Amedeo Beretta Teaches L7 Online

Amedeo Beretta 

Like all our animation tutors, Amedeo Beretta has moved his teaching online since the start of the Covid-19 Crisis. Amedeo currently teaches our Level 7 students, who are working to complete their integrated Master's Degree in Animation, Games and VFX.

Currently the L7 students are working on two large projects; one a teaser/trailer for an upcoming movie and the second a games project. Both projects still require a good deal of work to take them to completion, and both are now being carried out entirely remotely.

In this blog post, Amedeo explains how he is continuing to run his online classes.

Discord

Amedeo Beretta

"I run the daily work of my classes on a Discord server I've set up for the purpose. My current class comprises a few groups, each one working on the delivery of their own project, and I find that Discord's voice chat structure works very well for quick feedback, as people can quickly hop into a channel, discuss an issue, and hop out of it, without having to organize different meetings every time.

Also, the ability to have several voice channels allows for students to discuss matters on a different channel without the tutor, if need be. I used Discord in the past for another class and I find this approach still holds up.

Another useful feature of Discord is the ability to share the screen, so that with just a couple of clicks both tutor and students can share their screens to the benefit of all who join the stream. The feature still has some wrinkles to iron out but it's working well for the most part.

The fact that students can be assigned some sort of tags called "roles" means that I can tag all students belonging to a same group, or all the producers in a class, and address my messages to a specific audience very efficiently without spamming the rest of the class with unnecessary information.

Google Meet for Dailies

Google Meet

Every morning at the beginning of class we have a group call of about 20 to 30 minutes on Google Meet, so that we can see each other's faces for a few minutes, have some human contact, see to it that everyone is fine, and recap the main points of action for the day. It really improves my mood to be able to see people I work with, while talking to them, and usually this talk is characterised by a positive vibe.  I employ Google meet for dailies, too, since it lets me record the session and automatically uploads its respective video to my Google Drive.

Syncsketch
The most efficient way I have found to give feedback is by employing Syncsketch.com, through which I can draw on people's artwork on specific frames, while the artist on the opposite end can see the feedback process in real time. This is an approach I have been using for a few years, now, and I am quite happy with it.

Google Classroom
For more official communications I rely on Google classroom, which is the same tool I also employ to collect assignments, since it's easy to use both on the student's and tutor's side.

Slack
One of the groups has elected Slack as their weapon of choice for internal communications, so when they need me there I hop on that platform too, which features a rather practical way of organising content."

The Escape Studios Animation Blog offers a personal view on the art of animation and visual effects. To find out more about our new BA/MArt, now recruiting for September 2020, follow this link.   To apply, visit the official page here.