The VFX for Guerilla Filmmakers course is at the end of its 4-week run over on FutureLearn. There’s still time to sign up (after which you can go through it at your own pace), so do so now if you don’t want to miss out on free learning.
Having worked on the course for months prior to its launch, along with the mastermind Saint Walker, it was exciting to see it finally go live at the start of February. Each week unlocked new content and saw a massive flow of students sweep through the lessons.
There’s nothing quite like the community feel of a FutureLearn course. I’ve been on the other end of it several times, most notably in their excellent Start writing fiction course, but this was my first experience of being front of house.
Now, over at HitFilm we put videos up every week which get seen by thousands of people. Videos I’ve made in the past have been watched by hundreds of thousands. But that’s all cumulative, and it’s also in areas I’m very familiar with. With the FutureLearn course, each tutorial would have hundreds of comments within a day of it going live.
As a father I work four days a week, which means I’m at home on Mondays with my son. Each week of the FutureLearn course was unlocked on a Monday. This led to exceedingly tense starts to each week, as I sat in a singing class surrounded by 20 shouting toddlers and as many parents, wondering whether anything had gone wrong.
Of course, nothing went wrong, because a huge amount of effort and care was poured into the course from everyone involved. The really wonderful thing has been reading the comments and watching as filmmakers of all ages, genders, nationalities and experience levels have their eyes opened to the possibilities of visual effects. There have even been a fair number of experienced HitFilm and After Effects users who were along for the ride and even they seemed to get something out of the course, which is great.
Super pleased to have been a part of it. Even happier that thousands of people have enjoyed the course.
Let’s do another one.
0 Comments