You are absolutely right. This is basically a tool that AM is using to sell the dream to future students. AM is a for profit venture… there is nothing wrong with making a profit, but in light of our economic state, selling that dream may do more harm than good. It IS borderline brainwashing propaganda and it is effective. Nobody questions the science behind the survey or the report because AM has become synonymous with the mainstream Animation Industry. The entire Industry reeks of a childlike false sense of hope. The fact of the matter is, many of the small houses that would have hired animators have gone under (Orphanage, Giant Killer Robots to name a couple) and the rest of them hire only for short periods of time during rushes with hardly any prospect of a stable ongoing gig. Job stability is a myth especially in Animation… do not be fooled. AM makes it easy to buy into their brand of education. I bought into it and then I quit. While their model is on the right track, I found that some of my mentors were pretty burnt out and they passed some of that burn out on to their students. A few even openly talked about transitioning OUT of animation… and these were the seemingly "happy and fulfilled" cadres of Animators that are actually employed full time. One always has to look at both sides of an issue. Whenever I tried to speak about this with other students, they simply refused to talk… they had bought into it so much that they could not bear to hear an opposing opinion. This can be dangerous, and I can see how in a few years, once the market is fully saturated with Animators, it may play out against AM unfortunately. Someone really needs to investigate this further not as an expose (because as a business, AM is very legit and by the books), but more as a psychological study on the effects of this "soma" like induced exuberance in the mainstream Animation Industry.

That was I planed to say, but you said it better ;)

Its also funny that most games now days are done using motion capture. Which is abit …different than working with key framed animation. Nothing against mo-cap but the guys at Animatin Mentor dont teach you that cos by heart they dont like that. (At the end of Pixar movies it says that no motion capture was used in the film to point out where they stand in that debate)

Also I presume they asked all the animators who got a job ?

They jump quickly over the fact that if you cant travel the world for jobs, then you are likely to end up in a place were animaiton has to be done so fast and cheap that it ends up as an example by Animation Mentor teachers as how not to do it. (Forgetting the fact that most shitty animation is shitty cos of inhumane deadlines, not because the animator is crap) But of course coming from Pixar you know that.

Im not against Animation Mentor in anyway, but I just would like to give people in here another input than the typical Succes story that we all want to hear. There is another side to the animation industry which are never told, because the people who dont succed finds something else to do and never look back.

½ of my animation class is (20 people) not doing animation at all 5 years after we finished school. The rest is doing something related to animation, a few actually do what Animation Mentor is teaching.

I dont buy the survey that seems to be asking all the succesful animators if they are happy and satisfied, I think the survey is on the edge of being brainwashing propaganda.

If you have something else to fall back on if you fail as an animator then go for it !

T

Thanks.