Over the last couple of weeks my life has been Animation Mentor from head-to-toe! It's been so inspiring hosting and participating in so many fantastic events! It was a pleasure meeting so many inspired students and graduates from all over the world.
Christa and Melissa welcome AMers to the Career Fair!
This is the stuff I LOVE to see. Alumni coming out to support the current graduates and having a blast. So stoked to see so much love and support going around. If you weren't there you wouldn't believe it if I told you how freaking awesome it is to be around this energy! WOW!
I was also fortunate enough to host a webinar with Don Hahn, the editor of the two book set "Drawn to Life," by Walt Stanchfield! It was such an honor to host this and I'm so stoked we're offering it for people to view for FREE! Click Here to view it. Enjoy!
So with that I'm getting a couple moments of rest and then getting ready to hit Animation Mentor Power Sessions Part 2 at Comic Con and then at Siggraph! It's going to be a VERY BUSY next couple of weeks and I'm SOOOOOOO looking forward to it! WOOT WOOT! Hope to see some more of you soon. I'll also be blogging more while at the events!
Yesterday Animation Mentor had our annual company wide team building event! I've appropriately titled this one, "TOP CHEF." We have a small group within Animation Mentor called the EEC (Employee Event Committee) who researches events and details. We keep the details of the events "secret" to the rest of the team so that it is a surprise. Unfortunately, I was out in bed sick so I missed this event. I was torn for sure! But better to take a sick day than to get everyone else sick. Overall I've heard amazing things about the event and wanted to share photos with you guys! My thought is that an inspired team creates inspired results. There's a lot of buzz around the office today and a lot of smiling faces! WOOT WOOT!!!
We have a lot of "Foodies" in the group! I love the smiling faces and overall energy in this picture!
Lately we've begun doing a series of internal trainings. One was led by Jay Epperhart, super star Tech Care guru at Animation Mentor. His talk was tiled "Animation for Non-Animators." The point of this talk was to help educate everyone in the company about what makes great animation without all the technical jargon. Our hope with this was to help increase the awareness of what we do here so that people can also log on and look at student's/alumnus's work and give comments if they'd like. Thus getting people more involved. The entire company participated in this from Finance, HR all the way to the art department and technology. Way to go Jay!!!
The second was a talk given by Super Ninja Technology Specialist, Taylor Mahony! His talk centered around all the different products and services we have for students, alumni, leave of absence students etc. Again, this is all in an effort to make sure everyone in the company is educated on the different product offerings and services we have.
[Lleslle learns about Spacing]
Our company mission is: "To provide the most personal and fulfilling learning experience on the planet" and we want to make sure we are starting internally so that these are not just words we say, but life that we breathe in to all areas of what we do here!
I attended the Success Connect 2009 conference Monday and Tuesday of this week. This was a conference about a software product we are beginning to use internally to help tie all that we do in the company to the bigger picture. Ultimately it is an internal social networking tool to line up goals to strategy. Really neat and I got a lot out of it.
Things at AM are really buzzing right now. We have some cool additions we will be launching shortly. Our new "phased roll out" is working well and we've launched several new tools in beta to people. The method allows us to really gauge people's comments and usability while allowing us to work out necessary bugs before rolling it out to the entire school and alumni communities. I'd say my inspiration at work is hovering around 1,000% right now. Just wanted to share some of the really cool things happening behind the scenes. :)
Animation Mentor Volunteers at The Local Food Bank
Today at Animation Mentor the whole company volunteered to help out the local Food Bank. It was great starting the day out with the pitch of just how far their outreach is and the impact they are having not just locally but state wide, too! It was inspiring even to play a small part in something so grand.
We had plenty of fun and shared many great, ridiculous moments together! I love this amazing team who always impress me with how much fun they can have doing just... well, yeah... Anything! Enjoy the pics below!
Victoria, Brittany and I rummaging through the apple bins, with cameo from Mike Mahony in the background!
Michael Steele enjoying the many yummy "apples gone wild." Check out the color on that apple. Ugh!
Lots of fun yummy goo to pick through. Mushed nice in the hands. ha ha!
The whole crew chillin'. Thanks to Rachel Lee and Francis for letting our crazy group bust in and "take over" their facility. It was truly a fantastic experience!
