Charlie Custer

Short version of this wall of text: It’s good, do it.

A very long version follows. I’m not under the impression that most people would want to read all this, but I would have liked to see a very thorough review before signing up, so here one is.

My background and how I came to the course

It may be helpful first to explain my background. I fell backwards into motion graphics more or less by accident. When the media company I work for wanted to start experimenting with social video, I was a natural choice, having previously made a feature-length documentary film. Our social videos mostly used existing video assets, like clips from tech product promo videos, but we needed to add titles, and I got increasingly interested in making them attractive and interesting, which lead me to After Effects.

Doing things in AE became an increasingly large part of my job, mostly because I wanted that to be the case, and like many people I was just flying by the seat of my pants. By late 2017, I was making fully original animated videos 1-3 minutes in length in AE, just from what I’d taught myself and copied from Youtube tutorials. But I knew that I wasn’t very good, and after deciding to go all-in on mograph as a career, I came across School of Motion and decided the Animation Bootcamp might be a good way to help me pick up up all the things I’d missed by teaching myself through bits and pieces of random tutorials and trial and error.

As it turns out, I was right.

Animation, not Effects

The first thing to understand about Animation Bootcamp is that it’s not an After Effects class. At least, that’s not the focus. You will use After Effects constantly, of course, and it’s what all but one of the lessons is taught with, but the point of the class is to make you an animation master, not an AE master. In fact, you’ll make precious little use of AE’s effects in the course. The vast majority of your work is going to be with those old standbys: position, scale, and rotation. Sure, you’ll get some trim paths, some mattes, some expression rigs, and other fun stuff, but if you’re looking for a class to master every setting you can tweak in Turbulent Displace, this ain’t that. Which is a good thing.

The class is focused more on learning about and practicing fundamental animation principles like overshoot, follow-through, squash-and-stretch, realistic drops and bounces, etc., and then clue you in to more advanced stuff like reinforcing movements with secondary animations, perfecting your eye trace, etc.

I went into the class knowing the basics about overshoots and even a little squash and stretch, but I didn’t really know how to apply it well. I certainly didn’t feel comfortable messing too much with the value graph or the speed graph which, as it turns out, is where the key to great-looking animation actually lies. School of Motion forced me to get intimately familiar with them, and I now jump in and work with my curves for basically every keyframe of every animation I make. This, when combined with my new knowledge and practice applying animation principles has really made my motion better, to the extent that it’s ruined my reel, because I now don’t want to put anything from before the class in there, but I don’t have enough new work to really fill it out yet.

…but kind of AE

That said, although it’s not intended as an AE class, I still got a ton of software know-how out of it too. You won’t be surprised to learn that in my hodgepodge of Youtube tutorials and trial-and-error animating, I had missed out on a lot of good basic practices, organizational strategies, and I didn’t even know a bunch of incredibly useful keyboard shortcuts. As lessons are taught, you also get a lot of this sort of thing, which is really helpful.

I also learned some cool expressions (and now I really want School of Motion to do a full expressions class, because although challenging they’re also very cool. Joey plz?).

Hooray for structure

Honestly, the most pleasant surprise for me was how thoughtfully the course is structured. If you’re reading this review, you’ve probably already done enough research to know that this is not just a series of video tutorials. There are podcasts, supplementary lessons, resource PDFs, TA and student feedback, a weekly project review show. But what surprised me was just how well-thought-out and structured all of that content was.

For example, there’s a podcast on “The Dip” (this concept) that came right when I was feeling that “dip” demotivation, and it kicked me right in the ass and kept me psyched to keep going in the course.

Speaking as a former teacher, I was really impressed by that (and the way a lot of the other content is structured, too). It’s clear that a lot of time went into figuring out a logical flow for the lessons, and considering not only student skill acquisition but also how they’re likely to be feeling at each stage of the class. It’s clear the course is structured to help you stick with it and make it to the end, and it does a pretty good job. That’s impressive, and it also made me feel like I’d really gotten my money’s worth with a genuine curriculum, not just a series of increasingly complex Youtube tutorials.

Day to day life in the class

One of my anxieties about signing up for the class was whether I’d have time for it. I have a wife and a young child, and no shortage of mograph work that needs to get done every day to keep food on the table. And I’m not going to lie, it was a struggle some days after a full day of animating work stuff to then sit down at 9 PM and start animating class stuff. But I did it, and it wasn’t that bad.

I decided early on that I wanted to try to get assignments in more or less on time, both so that my work might appear in the video “This Week in Bootcamp” reviews (it did, several times), and so that I didn’t fall behind. This meant that admittedly I wasn’t giving each assignment my absolute all. I put myself on a time limit for most of the assignments, on the theory that the goal here was to get some practice applying these concepts and techniques, not create finished pieces for my reel.

