledge exchange between the Academy Award®-winning digital production studio and the academic community.

“Animation students attend our school with the dream of working on a film as big and inventive as Imageworks’ SPIDER-MAN® films,” said Animation Mentor CEO/president Bobby S. Beck. “This is a great day for our program.”
"Animation Mentor has a unique program that offers real world expertise to animation students around the globe," said Sande Scoredos, executive director of training and artist development at Imageworks and the chair of IPAX. "Several of our top animators are already teaching at Animation Mentor, and it is impressive how well this innovative approach to teaching works for both faculty and student.” Scoredos continued, “Animation Mentor will benefit from IPAX membership and we look forward to what this
animation program will offer our other schools in the IPAX community."

Sony Pictures Imageworks created IPAX to nurture a strong relationship with established academic organizations and cultivate future generations of high-level animation and visual effects artists. With IPAX membership, faculty at member schools gain access to several formal programs including in-house training, curriculum reviews, guest lectures and guided tours, all designed to enhance faculty and student knowledge of real-time production activities and issues. The other IPAX member schools include: Carnegie Mellon, DePaul University Computer Graphics and Animation Program, Gnomon School of Visual Effects, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Otis College of Art + Design, Pratt Institute School of Art & Design, Ringling School of Art & Design, Stanford University, University of New Mexico and University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts.

ABOUT AnimationMentor.Com
Based in Berkeley, California, AnimationMentor.com is an online school at which top working professionals teach character animation to students worldwide. Opened March 2005, the school offers an eighteen-month program built from the ground up by its founders, Bobby Beck, Shawn Kelly and Carlos Baena whose combined credits include RATATOUILLE, FINDING NEMO and TRANSFORMERS. Animation Mentor’s California-certified curriculum includes professional mentoring; expert audio/video rich media lectures; live, real-time, interactive Q&A sessions (web classes); eCritiques™ and 24/7 online creative community. More information at: www.AnimationMentor.com


Check out the website http://www.cgindia.org for other cool updates on industry news

My Current Demo Reel (from SCAD)

I've finally finished tagging my latest demo reel for YouTube... This is from my days at SCAD(Savannah College of Art and Design)

It's kinda blisteringly(new word-just created!) obvious why I want to take the AM classes for animation.*grin*

If anyone out there has any suggestions for making the video look better than it does on YouTube, give me a holler... (I used Premiere Pro's media encoder to make a .wmv 1024k streaming file with a constant bit rate)

It looked so much better before the final processing at YouTube. I've just realized that YouTube looks pretty good until you down-grade your own work*grin*... just producer syndrome(the love of looking at your own work*grin*)I guess... You always want your stuff to look its best.

YouTube is still pretty cool in my book though...

Hope you like it!...

About WebRing...

WebRing, as I alluded to earlier, is a collection of blogs and websites.
It's been created as a way to connect similar topical journals into one community. WebRing does have other topics, aka other 'rings', of interest other than just animation. I, of course, have joined the particular one that is associated with AnimationMentor.com
Each community, or 'ring', has a main area, aka 'hub', for their community. At the hub folks can check out the details for that community via the tabs...hub page, sites, traffic stats, etc. Each member of the ring gets their own personal navigation bar (usually located at the bottom of their blog page or website). This navigation helps internet surfers get to the ring hub or surf to the next or previous blog in the community. (go ahead...check out my navigation bar at the bottom of the page *grin*)
Another way to check out the sites in the community would be to check out the tab 'sites' from the ring hub. Choosing this will give you lists of blogs in the community. Once you click on any of these blogs specifically, you are taken to a new page where the chosen site is brought up in a special navigational window. The folks browsing at this point have more options to check out that particular site or to speed surf to the next or previous site in the ring.
The blogs at the Animation Mentor ring are very unique. For the student members, each blog is an online journal chronicling their progress at AM. There are a also few mentors that are apart of the ring. They like to throw out tips and tricks for lucky would be animators. Of course all of this means that there is plenty of animation to see... some of it very rough... and some of it polished to perfection!

Thanks Jason Schleifer!

Thanks Jason Schleifer, webmaster to the collection of Animation Mentor Blogs over at WebRing.com, and animation god...

You can learn more about him at http://www.jonhandhisdog.com/

*I have been officially accepted into the fold of animation blogs!*... SAAAWEEET~~~