Having launched just one year ago, fxphd is about to start a new term. fxphd is the sister site of fxguide providing professional training for artists who want to lift their careers to the next level. Classes this term include character design/drawing, flame, Matte painting, Maya, Max, toxik AE , Photoshop – 15 different classes in total.
With the one year anniversary this week, and the start of the new term next week, we figured we would look back over the past year and look forward to the new classes.
Shoots:
One key aspect of fxphd is the ability to have high resolution material provided that you can complete and put on your own show reel. Nothing sells your abilities like your reel, but having high quality source material that is free of copyright problems is hard to find. fxphd started a year ago with a one day 35mm shoot, and over the last year it has shot on 16mm, Genesis HD, 35mm, Digital stop motion as well as generated 3D elements. This term the production slate has extended to three shoots, including a large three day shoot with the Viper camera – involving Zombies! The script involves complex camera moves, guns, highly polished special effects makeup, explosions and stunts – this will be shot later in April. This is just one of three shoots, the others involve stunts and also studio television style work.
Challenges
Each term students, or “Post Grads” are given challenges and these are now being done with detailed video ‘vfx supervisor’ reviews and notes, so each student can see how their work can be improved and just how to push their shots to better show their individual talents.
The first Challenge starts in next week and involves poking out an eye!
Courses
This term the following courses are on offer
1. Drawing Character Design: How to draw and design characters from sketches to turntable
2. Roto and Paint prep: How to work in the feature film roto department
3. Matte painting Production techniques for Matte painting both 2D and 2.5 D matte paintings
4. Flame Introduction:A 100 level introduction to flame
5. Flame Advanced Expressions:An advanced expression in flame course
6. Max: Mental Ray Rendering :How to get the best out of Mental Ray
7. Maya: Rigid Body Modeling and animation: Modeling, animation and rendering of rigid body objects
8. After Effects Design: Design and related issues in After Effects including a preview of AE CS3
9. Max for compositors: Introduction to 3ds Max to give compositors the tools to build simple scenes you might need everyday.
10. Introduction to Toxik First introduction to toxik
11. Introduction to Toxik II part 2 of this introduction to toxik
12. Intermediate Final Cut Pro II FCP covering plugins, EDLs and Digital Camera workflows
13. Shake Introduction: An introduction to Apple’s Shake
14. Shake intermediate: An intermediate Shake course
15. Photoshop CS3 How to get the most out of the new CS3 Photoshop, and Photoshop Extended.
16. Background Fundamentals: A theory course covering approaches to different types of everyday visual effects problems.
For more details including podcasts with the various Profs – see fxphd.com
How it works
Enrollment is $300 a term and for this everyone gets one mandatory class called Background Fundamentals coupled with up to 3 other courses of the individuals own choice. Additional courses can be bought for those who are super keen. Classes are geared to different levels – either 100, 200 or 300 – with a few rare 400 courses.
Each course runs over 12 weeks including a mid term break – for a total of 10 classes per course. Each class is about 30 – 40 mins long and includes sample files, example clips and high resolution material you can use on your reel if you wish.
fxphd is the only online training center in the world that is both a registered online Autodesk and Authorized Apple training center.
Learn more
Go to the fxphd web site and watch the video on the right hand side
Plus you can hear a bit more about fxphd during our Daily NAB fxguide podcasts live from NAB.
