Collab: The Course

Capturing the Collab experience in a course

Collabs are community-sourced animation productions that have become an annual tradition around here. The combined powers of instructors and students have produced 3 stunning animated shorts over the past 4 years. Collabs are a unique format centered around making something big and awesome while applying one's Blender skills in a production environment.

First of its Kind

For the first time, Collab.003 was exhaustively recorded and documented for the purpose of editing an in-depth course after production finished. Kent has recorded over 50 hours of raw video from livestreams, demonstrations, and unrehearsed tutorials for contributors. Kent also has a list of rehearsal-based tutorials planned for the course curriculum.

While we've taught some of aspects of a production, this will be the first truly in-depth look into a team-based Blender production. A first for the CGC course library and possibly the first in history.

A balance of both

The limitation with BTS, even LOTR special edition, is it amounts to a "peek behind the curtain". No one watches it and learns how to make movies as a result. It's great for glimpsing the complex processes but it's far from instructional.

Tutorializing an entire production pipeline is impossible in the sense of "follow these steps and you will produce the exact same result." A literal step-by-step format cannot anticipate the realtime adaptation and unplanned challenges that are an inevitable (and huge) part of production.

Kent believes an effective course lands in the middle of these two extremes. By editing the livestreams, the course will feature an "in the trenches" context of the production as it really happened: Raw, unrehearsed, and influenced by team situations. Along the way, Kent made a 4-page list of specific techniques relevant to the production that will be rehearsed and recorded as traditional tutorials.

The resulting curriculum will be the best of both worlds: explaining broad pipelines concepts along with the granular.