Hackberry Hollow

Big news folks. The Animation Academy is starting their online program next week on Wednesday the 8th! It’s going live! Woo! (For those that haven’t been following this blog, or it’s been so long that you’ve forgotten, we’ve been working on the online software for the school for the past several months.)

There’s more info about the school and enrollment after the jump, but here’s the summary:

The reason why Hackberry Hollow is going to rock is because the training program at The Animation Academy rocks. Without it I couldn’t create good character designs.

Just a little bit of history. I started taking classes at The Animation Academy as a result of working on Hackberry Hollow. At the beginning of this project when I initially attempted character designs, I couldn’t quite get anything that was appealing. All I really knew how to draw was humans, and when I tried to do something cartoony or stylized with non-human anatomy, I couldn’t get anything that matched what I was envisioning in my head. And it didn’t help that there was almost no prior artwork that we could reference as “the style” of characters that we wanted. So for a while any design work that involved characters was paralyzing.

From experience, when there’s a task that becomes paralyzing (meaning I don’t want to do it because all my attempts are crappy and don’t want to work out of fear of failure) it means that I haven’t researched enough. That’s why I do most of my research at the very beginning of everything I do. But after months and months and months (I think it went on for a year actually) of going through online resources, books, videos, and looking into other art schools, nothing seemed to give me the answers I needed. I wasn’t learning the principles and elements of appealing character design.

That was until I started taking classes at The Animation Academy, which I found out about through my involvement at Animation Nation (long story, remind me later). After my first session of class my mind was blown. I could tell everything was going to start making a lot of sense over the next 6 weeks. And it did. Adam and Shane can attest to this; I was going nuts, going on and on about all the cool stuff I learned.

It’s been almost two years, and I’ve been at The Animation Academy ever since.

So consider that my testimonial. Their training program absolutely positively totally rocks, and is the reason why Hackberry Hollow is going to rock too.

The first class that will be offered is their core class, Character Design 1. The character design classes are being taught live by the man himself, Charles Zembillas (Crash Bandicott, Spyro the Dragon, Jak and Daxter).

If you have the opportunity, I strongly recommend taking their character design classes. The class is 7 weeks long. Every week there’s a live session held on Wednesdays at 5PM Pacific and 10PM Pacific to accommodate different work schedules and timezones.

There’s a thread about it at Animation Nation here.

Here’s their main site (most of the info is for their Burbank location): http://theanimationacademy.com/

And this is the site for their online program: http://online.theanimationacademy.com/

Since Adam and I will be developing and helping out with the technical side of the school, you’ll undoubtedly see us a lot after you enroll. So we hope to see you there!