Friday, January 27, 2012

Another great place to study animation - the University of Kent at Canterbury

I have been doing some teaching lately at the University of Kent at Canterbury, where my old friend David Byers-Brown runs an excellent Msc. in Computer Animation, a course which he built from scratch. It's a one year graduate course on a 1960s campus a short cab ride out of beautiful medieval Canterbury, where David's students are producing some amazingly sophisticated work. David and I worked together many years ago on The Thief and The Cobbler; he animated lots of excellent shots of Zig Zag the Grand Vizier, and later went to work for ILM where he seems to have mastered most of the elements of digital film-making. His students are not just trained to be animators but rather emerge with all-round skills in Maya - an excellent training for work in the visual effects industry in London. You can see their website here - check out in particular the excellent short film "The Raptor Hunter", created and animated by the very talented Dariusz Szczuraszek. - Alex