You want to learn to prepare a continental dish, you won’t sift through the bundle of cooking books in your drawer. You will straight go to YouTube and watch a video. You have to be at a party tonight and want to show-off a few moves, you get on the net and watch a quick video with Bollywood style dance. Well, the entire world is practically online, and so is the art of animation.
Native Puppets is a professional level animation training program, conceived and developed by industry experts. It is India’s only online program focused in providing high quality training in the field of animation and is now venturing into VFX as well. AnimationXpress spoke with Native Puppets founder and CEO Anand Baid on their plans for Teacher’s Day.
“These are exciting times at Native Puppets,” exclaims Anand Baid, referring to David Burgess a.k.a Dave joining Native Puppets as advisory head of Character Animation Training course.
“What better way to celebrate Teacher’s Day than to have one of the best creative minds in the animation industry in the world be part of Native Puppets Animation Training Program,” says Baid. “Dave will be interacting and mentoring students live and for the first time really, animation students from India would benefit by learning from someone as experienced as Dave out of a school based in India.”
David Burgess is currently in working on The Lego Movie sequel, due to hit theatres in Spring 2019. Prior to this, Burgess worked at DreamWorks Animation where he served as head of character animation for animated features like Trolls, Turbo and Monsters vs. Aliens. He is also known for his work as supervising animator on Megamind and Over the Hedge.
At Disney, he worked on many of their most successful hand-drawn productions. His assignments included: supervising animator on Tarzan (Professor Porter) and The Lion King (The Hyenas), as well as working as an animator on Beauty and the Beast (Gaston/Bimbettes) and Aladdin (Genie), among many others.
On joining Native Puppets, Burgess says, “With their upcoming courses and highly qualified set of mentors, Native Puppets will give students the creative knowledge and confidence to make a successful career in the field of character animation. I am very excited to be a part of the Native Puppets team, and look forward to working with students to take their animation to the next level.”
“After working with Dave for close to over three years in DreamWorks, who I consider an ideal animation guru considering the rapport he had with the animators, I am super thrilled to work again with him at Native Puppets,” Native Puppets head of strategy Sumit Verma states. “We are looking forward to leverage his more than three decade expertise in character animation to help students enhance their reels.”
The on-going webinars in the Meet the Expert series on Native Puppets are first of their kind, considering 30 plus top artists around the world who would be talking to the next generation of artists and students right at the comfort of their homes. “These will help students gain knowledge from industry experts and showcase their talents, respectively. It is a great window and surely miss not the opportunity, especially the students,” explains Verma. Students can check these webinars on facebook.com/nativepuppets.
“Apart from Dave, Native Puppets has roped in top talents from India and overseas as Gurus to mentor in the upcoming new set of courses ranging from 3D modeling, VFX, and for the first time in India pipeline tool development and production courses catering to providing training from foundation to advanced level for the animation and VFX segment,” adds Baid.
In short span, Native Puppets has proved itself by providing industry-ready animators. Under the program, students have been successfully placed in top animation houses in India like Xentrix Animation Studios, 88 Pictures, Vaibhav Studios, Technicolor, Rocksalt Interactive and Digitales Studio.
The team recently has been selected as winner for 100 most innovative start-ups under the government’s ELEVATE 100 programme and is currently on the look-out for mentors in their host of online training programs.
“We thank all our teachers and gurus in showing us the way and keeping us inspired in this beautiful journey of visual story-telling through the medium of animation,” ends Baid.