Trip to Sony Pictures Imageworks for new Animation Mentor Video Lectures
Rachel Ito (AM's Art Director), Michael Dauz (AM's Web Publications Specialist) and myself flew down to LA this weekend to shoot two new classes for the Polishing and Portfolio classes that are new to Animation Mentor. This marks the first of many upcoming classes that will feature real production shots! This is exciting for us as this will really begin to open things up as far as teaching goes, and being able to see real production shots, workflow techiniques, etc that take a shot from concept to the big screen is so absolutely invaluable!
Matthew Munn did the first class in which he went over some great shots he did on Surf's Up! He was full of energy and excitement for this class. We had a blast and we all laughed A LOT!
Joshua Beveridge did the second class where he also went over a shot he did on Surf's Up. Josh has an excitement and enthusiasm for animation that radiates from him! This totally came through in the class and although we had a lot of technical difficulties throughout the day it wound up being absolutely amazing and very memorable for all of us!
I wanted to give a HUGE public thanks to both Michael and Rachel for being rock stars and sticking through two shoots in one day! WOW, that was a lot of work for all of us and they kept up their energy and the results will pay off when these classes air later this year.
I wanted keep the readers of the blog abreast of all the cool things we're doing on a regular basis because it helps everyone see the effort and energy that goes into this crazy place. We're so happy and 2009 is proving to be a fantastic one indeed!
I always talk about how the team at Animation Mentor makes it so amazing and so special. Here's a sneak peek of the video news boardcast for week 1 this term. You get to see all the amazing people who help bring it to life every day. I'm proud to be a part of this and am so happy to be working with the best, most funnest team on the planet!
Okay, so I may be a bit late on this one, but I had to post this as I was so TOTALLY impressed with the enthusiasm and effort that was put into the Animation Mentor team's halloween festivities! Check out a link to more photos here:
Well, almost home. I'm back in the US in route to Cali. My trip to Egypt and Morocco was fantastic! Actually, "out of this world" in so many ways.
Egypt was all about history, culture, religion and being constantly inspired by the landscapes and archetecture.
Morocco was all about culture, food, kitesurfing and religion.
Both countries are so totally different. Egypt is rich in history and really is something to see.
Morocco is fantastic and filled with the most unique landscapes and casbahs and is also something to see!
This was a dream trip that I have been planning for a long while and it surpassed my wildest expectations. With that being said, I'm happy to be back in the US.
Four full weeks of vacation was awesome and I kept in constant touch with the Animation Mentor office and am so proud of the team for being so strong in keeping things rolling so smoothly! These trips are very good for me as they challenge me to let the team grow. Whenever I return from a trip I am always pleasantly surprised by their growth. This time will be a pretty big leap for all of us! So cool.
I'm ready to dive in full on as we have a lot if stuff in the hopper and I'm pumped to keep things flowing strong!
So many great things are happening at Animation Mentor! Today we launched the latest version of our Public Site. We are happy to have tested the usability with beta users to make sure the design and ease of use was there. We're really proud of it and the Art Department did a fantastic job putting this together. A lot of love went in to this and we tried to add as much video stuff for people coming to the site so they can get a feel for what we're all about. We hope you enjoy!
Oh and it's all HTML now so it's tons faster and we can link people directly to pages like our FREE RESOURCES page! Sweet!!!
So, besides a mix up that sent out emails to people early for having late grades before the term started (whoops) we launched version 3.1.0 today without a hitch! This is HUGE because it's been about a year in the making. Most people will not notice much of a difference right off the bat. However, on the back end the site is completely new and the server environment is 100% brand new and co-located at a new, super reliable location.
Huge props to the Animation Mentor Software Development and Network Operations teams!!!
What 3.1.0 gives us is the ability to have both Alumni and Student sites in one place. I'm an admin/beta user so when I log in the site chances color to reflect alumni or student. It also allows me to co-mingle with alumni and students together in one place. My buddy list has students AND alumni in it! So cool. We're testing this out and are not releasing it this year, however the "pipe" is laid and we're SUPER excited to be moving in the right direction. After some testing we will slowly open it up to both students and alumni together. Once we do this the community will feel so much more robust and solid. Becoming an alumni will be that much cooler and we have a lot of awesome stuff that we can now begin working on which will make the alumnni site super duper crazy awesome! I wanted to share because I'm a bit excited about this project. :) I know it's a little early to be celebrating as we can only see and feel the results internally, but I see the future of AM and it looks awesome!
Also, a little birdy told me that there is a brand new Animation Mentor public site launching some time tomorrow! So stay tuned for that at www.AnimationMentor.com . WOOT!!!!
