CGI Training for the Entertainment Film Industry

onsider a snapshot from 1996: A bright young woman has just earned a degree from a prestigious art college, majoring in computer animation (a program her school started four years ago). She is looking for her first job. An excellent student artist, top in her class, she does not know how to program. She is being courted by all the major West Coast studios and has retained an attorney to get her the best possible deal (among other things, a starting salary in the $60,000 range). Cut back to 1990, just six years earlier: A recent graduate is trying to find a job. He studied computer graphics as an art student and created some respectable short anima-tions. He took a class in general programming but not graphics programming. He is not even looking at the big companies in Hollywood because they seek only experienced people. Instead, he sends out resumes to and visits small " boutique " production companies in the Southeast or Midwest—any place that will let him get a foot in the door. Cut back further, to 1986: A student has just graduated with a Master's degree in computer science. He has always been interested in art, but never thought of it as a way to make a living. He did his graduate project work in NSF-funded simulation techniques. He attends Siggraph 1986 in Dallas, resume in hand. He lands a job programming for a newly formed small production company, hoping to make it big doing computer-generated imagery (CGI) for the film industry. Finally, cut back to 1975: A talented, creative computer science student wants to explore computer graphics' animation potential. His thesis, funded by the DOD, describes a way to render images on the computer with something called a " z-buffer. " His school approaches a large animation company about an exchange program that brings a student to the company to learn the industry and a company animator to the school to learn new technology. The company's animation division isn't interested in computer animation and the exchange does not work out. The graduate student—Ed Catmull—goes on to found a premier computer animation company. The above scenarios illustrate actual examples of people trying to get computer graphics jobs in the entertainment industry. You may recognize yourself among them, depending on when you started in computer graphics. Barely three decades old, the computer graphics field has been through enormous …