A few good mentors.(future of personal online mentors )(Editorial)

Last spring, the editors received a rather cryptic e-mail from an animator at a major studio about a "side project" that he and a few of his friends were working on. When we checked it out, we learned that the group was planning to launch an animation school with a couple of novel twists. Rather than following the typical instructor-in-the-classroom model, the school would be online and available to anyone, anytime, anywhere. And instead of providing boilerplate responses, as is often the case with any sort of online services and support, a staff of professional animators would offer personal, video-based, one-on-one mentoring.

Intrigued with the concept of personal online mentors in an age of impersonal electronic communication, we invited the three founding members of the group to put on a Q&A demonstration over the summer at our booth on the SIGGRAPH convention floor. We were curious about what issues were on the minds of those in the animation community and how much interest they would have in posing questions to these animators.

What transpired during the demonstration surpassed expectations. Hundreds of attendees stood for hours at the booth querying the trio of self-proclaimed "animation mentors"--Shawn Kelly of ILM, Bobby Beck of Pixar, and independent artist Carlos Baena--with questions ranging from the simplistic to the sublime.

The session, in fact, was similar to an experience two of the artists shared years earlier when teaching an animation course in a traditional university program. Kelly, who had been the instructor for a couple of semesters, invited Beck to deliver a guest lecture to his class. During what many of the students would later say was one of the most inspirational nights of their education, the instructors let the class run over a couple of ...