Today was one of those days that makes me proud to be working at Animation Mentor. We had one of our big team building events today where the entire company went out for an urban adventure rightfully called Geo Team Building! We randomly broke up into teams of five. The selection process was great because we were all on teams with people we did not necessarily work with on a day-to-day basis.
If you're not familiar with geocaching you can click on the word and it will explain more on what it is. Basically you each have little hand held GPS devices and you go around looking for pre-planted treasures. The GPS devices only get you within about 30 feet from the treasure so from their you have to work together to find where it is located and that's where a lot of the fun comes in! Overall this event was SO awesome and we all had so much fun, running around in the Tilden forest in the Berkeley hills! Below you can find some pictures from the event. SWEET!!!!
[picture of Rachel and Amanda getting ready to launch on an adventure] So you start out like this with your team (5 people per team). You have a pocket PC which gives you a little clue on the treasure and the coordinates to put into your handheld GPS. And from there your team is OFF on the adventure!!!
Here's an action photo of Molly in pursit of the golden tickets! Ha, ha! The setting for the event was really spectacular! The event is based around team building and we all worked so well together and naturally gravitated towards different roles; i.e. someone with the pocket PC, someone with the map and me running around like a mad man having too much fun! I think that was my role at least. :)
There were 20 treasures in all and your team wins based on how many treasures you find, how many you find FIRST (aka the golden tickets) and how creative your photos are as you take cool photos of your group with each treasure. This was our team! We rocked!!! Woot!!!!
Here's a group photo of all of us at the very end enjoying ourselves and having a great time together!
Afterwards we went to the Pyramid Brewery in Berkeley and had some snacks, finger foods and reviewed the winners (our group came in second which rocked!) and the crazy photos we took along the way!
Overall this is the kind of stuff that makes coming to work great. This is the energy that we share at work and this energy then comes through to the school and the students and all the things we work on. It's so fun to be a part of this and I'm proud of it for sure. Today's adventure was a real treat and one that we will be talking about for a long time to come! I hope you enjoy the post.
At the Animation Mentor graduation this year the grads made this fantastic "Thank You" video that really touched everyone.
It's things like these that make AM so completely special to us. This comes 100% from the heart and it shows and that's why it hits us so hard. Thanks to GC7 and GC8 for your awesome energy, talent and enthusiasm!
Thanks for Carlos Baena for hosting this video from his site:
Okay, so I talked to a few other AMers who were staying at the same hotel and we all had the same "56k" slow internet experience. Eeek! Sorry the updates were not as often and vivid with photos as I would have liked. I thought I lost my camera at the Birds of a Feather event, but Michael Dauz grabbed it. Sweet. I'll pick it up on Monday so, for now, no pics.
I just got back home and I'm filled with inspiration and good vibes! I had such a great time with everyone. It was so fun getting to get to know so many of you. There are so many highlights to the whole event.
Animation wise, the Frank and Ollie tribute we hosted was a MASSIVE highlight for me. There were 600+ people who attened (or so they told me) and I think everyone left that event with crazy inspiration!
DISCLAIMER: If you did not attend Siggraphh the below comments may not make sense to you.
MEMORABLE "NON-ANIMATION" MOMENTS: 1. The big group walking "in a straight line" at the Animation Mentor Industry Party. 2. Dancing like maniacs at the Blur party. AMer's know how to dance and have fun! NO DOUBT! 3. Mel's diner at 4am: singing Beatles songs, pancakes, meat earings (ha, ha!, sorry Alexiss) 4. Hanging out at the Sheraton lobby in the wee hours on the couches talking about life with AMers! 5. Eduardo, I will NEVER forget your name! 6. "Teresa, my one and only blogger friend!"
Hopefully this will get the words flowing in the comments section. I'm inspired by all of you and the friendships you share with us and with each other! This week has been a MASSIVE battery recharge!
I had a ton of cool images to upload today but the connection at the hotel is literally 56k. It's so slow I had to kill it after it was taking 15 minutes to upload an image. Eeek! Plus I was out SUPER late and have to take off in 5 minutes for day 3!
