Animation: Personal Trainer Program

UPDATE**: There’s just one spot left open for this session. Just in case you were on the fence or anything.

UPDATE #2** Uhm.. never mind. that lasted all of 15 minutes. Heh. All the spots for this session are taken! If you were interested keep an eye out for the next session which will be taking enrollment in January.

I’m happy to announce a new training program for animators, the Animation: Personal Trainer program. Ever since successfully launching the Video Tutorial Service I have been thinking of ways to provide even better animation teaching and training. The best way by far is personal, hands on, in-the-same-room working on real production scenes kind of training. This was the usual way you learned to be an animator for over 70 years. Sadly this doesn’t much exist in the animation business of the 21st century. So I decided to do the next best thing: offer a program where I can take my years of experience training and teaching animators as an animation supervisor and apply that experience to be your personal trainer for animation. The idea was simple: provide a completely customized, personalized, unique animation curriculum for each student based on their current skills to address their areas of greatest weakness. What if I could be like an exercise personal trainer where I can help you target specific goals for improvement? Thus the idea for the Animation: Personal Trainer program was born.

Using proven methods for online training in animation I want to provide folks the opportunity to have completely customized training for their goals and needs. Rather than a one size fits all approach, the Animation: Personal Trainer seeks to create specific assignments, milestones, teaching moments and feedback sessions for every student. Are you already a professional animator and you just want to improve your lipsync animation in an effort to break into film? Or what if you really want to master walk & run cycles for games? What if you just want to take your acting to a higher level? What if you struggle with process? What if you want to better understand how to polish your animation? What if you don’t have the time to be involved with an animation training program for a long time? Or what if you’ve completed other schooling in animation but you still feel you have areas of weakness that need some personalized training to improve upon? Basically, sometimes we just need to work out those problem areas that give us trouble, or we want to focus and improve in specific ways to get over the hump in our work. Often nothing short of a highly personalized approach can help us do that. That’s what the APT was designed to do.
The APT program is an 8 week online course. Students meet with their trainer (me- there are no other trainers) at least once a week via webcam, are given uniquely designed assignments to help their area of focus, are given video and face to face feedback, enjoy personalized video lectures and email support. And it’s all designed around each student. By necessity this means that classes will be VERY small. In order to provide the best training for each student enrollment will be capped for every session. The first APT session will begin the first first week of September and run through the end of October and I’m taking enrollment now.

Want to know more about the APT? Want to sign up? There’s no reel review or admissions screening- I believe that anyone can benefit from personal attention and help. Anyhow, if you’re interested then follow the store link or the promo banner link on the left side of this page for more info on how to order. There’s also a handy dandy FAQ ready for you to check out. And as always, VTS subscribers will get a tasty 10% discount when they enroll.

I’ve been cooking this idea up for a good long while and I’m really excited to be able to offer this to folks. I hope that it meets a need in the animation training universe. I desire to fill in the gaps where folks often get lost. I hope that for some the APT is exactly what they have been waiting for and I hope that their wait will be rewarded with a rich and fantastic exprience. I’m pretty jazzed about this, so let’s get learning!