Testimonial from Terry Chiem - iAnimate Games student

My name is Terry Chiem and I am from San Jose, California. I graduated about a year ago from San Jose State University's Animation and Illustration program. The curriculum there is great, but it was more geared towards feature production. I've always had a passion for games and had an interest in working in the industry so I decided to give iAnimate Games a try. To date I have only taken Games Workshop 1.

I started working at Spark Unlimited as an Animation Intern in June. The whole process happened over the course of a few months and went by pretty smoothly. Back in March, I had heard that Spark was looking for an animation intern. I applied for the position and received an interview a month later. The interview went well and I received 3 weeks to relocate to Southern California and start working.

I definitely learned a lot in my 14 weeks in Games Workshop 1. It was very fast paced and I was able to learn new things every week. It's definitely an intense course that covers a lot of body mechanics and I felt myself improving with every assignment. In addition to the great lectures from my instructor David Lam, iAnimate also provided additional resources to learn from such as special guest lectures, Jason's webinars and vault recordings from other classes. I was able to go through them at my own pace and pick and choose what I needed help with in my spare time. It was very informative to see different instructor's approaches to each assignment and I was able to gather extra tips along the way.

iAnimate Games definitely taught me a lot of the skills that I needed to work at a game studio. Every day I'm given assignments that are similar to the ones that I did at iAnimate. I was able to transition into the job easily since I had already developed a good workflow during the workshop. In addition to improving my body mechanics, I also learned how my animation applies to a game engine. That knowledge definitely gave me an edge when I started since I was able to understand how things work outside of Maya. That's a valuable skill that I don’t think many animation schools teach.

iAnimate is a great option for people who want to learn and refine their animation skills. The amount of extra resources you get is worth the price and the rigs are just awesome. The community is very friendly and I made a lot of connections during my time here.