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The DAVE School sees LightWave from a unique virtual viewpoint. The visual effects school, located within the rumble and roar of roller coasters at Universal Studios Florida in Orlando, offers a year long course for aspiring computer artists. The LightWave reputation - that one LightWave artist can do it all - is a major reason that this tool is the preferred 3D software taught at the school. The goal is to graduate contenders for any CG artist position anywhere. So not only can graduates make their own film - from start to finish - but they know how to work on a team in all positions along the pipeline. Founder of the Dave School, Jeff Scheetz, explained. "LightWave is more than just software; it's the common denominator for an incredible group of artists who started doing things nobody thought could be done with off-the-shelf software. At the DAVE School, we are trying to promote that spirit, and fuse it with new ideas and the latest technology. The added features of LightWave v9 are incredible, yet our community still did spectacular work with LightWave 3.0." Scheetz, himself a LightWave alum, spent years toiling in the CG trenches at Foundation Imaging in California. "When I used to hire for the studio, I was constantly frustrated by the lack of qualified applicants," he said explaining the genesis of the school. "I saw common mistakes in their work. I realized that this is a very new field and nobody had attempted to develop an intensive curriculum based on industry experience and expectation." The school's year-long curriculum is divided into quarters, or blocks. The first three months is basic CG; the second block focuses on character, where students learn how to model, rig, and animate. The third block concentrates on compositing. During the final three months, the class project is to produce a short animated or live action movie. Recent titles include NASA Seals, Psycho Pump, Specidemons, X-Men: Dark Tide, and Batman: New Times, (with Adam West as the voice of Batman). William Vaughan - DAVE teacher, animator and artist extraordinaire - explained, "One of the big reasons that we teach LightWave here is because we are trying to get somebody up to speed within a year to be production ready." "Most of our students have never worked on a computer, and never worked with 3D. They like movies, they like games, and they want a career in it," said Vaughan. "We're able to take students that have never made a movie before, and in the final two and a half months, produce an animated short that is from six to thirteen minutes. We definitely couldn't do that with any other piece of software." "Because LightWave is so easy to pick up, students don't have to choose between CG skills. They go through all of the classes. That's why places like Rhythm & Hues' the boX use LightWave. They have a small team and they crank out gorgeous commercials and game trailers. You'd think they used a really big crew." To reinforce the on-the-job training scenario supervised by industry veterans like Ron Thornton, Lee Stringer and Vaughan, the school offers the Hollywood accoutrements that make a production possible: prop room, green screen, motion capture system, editing bays and sound stage. "We have everything you need to make your own movie here," said Vaughan, showing off the facilities. As an example of how the DAVE School structures these final projects, Vaughan described the movie the graduating class was just wrapping up. Teddy Scares is an animated short based on a series of teddy bears that Freddy Krueger might have played with when he was a child. "I became friends with the folks at Applehead Factory," said Vaughan about the makers of the bears. "I talked them into letting us use their license. We treat them as an actual client. They have to approve things. The characters actually went through several revisions before the client was 100% happy with them." As they often do for these projects, Vaughan was able to recruit celebrity voices that are strangely apropos to their characters. Rita Mortis, the boss, is played by Linda Blair. Clive Barker lends his voice to Edwin Morose, the poet. And Rick Baker is the cockroach wrangling, Hester Golem. The client likes the results so much that they are planning to ship the DVD of the animated short with their next series of Teddy Scares toys. "Everybody had to do a little bit of everything," Vaughan explained. "Students had to build the whole thing in animatic form; they had to build proxy models and sets, working their way through the schedule." "With that experience, our students have gone off to work at Softimage houses, Maya houses, Max houses. They are ready to work in any production environment. And they can pick up other software if they need to." "We hear a lot of positive things from the studios, too," Vaughan said. "Like Wet Cement hired several of our guys at once and they hired two people from other schools. They said, 'Right now, we are in Day Two and DAVE School guys are already doing shots, and the other two will be in training for awhile just to get into production.'" Deborah Gates, who co-leads the boX at Rhythm & Hues, concurred, "Because they are so production oriented at the DAVE School, they understand working together. They get responsibility. They know that the job delivers and there's no 'ifs', 'ands' or 'buts' about it, which, in general, people who are just fresh out of school haven't clicked to." "That's the main reason that I came here," agreed Vaughan. "I really enjoy teaching, but I was never interested in any other schools I visited because they really weren't teaching what needed to be taught. They were teaching how to use the software, but that's a small part of it. When I saw the DAVE School, I said, 'O.K. I'm sold.' It feels like a production studio and that's the whole goal."
M.R. Dinkins & Dick De Jong have covered the computer arts for over ten years. They reside in Austin, Texas. |
