Here at Animation Apprentice we believe in the power of online training – and in the idea of "flipping the classroom", a philosophy of teaching pioneered by Sal Khan's Khan Academy. Khan's big idea is that physical classrooms are obsolete. Why take notes on a lecture during class and then do the homework later, when you watch the lectures in advance, online, and then use precious classroom time for workshops and feedback? Best of all, each student gets to learn at their own pace, so no-one gets bored or, worse, falls behind and can't keep up.
We don't have physical classrooms at Animation Apprentice, but we have something much better instead. We offer a weekly personal feedback tutorial, recorded as a video, which gives you a step by step guide to what you did right, what you did worng – and how to do it better next time. How often in a traditional classroom will you get 20 minutes or more of a teacher's time devoted exclusively to showing you how to fix your work? It's a system that we think works much, much better than the traditional classroom model.
So what' the best way to use our videos? Lots of our students have day jobs, so each week we expect you to do around 8-12 hours work, depending on how ambitious you are. It will take you around 2 hours to watch the videos, and then at around 6-10 hours to do the exercise. Each exercise has multiple layers of complexity so you can tackle as much as you have time for. The more time you can commit, the better your work will be.
The ideal way to learn is to use two screens at once, and do the exercise as you go along. On the left hand screen you watch the videos, on the right hand screen – you do the exercises. Follow the videos carefully step by step, click by click – and you won't go wrong.
Once you are done, make a Quick Time of your animation, upload it to your YouTube account, and then embed it at the Facebook page, for review by your fellow Apprentices. And we'll send you video feedback, so you can go back in and fix what you're done.
Welcome to the future of education!