Well, I just finished my first week of AM. Even though our only assignment was to get acquainted with the site and our mentors, there was a crap load of information to go through. First there were a bunch of introductory and instructional videos to go through that explained the ins and outs of the AM site and Maya (the software program that most of us will be using to animate). Then there's the forum. Its huge! Despite the fact that not every thread applied to me, there were still a huge amount that did. These forums have been building up since the school started in March of '05, so there are so many discussions that went on about all manner of animation topics. While reading though some of the topics, I noticed that many of the questions had already been asked and answered in older threads. Inevitably, in each thread, an old-timer would reply with a link to an old thread with the exact same question. I guess that means when I have a question I'd better search the forums first.

After going through some of the forums I moved on to "Cruising the Campus" Basically everyone has a page with their personal info and all of their assignments that were submitted throughout the term. Since this was the first week, there wasn't much to look at, however, most of the old-timers had progress reels posted. These are basically demo reels with the student's work that they'd generated so far at AM. There were so many to go through, but they were really inspiring. There were students whose work just look amazing right out of the gate, and then there were students who frankly, sucked, but then over the span of a couple of terms they improved so much that their animation looked great. Of course some of the students were better than others, but it seemed that most everyone was at a point where they were making some pretty descent animation. Thats a great testament to how good this school is. I'm really excited to get started.