In a typical week, here’s what you’ll need to go through:

• Two main lessons, each roughly an hour long, on the two main topics of the week
• Supplementary materials (short PDF summaries)
• This Week in Bootcamp, the weekly show where TAs and Joey look at student projects and offer critique. This can be lengthy, up to 2 hours of video if you watch every TA’s video (which I recommend).
• Podcasts and/or bonus lessons, typically two per week, ranging from probably 45 mins to 2 hours of total content on average
• The homework assignments. One per lesson (so, two per week). These could really take as much or as little time as you’d like. I doubt I spent less than three hours on any assignment, but some are definitely more time consuming than others, and obviously the more you want to get it perfect and the more you add, the longer it’ll take.
• Time spent critiquing and discussing with other students in the Facebook group. Varies, but it’s worth dedicating some time to this every day (maybe just 5 or 10 minutes).

For me, a typical week often went like this:

Monday: Watch lesson 1
Tuesday: Listen to podcast 1, do homework from lesson 1
Wednesday: Watch This Week in Bootcamp
Thursday: Watch lesson 2
Weekend: Do homework from lesson 2, listen to podcast, watch extra episodes, etc.

I typically did this in the evenings after regular work was done and my daughter was asleep, which did mean that I was sometimes pretty burned out before even starting the homework, but I know that would be likely coming into the class, and there’s really no way to avoid it. There’s a lot to learn and practice, so if you’ve got a full-time job and family, know that it’s definitely doable, but you are gonna need to make that time, probably at the expense of some other stuff in your life.

Is it worth it?

Short answer: yup.

Longer answer: Like any kind of educational product, to some extent you’re going to get out of it what you put in. But if you seriously engage with the class and do the stuff you’re asked to do, it’s hard to imagine you wouldn’t get a lot out of it unless you’ve been in the industry for years and already know and use all the material the class covers.

I can say that for me, subjectively, I think it improved my work a ton. Today alone, I improved the “feel” of one client project significantly by adding some overshoots, anticipation, reinforced movement, and adjusting some layers to improve the eye trace, and in another client project I used a modified version of an expression we learned in class to get something I wanted set up in a rig.

I can also say that I felt it was valuable enough that I’ll be taking more School of Motion classes. In fact, Design Bootcamp, Character Animation, Cinema 4D Basecamp, and Explainer Camp are all in my future (now if I could just figure out how to afford them all!)

If you’d like a slightly more objective measure, I took notes while taking the class. I didn’t write down every point that was covered (not even close); I only noted things I thought were particularly important to me and my work personally as I watched lessons, This Week in Bootcamps, etc. At the end of the class, I was left with a 10 page google doc of notes (in Arial, size 11 font). And again, that’s not representative of the class content, that’s just the content I thought was important enough/new enough to me that I felt the need to write it down (even though I still have access to the video lessons, PDFs, etc.).

(And that’s not even including podcasts, which I didn’t take notes on because I typically listened to them while doing other things, like mowing the lawn or driving somewhere.)

My advice for getting the best out of it

If you’re taking the plunge, I think there are a couple things worth mentioning:

• Engage with the Facebook group and critique. It’s a useful resource for getting questions answered, for developing your eye, and for discovering cool resources you might not know about.
• Don’t use scripts in the class unless specifically asked to (there are a few assignments that use DecomposeText and Duik, which are both free). Obviously you could, but it’s worth learning to do everything by hand so in the future when your script’s motion isn’t looking quite right, you can fix it yourself by hand.
• Try to keep up with the lessons. YMMV with this one, but a lot of people fall behind. I think you’re better off trying to keep up, even if that means you’re not making a masterpiece on each assignment. This is just a personal opinion, but the point of each assignment is to force you to practice particular techniques, not necessarily to produce something for your reel (and to be honest, I’d feel a bit weird putting homework in my showreel, since a client watching it may have seen the same designs in other reels before). And if you get your assignments in on time, especially later in the course, you’ve got a great chance of being featured on This Week in Bootcamp, which means in addition to getting TA comments on your assignment (which you get for every assignment) you’ll also get to see them actually talk about it on video, which can be helpful.
• Watch every TA’s This Week in Bootcamp segment, not just yours. This can make for a lot of viewing, but there are a couple key things in my notes that I got from other TAs reviewing student work on TWIB. You never know what might be said that could help you.
• Pump up the video speed. I watched almost every video on 1.5x or even 2x speed. You’ll want to slow it down every now and then to review things, to see what a movement looks like in real time, etc., but in terms of what’s being said, you should be able to follow it somewhat easily even at 2x speed, and watching the videos in 2x speed gives you more time to do other stuff like work on the assignments, review notes, or be a person.

That’s it! Happy bootcamping, folks.