School of MotionReviews of schoolofmotion.com

Animation Bootcamp (ABC), my 1st and currently only course at School of Motion, was a great experience. The course itself teaches a few of the 12 Principles Animation, those that lend themselves nicely to motion design. By the end of ABC, you will know intimately how to use the Value Graph and Speed Graph (curve editors similar to those in many animation applications). Frankly, now that I'm comfortable with the the curve editor, I can't imaging using After Effects without it. The best part of my experience was interacting with students from all over the world. Doing so helped make the immersive learning feel comfortable knowing others were in the trenches with me. Posting work on the School of Motion intranet allows you feedback from students, and you can offer yours to them as well. Students help other students. It's an interesting and certainly cost-effect alternative to bricks-and-mortar art school. Yours truly is a NSCAD College of Art and Design graduate, so I have that frame of reference for comparison; I absolutely cherish my art school experience, no question. School of Motion, alternatively, offers a streamlined, condensed delivery of information, and is very good value, especially relative to time invested. I've done tutorial-based courses in the past, and they were perfectly good ways to learn. However, because SoM has more of a school "feel" with deadlines for homework assignments, albeit soft deadlines, having that layer of structure helped me stay focused. I've signed up for Character Animation Bootcamp, a ringing endorsement I reckon, A Friendly FYI -- it is possible to complete a SoM course while working full-time (I've seen a few super-human students do it); but, I wouldn't want to have been working while in Animation Bootcamp. If you are working full-time, make sure you're prepared to work long days. In my case, Animation Bootcamp was all keyframes and curve editor work, all manual effort, so I can only suspect a course like, say, Expression Session (coding / scripting) might not necessarily require as much brute-force effort to complete. I've not take Expression Session, ergo this is pure postulation. In closing, if you're familiar with using After Effects and want to create finely-tuned motion that "feels" good without using scripts, plugins, or expressions that do it for you -- ABC is a great course. You will get out of School of Motion what you put in. SoM has my endorsement. Onward! P.s Please forgive spelling faux pas if any.

good school!

I don't have the right words to explain how valuable SOM was for me. I went in skeptical because I took courses on other platforms and felt like I got little to nothing out of them. SOM was completely different. The aspect of community was there, the TA was extremely helpful and a sense of accountability was there, and most importantly the content and quality of the actual teaching was there. I never opened c4d before I took the basecamp course. Obviously with anything that you're new to, it won't be easy and it wasn't but in the best possible way. I was challenged and pushed and I'm better for it.

This was the perfect marriage of education and entertainment. The combination of online lectures, homework, valuable feedback during assignments, podcasts, and real-world video examples all contributed to my joy in learning what I initially felt was an intimidating tool. The curriculum surpassed my expectations and I walked away feeling more confident in my ability to use After Effects. Highly recommended!

Well worth the cost and effort in my experience!!! I've just finished my third SOM course (Photoshop + Illustrator Unleashed, Design Kickstart and After Effects Kickstart) and plan on doing a few more. It can be hard to stay on top of the assignments but once it's over the amount you learn is pretty incredible and all the lessons are there online whenever you want! The projects are as fun as they are challenging, all instructors have been excellent and the TAs are helpful and encouraging. Can't wait to learn more with SOM! :)

I've been an After Effects artist for 10 years now and I've always known if I could write expressions and using code to animate in AE I could achieve more and make my life a lot easier. I've seen some amazing things achieved in AE using expressions and its about time to fully immerse myself in this world. My expressions knowledge before this course was from freely available tutorials online and by looking up forums, I know a handful of useful functions like "wiggle" and I would store expressions written by other AE users in my personal library for whenever I need them but I didn't have the skills to write them from scratch. This course help me to understand how Expressions are structured and broken down. The two instructor Zack and Nol makes learning to code very enjoyable, I love their dynamic. They've shown real world examples on the types of projects that uses expressions extensively. I got great feedback from our TA Shea Lord, and felted encouraged along the way. This is my first school of motion course and it's been a great experience with the teachers, TA and how everything was structured. Valuable skills acquired like, being able to create rigs so I could reuse for my projects. Many repetitive tasks that I had to manually keyframe I could use Expressions to automate, having properties dynamically change to other properties. With the knowledge gained I'm able to look up expressions online and have a better understanding of how it was put together and how I could use certain parts of it for my work. Expressions is a great skill to add to my toolset as an After Effects artist and honestly where the true power lies in After Effects as a software for creative professionals.

As a recent graduate of the Photoshop and Illustrator Unleashed class, I can say it's a great foundation for those starting to work in Motion design. I came to the class because I was wasting a lot of time watching bad tutorials and not really learning what I needed to know. I decided to find a more holistic approach and School of Motion did not disappoint. The Platform is easy to use, the lessons are thoughtful and build on each in a way that makes learning easy. The homework is meaningful, giving you a good chance to apply what you learn. They have a nice balance not overwhelming you with material but still keeping things challenging, and the individual feedback from your TA, gives you a place to ask specific questions and learn some extra tricks - while being cheered on (and let's face it we can all use the encouragement!) The class offered a ton of useful and interesting content in addition to the weekly lessons, and it's all now available to me whenever I need to go back and get a refresher. The only negative I have is that it's clear at times that to course is a little old already, as some of the program interfaces have changed a little, but this is not surprising at the rate these programs change. All in all a great value and extremely useful and I will 100% take more classes from them in the future.

Animation Bootcamp is the first course I have taken at School of Motion and it was excellent. Great content and structure. I am going to be doing another course from them soon.