I am about to wrap up my third Animation Class at Living Arts.
This class is for students that are in the 6th-12th grades, but I mostly get students that are in middle school.
We use 4 Mac laptops that are provided my Living Arts, and use the programs Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash and After Effects. Some of the students come in used to a certain program, such as a current student who is used to drawing in a program called SAI. If they don't like Photoshop or Illustrator, we try to download the others. I prefer them to animate in After Effects or Flash however.
I have learned a lot in these classes as well. I have only been accustomed to how I animate, and students come in wanting to do things that I have not done...so I learn techniques to help them.
I think most students do not expect how long it takes either. Even though we have these programs that make it possible to animate without doing step-by-step drawings, it still takes a lot of time to prepare drawings, pictures, etc for animation, then to work with the programs to animate.
I have also learned how well these young people really listen (This is a statement of a fairly new teacher! I have been teaching for about 3 years now). There are some students who come in and are so eager and ready to learn everything I've got to teach them. Then, there are the ones that already know a little bit about this process, and come in to impress me with their skills, not necessarily to learn anything. I have had a hard time getting through to some of these students, but I have found if I have them integrate what they know into these new programs and show them what they can do in Adobe After Effects that they could not in other program (i.e. ToonBoom), they eventually get excited about the new things they can do.
Here is an example of a talented student's work from my last animation class:
