I have been invited to facilitate the final-year Media Design and Technology Diploma students at the Bramley Campus of Damelin’s School of Media and Design Technology this year. Some comments from my 2005 students at the Centurion campus here.
The set menu for the year ahead in this course includes:
Web Animation and Interactive Design (2nd year) [Macromedia Studio]
Fundamentals of web animation
Create animation for the Internet
Basic principles of actionscript in Macromedia Flash
Basic principles of Flash animation
Importing animation generated in other software applications and adapting for the Internet
Flash interactivity
Developing animation from a brief through the conceptual stages to production in Flash
Industry practise in Internet animation
Developing a basic interactive CD ROM
Production Design Fundamentals (2nd year)
Fundamentals of production design
Applying animation to create a considered computer-generated design for broadcast
Rendering an animation to be imported into a compositing package
Developing a design for broadcast from a brief through conceptual stages to production
Integrating traditional design skills with relevant software applications
Introduction to 3D Animation (2nd year) [Discreet 3D Studio Max]
Principles of modelling (nurbs, polygons and sub-divisions)
Basic principles of 3D animation
Basic principles of texturing
Basic principles of lighting
Basic principles of dynamics
Developing an animation from a brief through the conceptual stages and producing it using a 3D animation package
Introduction to Compositing and Visual Effects
(2nd year) [Discreet Combustion, maybe some Adobe Premiere]
Creating considered broadcast footage
Principles of primary and secondary animation in Combustion
Principles of chroma key
Principles of masking
Principles of colour correction
Principles of particle effects
Adapting animation for broadcast
Industry practise in the field of compositing inVFX
Which I still think looks pretty solid as a foundation, but the really interesting stuff is of-course everything that lies just behind the formal syllabus of the course.
It will be interesting.