I spent three days this week introducing Cinema 4D to the graphic design students at St Helens College. I'm not much of a teacher; I usually prefer to just leave a trail of breadcrumbs online and try to show some interesting processes for most projects I work on (see: CASE STUDIES). I enjoyed my time at St Helens, without a doubt the two most valuable years of my education, so when I was invited to talk about my work and do a bit of software training I didn't really hesitate.

It was pretty interesting going back to basics, three short days isn't really enough to even scratch the surface of such a multifaceted piece of software so I had to cherry pick a few tools and processes that could be put into context right away and achieve some kind of result. Ignoring modelling, lighting and traditional shading, I demonstrated a few ways of creating objects into 3D space and animating them using simple keyframes, deformers and effectors, as well as showing how dynamics can be useful for more than dropping a bunch of shapes on the ground!

As much as some students wanted to jump ahead and start adding wood textures to shiny materials I tried my best to restrict everyone to flat 2D shading and create a collection of little motion tests, concentrating on composition and colour (mainly inspired by my friends at Zeitguised's recent music video for Mouse On Mars)

It was a fairly big group with no real experience of 3D or animation software so I was really pleased with how interested most people seemed and how quickly some students were able to get into the software in such a short time. A lot seemed really keen to learn more independently, so I wish them all the best in learning more!