Yesterday was awesome. Each year Siggraph gets better and better. Here were some of my highlights:
2. The Animation Mentor Industry party. Several hundred AM students, mentors and guests gathered at the Elevate Lounge for an AWESOME party! We were excited to have tons of recruiters and the most mentors in one place at one time that I can ever remember! There was an awesome energy going on and the only bad thing is that it ended too early. 12:30 they were kicking us out and we were all ready to dance all night long. :( No worries. It was so great seeing some of the first ever students at Animation Mentor and we had the AM DreamWorks posse there, too. It's so exciting to see how many people are professionals now. It's like seeing your babies grow up. :)
Lots more but I've got to run! I'll try to get some photos in here later. I'll definitely repost pictures when I return home. Let Day 3 officially begin!
[This picture shows some of the schools gathered in a room to review each others top student work at DreamWorks Animation Studios in Glendale]
I flew in to Los Angeles last night. I started the day bright and early at DreamWorks Animation Studios in Glendale. I had never been there before. It is absolutely a gorgeous place to work!
Animation Mentor was amongst about 15 – 20 other schools for the DreamWorks educators symposium. The highlight was when they showed 2 minutes of each schools work for 2008. I had never seen our student’s work juxtaposed against all the other top art and animation schools and I must say I was pleasantly surprised at how well our work stood out. It hit me hard that we are doing things right and the results definitely show in the work our students are doing. It was a great way to start Siggraph!
There are a few points that I took away about demo reels:
1. Demo Reels are too long. 2 minutes maximum is plenty. They don't want to see EVERYTHING you've ever done. They only want to see the best and 2 minutes is more than plenty as any more than this and it just starts to drag.
2. Students need to specialize more. At Animation Mentor we've known this for a long time and when we started AM people thought we were crazy. The industry at large, not just the big studios, are requiring more specialization in one or two areas. Don't try to do everything otherwise you will not shine in any one area. If animation is what you want to do then ANIMATE really well and have someone else do the model/rig for you. It was awesome to hear this from theme carried through and supported by ALL of the schools!
3. Simon Otto, animation supervisor at DreamWorks explained he likes to see a maturity in students work. After many questions he explained that maturity meant animation that feels real and sincere. Not gimicky animation like overdone anticipations and characters scratching their heads to show they are thinking. I'm happy to say that at Animation Mentor we strive to teach the mature side of animation. The best way we've found to do this is by having students choose a variety of ideas and work with their mentor to focus it down to the best idea. From there the mentor helps the student really refine it into something special!
I hope this tips are useful for you guys.
Here’s a sneak peek of our booth at Siggraph this year! It rocks! We have an adventure theme going this year. Even though the show is not open yet I was able to sneak onto the floor to snap this picture of our booth! This picture does not do it justice. The Animation Mentor crew are so awesome and have really outdone themselves this year. It’s so cool and we have a lot of cool events happening at the booth this year!
Part of the adventure them is a case displaying “artifacts.” Among the artifacts is a “Mummified Tailor!” How cool is that. Our genius Art Director came up with this and it’s so fun. I love seeing the level of quality and attention to detail that goes in to every little thing that is in the booth. There’s tons of “Easter Eggs” to see in the booth!
After I got to check out the booth I had to rush over to our hotel where the Animation Mentor crew got together for a staff dinner to gear up for the next few days of insanity. I love our team and everyone is pumped and rarin’ to have fun! It’s always nice to get out of the office and simply have fun with the team.
I snapped this candid moment of the crew in mid-joke! I love the energy of the team and am so completely pumped for the next few days as I know we’re all going to have a blast. More to come, soon! Enjoy and I hope to see some of you at Siggraph soon!
Tomorrow we unveil the new Summer Student Showcase reel which will come online next Monday for the world to see!!!
4th Graduation at Animation Mentor a HUGE Success!
This year we held the graduation outside at a new location in Berkeley. It was fantastic! The weather was great and the energy was SUPER high. The graduates were bubbling with enthusiasm and it kept the mood on the highest note!
There are so many details that go into an event like this and I have to thank Molly our super NINJA event coordinator for making this one of the most memorable graduations we've done at Animation Mentor yet! And leading the fantastic team of Animation Mentor staff! This was one of the coolest yet!
Chris Derochie and Luci Napier hang out backstage with one of the Mentor Choice awards! This year we had a host of mentors present awards and it was so great! It was super touching for them to see their students glowing eyes and enthusiasm. They all explained it was a tremendous experience for them too as it really made the impact of what they are doing as mentors so much more powerful to them! COOL!
Glen McIntosh was our special guest speaker and he did an excellent job inparting his words of wisdom to the 7th and 8th graduating classes of Animation Mentor! Thanks Glen!
