Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/4522
November 2009 41 mators in the big studios, and I hoped to pick their brains and learn animation from their perspective," he says. So the new stu- dent moved back to Barcelona to continue his education, and turned down job off ers in Spain to concentrate on his studies. Enrolling at Animation Mentor also meant a return to the basics, something Liobera was looking forward to. "Up to this point, I had only made things move, but I knew I needed to stop and learn about animation from the ground up, which is something I knew I had to do if I wanted to improve my skills" he adds. Liobera describes the 18 months at Ani- mation Mentor as "amazing." "I learned a lot. Nah, more than that. I learned tons. From the get-go, it was the best experience. It was so much more than I had dreamed it would be." e student/professional continues: "On one hand, there were the weekly video lec- tures made by professional animators talk- ing about everything, from the most gener- al animation principles to the most detailed thoughts about hand posing and blinks. I remember sitting up with a notebook in front of my computer, taking as many notes as I could of every lecture. ere was so much information to absorb." According to Liobera, the assignments were well thought out. In Class 1, Ani- mation Basics, the fi rst assignments were about making bouncing balls and learning the principles of overlap and squash-and- stretch. en, little by little, the students were given more complex characters—a ball with a tail, a ball with two legs, then a character with no arms, and so forth. " is structure approach was very cool because you never felt the learning curve was too steep. Everything was achievable, and, High�Performance CameraTracking Use SynthEyes for animated critter insertion,»xing shaky shots, virtual set extensions, making 3D movies, architectural previews, accident reconstruction, virtual product placement, face and body capture, and more. 32-bitonly�$399 Windows-32�/Windows-64�/�OSX-32/OS�X-64 See the website for details of the latest version! Over the years, Liobera grew his art skills. The computer science classes helped him with MEL scripting, while the animation classes at IDEP provided a solid understanding of CGI. At Animation Mentor, he refi ned those skills, creating this scene for an assignment. Education