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What to expect from a CAVE course

Here we'll explain what you should expect from a CAVE course, and what we expect from our students.

Online course format

Our online courses are delivered through a combination of pre-recorded content, weekly assignments and live feedback sessions.

Pre-recorded content

The pre-recorded content is intended for you to learn at your own pace and be able to go back and forth to re-run workflows and techniques. Through years of experience in training, we found this to be the most effective way for students to gain new skills and understanding. