This article was published in Kidscreen Daily. This means that there will be more jobs in Ontario for Concept artists and 3d Animators!

Canadian province Ontario is spending approximately US$534,000 to spur video game development and production.

The provincial government is steering the dollars towards video game producers through three new training programs at Interactive Ontario, a not-for-profit trade group.

The first, ONtheEdge, will train video game entrepreneurs in new business skills, while the second GamesID program will provide market intelligence, marketing and promotional support to video game companies that are eyeing potential domestic and international partnerships.

The third program, the Ontario Video Game and Digital Media Investor Network, will actively work to match video game and digital media developers with Canadian and international investors.

Sandra Pupatello, Ontario minister of economic development and trade, told KidScreen’s sister pub Playback Daily the new money will get foot-loose global game makers to invest, expand or relocate to Ontario, rather than go elsewhere in Canada or internationally.

“We need to be competitive,” the minister said. Her government earlier invested roughly US$210 million in a new Toronto development studio planned by French video games giant Ubisoft.

Pupatello made her announcement at the Game On Finance 2009 conference in Toronto.

Ontario last week enhanced its video game tax credits to enable local producers to offset development costs as they are incurred, and no longer when a video game is completed.

“It’s not a big waiting game for producers anymore,” Pupatello said.

The minister added Ontario tax subsidies are for video game makers big and small.

“Our tax credits not only help the big multinationals. They’re for smaller companies that don’t have large credit lines and need assistance,” Pupatello said.

Yannis Mallat, CEO of Ubisoft Montreal and Toronto, said the French games maker was drawn to Toronto in part by the provincial subsidies, but also by the opportunity to exploit the traditional story-telling skills of Toronto film and TV producers.

Mallat pointed to the upcoming November launch of two Ubisoft new games, Assassin’s Creed 2 and James Cameron’s Avatar The Game, as encapsulating the current convergence of film and video game production techniques.

Mallat said both games employ live actors and traditional story-telling narratives to better engage game users technically and emotionally.

“They relate to the characters. That’s the perfect way to create those connections between the consumer’s brain and what’s happening in the game,” Mallat argued.

Ubisoft is currently scouting possible locations for its proposed Toronto development studio before a planned 2010 launch.

Don’t forget to think!  Education is an active pursuit and you are an important part of the process.  To get the most out of your education you need to be an active participant.  Think about each assignment in a course: what is the point of the assignment?  If you are attending a program with a well thought out curriculum there is a reason for every assignment, a skill that you are teaching yourself by going through a certain process. Do the assignment the instructor gave you keeping the point of it in mind!  Don’t make assignments more complex than they are, but don’t skip steps.

As you progress through a program, instructors will be aware of what you have already been taught.  They are assuming that you have a body of knowledge, so don’t begin every course as if you know nothing.  Be aware of the knowledge and skills you have already acquired and use everything you know to solve the next set of problems.  There is no point in taking a course in design and composition if you don’t use what you’ve learned in every subsequent course.  There’s no point   studying human anatomy unless you know how to use that knowledge to improve the quality of your drawings of people.

Every time you enter a studio or begin to work on an assignment, think!   Center yourself.  Do some deep breathing.  Review in your own mind what the next drawing, or the next project, is about. What do you need to think about?  In what order?  What do you already know that will help you solve the problems?  Do you have the appropriate materials to work with?  Should you do research first?  Play to win.

Your education is not about grades and doing what you think the instructor wants. It’s about acquiring knowledge and skills that you will own and continue to develop over a life time!  We cannot teach you everything simultaneously, so we devise a series of courses, each designed to teach specific skills. To become an artist, in the end you will need to drive all the horses at once.

Eventually, your subconscious will do a lot of the work for you, but in the first years you have to use active mental energy to remind yourself what you need to be concerned with to have a drawing or project succeed.

To be successful you must take responsibility for your own education.  Think about  process and don’t skip steps.  However, do ask questions if and when you don’t understand why you are being asked to go through a certain process. Good instructors will  be happy to explain both “why” and “how.”

We are now beginning the second half of first semester! Eat well and get a walk in every day. You will be able to think better with the right “fuel” (not junk food or cigarettes or too much caffeine) and your body will help you to stay positive if you also make sure you get some exercise every day ( a 25 minute brisk walk will do the trick). Take pleasure in the fact that through your hard work and passion to learn, you are developing yourselves. Most things that are worthwhile are difficult to achieve. Expect to have your share of work that you wish was better or need to redo. Take it all as part of the process. Remind yourself of all that you understand and can do now that you couldn’t do before you started on this path.  Just be sure that you are doing your part,  and aren’t working on automatic pilot!

Last but not least, keep your sense of humor and support each other. We are all in this together.

The 5 Hour Comic

Over the last few years I’ve tried to contribute in a positive way to the conceptart.org website, and I’ve also piloted  a now deleted Max the Mutt thread. I’ve tried my best to follow guidelines for recruiters. In fact, I’ve been thanked  many, many times. I’ve contributed information on painting, color, and was a regular contributor to a Nicolaides thread. I definitely also let people know about the programs at Max the Mutt when the information was relevant and requested and proudly posted work that was being done by our CA students.

I also received information, for which I’m very grateful. I found companies that are now manufacturing and selling, through the internet, artists supplies that I can’t get here! I found out about the anatomy DVDs mentioned in my last post.

All in all, it was a positive experience, and I would encourage Max the Mutt students to feel free to establish a thread and/or post work. However, the time has come for me to bow out.

Jason has been advertising his new on line school, which sounds like a great project that has the potential to help people without the funds to attend school!  I wish him luck with this project and don’t feel he is “spamming” or would be “spamming” if he tried to get the fact known across the internet!  Knowledge is power.  People have the right to know what is available, to investigate options, and then make the choice that seems a good fit for them.

In order to keep tuition as low as possible, we count on the internet and word of mouth to let people know about us, and our programs. It’s the quality of work that has been steadily produced by Max the Mutt students, and their professionalism, that has enabled the school to grow and expand. When a query on conceptart.org asking for an art school that teaches skills and is near Pittsburgh comes up, it’s impossible for me not to suggest that the writer take a look at our website!  If that’s spamming, I’m guilty.

I respect the fact that it’s Jason’s website and he has the right set the boundaries, but I cannot be present anywhere to do with art without Max the Mutt being part of who I am and what concerns me. Therefore,  with regret, I will no longer participate. My thanks to many of the contributors on  conceptart.org for their support and help when we were developing the Diploma Program in Concept Art for Animation & Video Games!  I’m sure I’ll still peruse the site, and I wish you all the best now and in the future.

We have a new Admissions Director, Julia Ma.   Julia is smart, generous and she found us!  She’s worked before in admissions and had heard about Max the Mutt. She wanted to find out if all the good things she was hearing were true.

At the time I didn’t know Lisa Mamers was going back to school, so I thanked Julia for her interest but told her we didn’t have an opening.  Call it fate.  Julia asked if she could have a tour anyway, and a few days after her visit Lisa announced that she wanted to return to school herself !  Being around art had made her realize that she was moving in the wrong direction: she wants to be a fashion designer.

Julia stepped right in and has been with us since the end of August. She’s piloting our first January start, and much to our surprise  it looks like we’ll have a full class!  These students will join the current year one students in September 2010 to begin year 2.   Since there seems to be a need for this option, we will offer it again for January 2011.

The magic of Max the Mutt from the beginning is that somehow what we need, the person or people we need, seem to find us just as we really need them! i can include so many people in that…Carla Drmay, who is our Secondary School liaison, Workshop Director and so much more… I’m thinking of many more, mainly instructors who found us…the list is too long!

The school is feeling very good to me these days. We have a solid core philosophy.  All the year one groups seem very focused and hardworking.  I work with the Concept Art students, so I’m more aware of what’s happening in their classes.

The second years are busy with all the intro CA courses: Intro to Environment Design, Intro to Animation, Intro to Concept Art, Background Painting ( a double course that starts with the brush and then moves into Photo Shop), Cartooning 1, and of course Intermediate Life Drawing (not an intro course but introducing new concepts).  The third years are taking Portrait Painting, and a full day of Advanced Environment Design and Painting in Photo Shop. They also have Advanced Life drawing and a course called Hands and Feet, which stresses anatomy.

The animation students have several new faculty members, including James Miko. He had an extensive career working for major studios, and learned the craft at a time when you learned  at a studio by being mentored, not at a school.  With that vantage point, he’s bringing some new approaches to learning animation to his year 3 students. (If we were degree granting, by the way, we couldn’t have seasoned professionals like James Miko teaching! We’d be required to hire those with the right “academic” qualifications, most of whom have very little real life experience).

Tina Seemann and I are working hard to get all animation students to realize that they need the fourth year of animation. In fact, we’d like to make it mandatory, a 4 year diploma that includes 3D.  To do this, we’ll need to go through the government and that will take time. In the meanwhile, I hope they’ll all be savvy enough to understand that as the studios -  unlike Mikko’s day- do less and less mentoring and want entry level animators to be at a higher and higher level, the necessity of spending more time in school is becoming a reality.

We’ve already introduced one beginning animation course into year one, and next year, animation classes will be longer in both years 2 and 3.

We are now asking all animation applicants and current students to think in terms of 4 years of study. The changes in the industry demand that everyone take 3D as well as classical and 2D computer animation.  We can help students to fund that fourth year, but, to state it again, everything we are hearing from companies in the industry leads us to feel that year 4 is essential for our animation graduates to remain competitive for jobs at the top companies.

The Illustration for Sequential Arts Program has really blossomed!  Thanks to Kent Burles, with an assist from Dave Ross, the year one and year two students are off to an excellent start.  The year three students, who will be our first SA graduates, have developed beyond expectations and are doing great work!  I really look forward to seeing their graduate show at our first industry evening showcasing both Animation and Sequential Arts!  We’ll have to wait until 2011 for the first Concept Art graduates.

I’ll try to post work from all three diploma programs when we get a little further into the first semester.  I’ll also try to write more for the blog.

Which reminds me, thanks to one of the threads on www.conceptart.org,  I found out about anatomy DVDs that show the body in dissection!  They were done for medical students, but I know they’ll be invaluable to all students at Max the Mutt, whatever their diploma program.  If these things had only been available when I was young… They should arrive soon.

Please post comments if there are subjects you’d like us to cover.  If I don’t have the answers, I’ll gt someone who does have the answers to write!  In fact, I really think Kent and Tina should start writing….in the meantime, keep drawing everyone!

This has been quite a ramble.  I hope you feel up to date.

After a surprise visit to Max the Mutt, to our delight Ken Steacy announced that he is very impressed with the quality of art work our students are producing and would be very interested in teaching here! The timing couldn’t have been better. Rob Walton has had to withdraw as an instructor for this semester, and Ken, a highly respected Canadian professional comic book artist, is the ideal person to instruct Cinematic Storytelling! Welcome to the Max the Mutt community, Ken, or as you refer to us, “the kennel.”

Ken has written and illustrated the exploits of practically every popular character you could name, including Astro Boy, Harry Potter, Batman, Superman, Spider-man, and the X-Men. His four major works in print are “The Sacred and The Profane” ( co-authored by Dean Motter), “Night and The Enemy,” (stories by Harlan Ellison), “Megapowers (written by physicist Jack Weyland), and “Tempus Fugitive.” He has also produced, directed and illustrated an interactive edutainment CD Rom series for kids ,”Adventures of Victor Vector & Yondo,” He has worked for many years with Lucasfilm, producing stories and computer rendered illustrations for Star Wars books and prints, and has collaborated on numerous occasions with author Doug Coupland. There is much more !

Welcome, Ken.