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?How do I learn about digital animation?? ?Where can I get my hands on that equipment and software to learn this stuff?? These were very popular questions about ten years ago, and hard to answer as well. I remember in my foggy haze of the past, how special digital effects were taking the film business by storm, that they were going to change everything about filmmaking. Avid was becoming the de-facto editing standard pushing aside the analog way of doing things, and digital effects were starting to change how people facilitated effects. But where do you get trained in these new fangled digital effects? The machines and software were far too expensive and obscure for most people to learn for themselves, and not very many colleges and universities carried programs to teach digital art.
During this time, only some fortunate colleges and specific training centers, often run by the software makers themselves like Silicon Studios in Santa Monica, Ca. (run by Alias), taught how to use their CG programs, and usually for a hefty fee to cover their own large overhead costs for high-end equipment. Even books on the software were hard to find if at all available; but they were essentially useless without the UNIX-based hardware and software to run the CG programs with which to learn from the books.
| So, most people learned this craft while on the job at companies who could afford the monolithic systems, some having come up from more traditional art backgrounds. |
What was ultimately left was a vacuum of education in Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) for most people, certainly compared to today?s standards. This vacuity finally began to fill slowly with the emergence of cheaper, more capable computers, and less expensive but more competitive software.
Students began demanding that their schools carry CG courses and little by little schools responded with at least some courses, and a few with graduate and undergraduate programs. With equipment and software costs still reasonably high, CG education was still out of the reach of most.
But when the industry fully converted to supporting popular Windows and Mac OS platforms for CGI to run on everyday home computers, the floodgates for CG education opened, and opened wide. Once everything was ported to more accessible operating systems that everyone already had running at home on their $2,000 computers, the educational market responded quickly by offering more training options with broader collegiate programs and more independent training centers, as well as the all important at-home materials like tutorials and books. This also empowered independent schools and training centers to open up their programs more to the general public and to outfit their schools with bigger and better labs.
Educational licenses brought the cost of software within reach for most schools, even start-ups, and courses in CG from modeling to animation where quickly offered to anyone with the desire and from several hundred to a couple thousand bucks. It soon became evident that you couldn?t have enough independent schools teaching CG as people began flocking to the industry, wide eyed and bushy tailed.
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