What is the difference between attending BYU’s Animation Program and an animation program at one of the top Art Schools?
There are many differences between the BYU Animation experience and that of top art schools. BYU Animation provides a very artistic and technical set of skills. Art Schools are typically very expensive; BYU is extremely inexpensive (around 10x less), especially for a private institution.
Although, the main difference is our collaboration-based Student Senior Film which wins many awards. Every year, students have the opportunity to work on a production-like senior film or game, while many Art Schools have individual thesis films.
There are many differences between the BYU Animation experience and that of top art schools. Art school students typically spend almost all of their time in art classes while students at BYU are still required to take all their general education courses and religion courses in addition to those courses in the major. Arts Schools are very focused educations and BYU offers a much broader education. Art Schools are typically very expensive; BYU is extremely inexpensive, especially for a private institution.
We have found by comparison, and this is not true of all schools, but that at BYU we have far greater technology resources and access to these resources than almost any school in the world. We are currently running 75 licenses of Maya, multiple licenses of Pixar’s Renderman for rendering, thousands of processors of computer rendering ability both on and off the super computer, tens of editing stations, tens of compositing stations, high end video cameras including HD cameras, film cameras, a motion picture studio with two sound stages, three pencil test stations and multiple licenses of ToonBoom Harmony and TV Paint as our traditional animation software.