The Animation Course - from a Parent Educator's Perspective

The Animation Course - from a Parent Educator's Perspective

When I first learned about The Animation Course, I admit I was a little confused. How could a class be taught to such a wide age range, eleven-year-olds to seventeen-year-olds, and still be effective? I have worked in a classroom with both ages, (albeit briefly), and if you don't already know, let me assure you that the content and methods for teaching those respective ages is very different! I was perplexed about what kind of lesson could be useful and effective for such a wide age range.

After watching my seventeen-year-old daughter progress through the first level of The Animation Course, I began to understand how this worked so well.

A Principal Approach

Both my daughter and I were unfamiliar with the basic principles behind animation. We had watched a lot of animation on the screen together over the years, without having any understanding of the techniques being used to transform interconnected lines on a flat screen into a living, moving 3D image in our minds. It's a bit like learning about the rules of perspective in art and then looking at a painting and seeing how that technique was employed. Like in any kind of 3D art medium, there are techniques that make this illusion convincing. There's a reason Van Gogh's Starry Night looks so high and grand and far away; Van Gogh used specific techniques of perspective to create that impression on the canvas, but until you know the technique, you only feel the effect of it. While no one may hang your work in an art gallery, you can use the same techniques with a pencil and scrap paper to produce the effect of distance.

So too with animation. While my daughter is not animating a Disney movie, she now can both understand and employ some of the simpler techniques used by animators to create the illusion of movement. And because animation itself can be as simple as a black and white drawing, or as complicated as a blockbuster movie, the students are able to put these techniques into practice at a level that suits their maturity and experience.

Making the Grade

The grading system in the Animation Course couldn't be simpler. If the assignment is completed satisfactorily, the student receives an A minus. If they do outstanding work, they might get something higher. Or they might fail to submit work at all. Grades are typically used by both student and parent to know if a student is mastering the material, and it serves this baseline purpose. But the feedback from the individual instructor is where the real gold of this program lies. By offering specific, one-on-one feedback, the student is given targeted advice that allows them to improve and directs them to the specific problems they might have in their work. This is the kind of feedback that cannot be transmitted by a letter grade. My daughter found it quite motivating to be given specific details that would improve her work, and then have her instructor acknowledge where she had improved the following week. Even though the feedback was fairly brief and just an impersonal video, it was a weekly acknowledgement of where she had succeeded. Her animation homework visibly improved as a result of the feedback she received.

Making Progress

The final aspect of The Animation Course instruction that really impressed me was the incremental nature of the instruction being given. The lessons were well organized in a way that allowed the students to build on the previous lesson. In this way, the feedback my daughter received from her grader allowed her to 'fix' those mistakes in her next assignment. She was able to continue practicing skills taught in the first lessons in each assignment, while simultaneously adding new ones. This is exactly how a good class should be structured and provides the scaffolding a student needs to develop at their own pace. After completing the first level of The Animation Course, my daughter is not only excited to continue with level two but is working on sketches for animating a music video, just for the fun of doing so. The techniques she learned through The Animation Course were taught thoroughly enough that she is now able to put them into practice on her own, which is exactly what a good class is all about.