A fantastic program (though painfully far from Australia) has been started by Dreamworks to train and subsequently scout new animation talent from universities in America and Canada. It’s an excellent idea, as the article points out, since people working in the industry have the best knowledge of what skills are necessary to work in animation (I guess that’s debatable, though they do at least know what it takes to get a job!)- and if they’re teaching the the classroom then, hey presto – graduating animators ready to get animating!
Last year, in an effort to both recruit new animators and make sure colleges had the right kind of curriculum to turn out high-quality professionals, DreamWorks initiated a program in which employees go into classrooms to either teach or critique students’ work, depending on the needs of the school.
Read the USA Today news item here. The current climate (guided by greed and lacking artistic integrity as it is) is brilliant for graduating animators looking for work – the number of studios looking to expand and increase their per-year feature output, as well as the growing presence of animation in advertising and television, is heartening! Still, with programs like the Dreamworks one, and with such amazing institutions out there in the big wide world, the urge to continue learning and be an international student grows stronger still…
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