You know we’ve updated our Creature Animation courses just for you. You are a working professional. You want early morning and evening class times. You want optional assignments and no grades. You want to focus on animating.

Most of all, you want to learn from the best animators in the industry. Nicole Herr is a longtime Animation Mentor instructor, and she’s worked on films like Iron Man 2, and on the dragons from HBO’s critically-acclaimed hit series Game of Thrones.

Nicole is mentoring this Spring 2014 term for both Creature Animation: Locomotion and Creature Animation: Fight or Flight, and seats in her classes are selling out. Nicole is a top mentor at one of the top animation schools (ours), but don’t just take our word for it.

Her students can’t say enough about her mentorship:

“Nicole is a wealth of knowledge. She is friendly and her classes are always informative and entertaining. I really like the way she does e-critiques, she is tough but fair and as a result it pushes me to work harder.”

“Nicole is very specific in her critiques. I find it much more educational when someone can really nit pick my work and tell me how to push it farther.”

“Nicole is very friendly and talkative. Gets very excited and emotional during q&a sessions with anything that has to do with animation – it is easy to see she loves what she does.”

In addition to mentoring students each week, she also provided the content for the Creature Animation: Fight or Flight polishing lecture. In the extended animation tutorial video below, learn the best workflow tips on how to polish your creature animation shot.

Watch this video to get top polishing tips from Nicole:

• Learn how to create a “hit list” of every area of your shot that needs more attention
• Check your penetrations & make sure you are considerate to your partners further down the pipeline
• Don’t forget to “hit” your major character notes
• Address any major technical issues
• Why you should look at your shot “from all angles”
• Get counter-intuitive advice on why you shouldn’t lock your timing until your shot is final
• Add critical “dirt” to your shot to make your character as believable as possible

Be sure look at your shot from all angles to examine your penetrations, and balance them as necessary.
Here, as the dragon is resting on the ground plane, one foot is penetrating more deeply than the other.

There are still a few seats available for Nicole’s sections, and we won’t be opening more. Don’t miss your chance to learn from senior character animator and Game of Thrones dragon-wrangler Nicole Herr next term: REGISTER HERE.