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Animation Mentor

Uses Industry Rock Stars to Teach Students

     Back in April, Oaklander Bobby Beck attended a wedding in Los Angeles. You might say he got the couple together. In fact, he has brought many people together from all over the world. “I always said I wanted to go to the first wedding whether I was invited or not,” he recalls as we talk in his Emeryville office. But to assemble this couple and other like-minded people, Beck went a much more complex route than introducing them at a party or forwarding their profiles on Facebook. He and some friends opened a school.
     The online animation school, Animation Mentor, went live in 2005 as the first and still-only program of its kind, offering students everything they need to know about the miraculous art of breathing life into computer-generated characters. Since beginning, enrollment has skyrocketed, with a student body spanning 75 countries and more than 100 mentors working in the field of animation. But while these stats are the makings of corporate giddiness, the biggest sense of pride at Animation Mentor has more to do with that wedding Beck attended.
     Poke around on www.animationmentor.com and you might find yourself trying to remember the last time you had that much fun. You might even wonder how an online program could evoke the kind of school spirit that is usually only generated by a homecoming game. But while monster-sized universities salivate over the online school phenomenon because of the potential cost-cutting benefits of impersonal features like being able to fit enough students in a class to fill a cruise ship, Animation Mentor has succeeded in making the experience one where you get to know your classmates so well you just might end up marrying one of them.
     It’s community-driven, personal, and, as Beck puts it, “pretty freakin’ awesome.”
     In 2003, when Beck was living the animation dream, working at Pixar on the classic Finding Nemo, his friend Shawn Kelly, an animator at Industrial Light and Magic, invited him to co-teach an animation class at the college both men had attended years earlier. Beck remembers having issues with the program when he was a student. “We learned to move stuff around, not how to bring characters to life.” Frustrated, he ended up teaching himself the fundamentals of this moving art outside of class. That’s when he started getting good. “I was in a lab and the instructor sat down next to me and said, ‘can you teach me to do what you’re doing?’ ” That’s when he bailed out. “I was working two full-time jobs and going to school full time. I was like, ‘this is crazy.’ ” But when he and Kelly returned to the school as instructors, he was shocked to find that nothing had changed. “The students had just spent about $80,000 to $100,000 on their education and not a single one of them was going to come out and be an animator.”
     While most of us would have gotten over the outrage after a beer and a couple of oh-wells, Beck and Kelly grabbed their friend, Pixar animator Carlos Baena, and began to draft a curriculum that would change everything. “It’s not rocket science, this stuff,” says Beck. “It’s been tried and true since the ’30s and ’40s from when Disney’s nine old men started figuring out the 12 principles.”
A year and a half later, the first term took off.
      If the above mention of “principles” and “old men” makes Animation Mentor sound like just another school, think again. Beck, Kelly and Baena knew they were not about to use the stagnant, industrial age–minded system of education as their foundation. No thanks, they said, to the idea of “punch in and punch out” where animators become “workers.” “We just threw out everything we knew and asked ourselves what we wanted it to be like if we started all over again,” says Beck, who has gone toe-to-toe with other prominent art institutions at the industry’s major annual event, SIGGRAPH, to discuss the online animation school’s methodology and rising success. “Other schools are like, ‘well, how do you capture the students and follow proper process and procedure for the board of directors …’ and we’re like, dude! We’re coming at it with a totally different perspective. You need to believe in the spirit of what you’re doing.”
     While traditional art colleges, according to www.animationmentor.com, will cost anywhere from $68,000 to $131,000 for a four-year bachelor’s degree program, the online animation school comes in at $17,875 for an 18-month certified diploma program that offers a pay-by-term plan. The list of requirements, including intermediate computer software skills and of course the minimum system requirements, is nothing like many of the ulcer-inducing necessities for many universities. This simple list, however, should not give anyone the impression that Animation Mentor is not selective. Animation Mentor requires no portfolio, but there is a series of essay questions to spot the candidates that will soar. “There are a lot of people who are hobbyists or they saw like the latest Dreamworks film and think they want to be an animator,” says Beck. But it takes a lot more than feeling a buzz after seeing a cartoon. “You’re going to be working on your computer from home. So we want to know what’s going to motivate you.”
