I, too, am writing a review of VFS’s classical animation course. My name is Tobin, and I was a classmate (and hopefully still am a friend) of Temris’. I found her review reasonably even-handed, as far as it goes. But there is a major difference. I am not trying to get work in the Pacific northwest region. I was also not one of the teacher’s favorites, as she was (pretty deservedly). So I will not white-wash my experiences in the program.
The people from the admissions board who review your portfolio have no idea what they’re looking at.
The Portfolio Reviews
First of all, let me clarify a few things. As was explained to us fairly early on by an instructor, the people from the admissions board who review your portfolio have no idea what they’re looking at. They know a lot about assessing your credit rating, but don’t know or care anything about your aptitude. I was a pretty mediocre draftsman when I enrolled, but I was far from the worst.
The people who do the phone interviews blatantly lie to you. They’ll tell you how easy it is for international students to get work in Vancouver, or anything you want to hear. What they actually put in print in e-mails, etc, is substantially different. They know better than to create a paper trail.
Also, the paperwork you sign when you enroll, centers completely around your financial obligation. There isn’t the slightest hint of any obligation on the part of VFS to teach you anything. This is one of the wonders of private schools – the teachers have no training as teachers, and the school has no real legal obligations at all. But let’s get to the classes themselves…
Any help and/or instruction we got beyond that depended on putting our name on the dry erase board, and asking for help from the instructor.
The Animation Program
The actual animation classes consisted of a teacher handing out an assignment – three or four badly xeroxed pages, usually out of Preston Blair’s Cartoon Animation. This would be followed by a twenty to thirty minute description of the assignment. No demonstrations, just a general discussion of the type of thing that’s expected. Then we were off… Any help and/or instruction we got beyond that depended on putting our name on the dry erase board, and asking for help from the instructor.
Within about two weeks of getting a new instructor (we had a few) they would choose their favorites. These would usually be the best draftsmen, and the ones who had the most previous training in animation. The main instructor – who I will call Prissy Peter – was the most flagrant in his favoritism. There were about 5 students with whom he would spend an average of twenty to forty minutes. Yes, it got so bad toward the end, I started clocking him. So let’s do some simple arithmetic: 20 students in the class, three hour class time, a maximum of an hour and twenty minutes to deal with the remaining 15 students. You were damn lucky if you could get him to pick up a pencil at all.
In my case, this “instruction” usually consisted of less than five minutes in front of a line tester with him saying – A: “Loosen up!” B: “You’re off model again!” or C: “Volumes! Volumes!” No real instruction at all. Just this extremely nonconstructive criticism. I once asked him how I could loosen up and stay on model at the same time. He basically said that it couldn’t be taught – you either get it or you don’t.
Not long after this encounter, I got the book Animating the Looney Tunes Way. This is a neat little book aimed at beginners. Nothing earth-shattering, but in two pages and a few illustrations, it showed how to animate with simple line of action and volumes. This seems basic to me now, but at the time, I just didn’t know it. I was trying to animate with construction lines, etc. This should have been obvious at a glance to anyone who knew what they were looking at. But for months, no one said a word to me about it!
This might come partially from the fact that for the most part, the teachers didn’t mark the assignments. In fact, we weren’t allowed to know who marked them. They were constantly writing remarks that referred to concepts we hadn’t been taught anything about at all. I would have to either ask another student, or go out to a local book store and buy another book on the subject! There was only one of the four teachers who would give me a straight answer when I asked them something directly.
I was working harder in animation than in any other subject, yet somehow I was making 80s and 90s in the other classes, and seldom breaking 70% in animation. I was staying up until two in the morning night after night, and getting up at six thirty to catch the Skytrain to VFS. Peter refused to even look at the whole thirty seconds of animation because he saw where one of the character’s forearms went a little off model!
In a clean-up class, I asked the teacher to look at an assignment I was working on. He said it looked pretty good. I said I really needed to bring my marks up to pass the class, and he was stunned. He thought I was doing really well in his class. He had looked at every assignment I worked on at least once, and told me I was getting it. Then the marker for that class would give me a grade way down in the low 60s. Who was I supposed to believe? It’s hard to even know whether you’re working in the right direction in an enviroment like that.
I have spent the last two years filling in the gaping holes in my education, and I’ve been doing a pretty good job. I am easily twice the animator than I was when I ‘graduated’ VFS. NOTHING I did there is on my demo reel. It’s all been replaced by newer pieces I do in my spare time.
There seemed to be quite an antagonistic relationship between the instructors and the board of directors.
The line testers themselves are these ancient computers – at least ten years old. They crashed a couple of times during the year. There was usually at least one down, with a hand-lettered “out of order” sign on it. This, as at least two teachers explained at length, was because all the money went upstairs to the 3D department. The classical department was apparently a very low priority to the school, and students’ dating habits were far from the only “drama” going on at the school. There seemed to be quite an antagonistic relationship between the instructors and the board of directors, who just kept wanting to either pull the plug on the program or cram more animation tables into the classrooms to jack up their profit margin a little more.
There were also a few really good instructors, mostly outside of the animation classes themselves. I found myself wishing we spent less time with hand-drawn, and more time with Flash and Toon Boom mainly because those classes were competently taught! We also had damn fine life drawing, composition, and color theory teachers. But these classes just weren’t the back-bone of the course.
The Verdict
The classical animation department at VFS is floundering at the expense of the students. When confronted with the department’s many shortcomings, they affect a pompous attitude instead of addressing the problem. And it isn’t as if there’s no competition. I just got Eric Goldberg’s excellent book, Character Animation Crash Course!, and it taught me at least twice as much about the subject as anyone even tried to teach me at VFS. And it did this at something like 1/1,000th of the price!!
Enrolling at VFS was by far the biggest mistake I’ve ever made.
I am now making less than half of what I was before I enrolled at VFS. I had a car and an apartment, and am now riding the bus, and have to live at home with my father for the first time in twenty years! Enrolling at VFS was by far the biggest mistake I’ve ever made. It has sent me into such a ridiculous amount of debt that I will probably never get it paid off!
I am very serious when I say that in my opinion, the Classical Animation course at VFS is downright fraudulent. Most of the “skills” they’re teaching haven’t been in use for over a decade, and they’re doing a shoddy job of teaching them. The department should either be completely overhauled or just shut completely down.
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Tobin
A Fellow VFS Grad.
Anonymous
If you came to VFS thinking everyone was going to stroke your ego, you were sadly mistaken. Blaming your ineptitude on everyone & everything around you will definitely get you a back seat in any career field you choose.
How about manning up and accepting the fact that you didn’t take advantage of the situation and tools you were given & move on?