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We see ourselves as an arts school where visual effects, games, and 3D just happen to be the medium.
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So Gnomon is very much now focused on professional education, but also creating careers.Ĭould a new artist come in here from the ground floor and work their way up? All of this gives experience to our students, like a real production type experience. We do other services, community oriented things, like CG Channel, which is a website, or the gallery here to expose people to artists, or Gnomon Studios, which is creating a short for Shane Acker right now. And then over the last 12 years, you know, we have expanded to offer a full-time program for people who want to get into the industry. And about 80 percent of our students at that time were professionals. So in '97, it was basically a continuing education series evening and weekend classes, people from lots of studios. And the tools were so new a lot of the artists at studios felt that they needed to learn more about them, so there was a great demand for a professional training facility where people would train people from the studios. And at that time, there was nowhere to study this stuff.
#Gnomon school of visual effects software#
I would go to studios all over LA everyday helping them get the software to do what they needed. So I was the support guy for Los Angeles, I was the main entertainment guy.
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And so back then, it was before Maya came out. What was your background? How did you form Gnomon?Īlex Alvarez: I was working with Alias|Wavefront back in '95. In our interview after the break, Alvarez talks about the expanding reach of video games, looks back at his youth spent playing Ultima and Wizardry, and doles out plenty of advice for budding young artists.
#Gnomon school of visual effects movie#
A few years later, he was explaining software to movie studios and eventually opened The Gnomon Workshop, which provides training to artists who are interested in the entertainment industry.Īlvarez recently finished a six-month stint working on James Cameron's Avatar, and Gnomon just hosted the "Unleashed: The Art of Naughty Dog" art exhibit showing off works by many of the artists from Naughty Dog, several of whom went through classes at Gnomon. He studied art, but with no one career-oriented channel for that creativity, he didn't find himself making a living as an artist until he stumbled into a job working on comic books. Alex Alvarez is one of those people who obsessively played games and constantly doodled in a sketchbook as a kid.