We took all the mentors to lunch before the graduation which was great to chill out a bit and exchange stories about their experiences at Animation Mentor as well as some cool inside scoop on what's going on in the CG world!
Here's a snap of Shawn, Carlos and I at the graduation event! WOO HOO, it was so great, we all spoke from the heart and it made the experience one of the most memorable graduations for me yet.
At the end it was so much fun as the graduates put together a video of them all saying, "Thank you" to us in their own words and different languages. It was so touching. Shawn, Carlos and I thought we'd get through a graduation without shedding tears, but when this went on it really hit us again at how many lives this place changes and even though the 3 of us came up with the idea and got it rolling, we owe the success all the many people who make it so great; The Staff, them Mentors and the Students. Honestly, I'm in awe of what we are doing here and I'm proud to be a part of it!
It was awesome hanging out with the graduates and getting to meet everyone and hear their fanstic stories of the journey they've been on to get to this point. Meeting the spouses, boyfriends, girlfriends and families is so outstanding. I feel a close connection to each one of our graduates in so many ways. I told many of them that these events are equally as much for us as they are for them. It keeps up in check on what we're doing and where we're going!
After the graduation we had dinner with Robin Linn from Sony Imageworks. It was great! We were able to finalize some of the details of a fantastic addition to Animation Mentor with Sony IPAX which we will be announcing at Siggraph. I met Robin Linn in Siggraph about four years ago which was my introduction to the cool things they have been doing at Sony and in particular with IPAX. Robin has been a big instigator in fostering the relationship between Animation Mentor and Sony and we're excited to be growing that relationship to the next level! WOO HOO!!!!
See you guys at Siggraph soon! I'm off to the airport now. Expect daily updates with images. This time I'm bringing my battery recharger so I don't have an excuse. :)
Things have been non-stop busy for me this year. It's been amazing, all sorts of new things happening at Animation Mentor and I'm so proud of them all. We've been doing a lot of foundational work internally. We have many cool things planned and had some minor set backs as well (Q&A 2.5/3.0). Sorry about that stuff.
We lost the lead engineer on the Q&A project to Adobe. Damn! That's one of the trade offs for living in the Bay Area; there are so many great companies to work for it's pretty difficult to find engineering talent as they have plenty of choices, and the market is quite hot for Engineers these days. The good thing is that we will get back to the project, but the timing is still to be determined. I just do not feel comfortable putting something out into the world that we can not fully support 100%. That is critical to me and to the students/mentors as well.
And while I'm at it I might as well add a shameless plug: If you know anyone who you think might be a good fit to our engineering team please let me know. Our job description is located here.
As far as new announcements go, I've learned it's better to be quiet about new things we have planned than to announce them way ahead of time. I think I like a balance between Apples "unveiling" of new products and Google's "beta tests" that last for quite a long time on products that are pretty darn solid. This balance is a new one I'm adopting so you may notice I'm a bit more "tight lipped" these days about "future plans" but I will say that 2008 has a lot of great things happening and I'm excited to announce them when the timing is right!
This is just a mini "whasss up" update.
Here's a wide angle picture of the first official AM staff "ping pong tournament!" Photo courtesy of Carlos Baena (who plays ping pong REALLY well)!
Wow, so we're all moved in to our new home in Emeryville! The move went SUPER smooth. A huge thanks to Dave, Adam, Tony and Stephen who worked so hard on making this such a smooth transition. We literally left on Friday from Parker St. and on Monday we came to the new Office and everything was ready to go! WOW!!!
Today we just had the Animation Mentor logo put up in the entrance and it was fun to watch. We all gathered around and witnessed as it really makes it feel like home.
Check out Michael Dauz in his new digs! If there's one thing the new office is not missing that is color (Thanks Rachel!)! We have lots of color on the walls and in the furniture, too! More photos will come with time as right now the office is a bit bare.
I will say that being under one roof is fantastic. It's so awesome and the energy is so engaging! I thought this week was going to be about settling in but I think it's been one of the most productive weeks for me this year! It's just so inspiring to be there! I'm so proud of the space and I'm happy to know that the staff are equally proud!
The old web development area was called the Brain Cave. The new one does not have a name yet, but I thought this was too cool of a photo opportunity to pass up! Hee hee. Note the Karate head band. Ninja in training? Actually Mike is a full fledged ninja, he's just dressing down. :)