     Sitting in Beck’s bright office, replete with shelves of toys juxtaposed with a product management system that allows for complete visibility and transparency throughout every department, there is a palpable sense of optimism and humility. Beck, who left Pixar in 2005 to become the school’s full-time CEO, exudes this kind of electric positivity, matched only by his on-the-level sincerity, scarcely found in the stuffy buzzards left over from the Madmen-era of business or the Ed Rooney–type school administrators. On a typical day, you might find Beck decked out in a skateboarder look and using karate noises to illustrate a point. What other college president proudly
refers to his diligent administrative staff as “ninjas”? Probably none. Get used to it. This culture of transparency and innovation, which consumers have grown accustomed to in the industry, is hopefully now the trend in education. The driving force is that education at Animation Mentor is built on the belief that it is about more than knowledge; it is all about passion.
    Only passion would possess a school to put out the slew of free resources available not only to students, but also to anyone with a hankering for how this cartoon stuff works. Lectures, “webinars,” surveys, e-books: free. Then there are the instructors. “We realized early on that we have to put the students in touch with their heroes,” says Beck, who believes that this should be true for any area of study. Even accountants have their rock stars. Instructors at the school hail from top studios like Pixar, SONY, Dreamworks and ILM. “You have to find people who are kicking ass. Then the students are going to be like, ‘holy crap!’ ”
    Take veteran Pixar animator Victor Navone, whose credits include WALL-E and The Incredibles. Navone has been an instructor with Animation Mentor since the very first term. “I’ve always enjoyed sharing what I know about animation. I really enjoy helping students get their heads around the complex concepts and seeing them grow and progress is really satisfying.” While some universities might be lucky enough to have such talent fly in for a day and give a lecture, Animation Mentor students can pick Navone’s brain for an entire term. Thanks to the preset curriculum, busy pros like Navone do not have to concern themselves with developing syllabi or assignments. Still, classes happen on the same night each week at the same time, with instructors giving examples, addressing questions and leading a discussion during class time based on that preset syllabus. And since the student body is from every time zone on the globe, instructors can schedule classes whenever it works for them — 3 in the afternoon or 3 in the morning. “The teaching itself is really rewarding,” Navone cays. “And it’s extremely convenient, given my busy work schedule and family life.”
     When it comes to the Animation Mentor experience, the term “personal” isn’t thrown around as a marketing gimmick like the way WaMu used to talk about checking options. It’s part of the school’s infrastructure. Classes range from a mere 12 to 15 students — a number rarely associated with class-size since the days of Little House on the Prairie. The intimacy enables everyone to be more than a random face on a screen. Instructors meet with their classes once a week for a real-time video chat, where students can ask questions about the weekly lecture, assignments, the industry or whatever they want. Each student also gets a weekly critique of his work for individualized attention. “You’d be surprised at how hands-on it is,” claims Nelson Brown, a 2009 graduate who now works at PDI/DreamWorks in Redwood City. He claims one of the biggest benefits was the constant critique of his assignments. “I never went too long without getting feedback. It’s a great way to work. You’re never left guessing.” Beck himself is regularly available on IM to chat with students and alumni, and even the administrative staff gets online face time during the weekly video news.
    The school holds some in-person events like an annual barbecue and, of course, graduation, which has had nearly 100 percent attendance each year. There is also a super cool web feature available called “Cruise the Campus,” that gives students a chance to meet up with schoolmates anywhere on the globe. Someone traveling to, say, Paris, can click on the city and spread the word of his or her upcoming trip. It’s one of Beck’s favorite features. “People will go, like, ‘you can stay with me, we’ll have some beer and we’ll show you stuff you’ve never seen!’ You wind up getting total hospitality on a level that you wouldn’t normally have.” It’s important to understand that Beck’s joyful way of describing how it works is more than a geek-out over the social technology. It is the thrill of watching the school evolve in ways none of the founders ever saw coming. Beck anticipated something altogether different — a website that would “run itself” with instructors addressing some questions on weekends. “These are people who are going through this same journey and they get it. They have that passion and they want to share it. That’s the stuff we never could have anticipated.”
     Not wanting to cut through the positive vibe in the air, I was hesitant to ask Beck if he missed animation, especially seeing his old stomping ground Pixar continue to crank out Oscar winners year after year. Anyone would be a little melancholy, right? That’s when he tells me about seeing Ice Age 3 with some graduates who had worked on the film. But just when I think he’s telling me a story solely about how proud he felt of the students, he goes on. “They were with their significant others in the audience and when their names came up in the credits, I saw them, like, rubbing noses and holding each other …” His voice lowers. “Seeing the impact — how proud their partners were of the work they had done — there’s just nothing more satisfying to me than that.”  That’s passion for you.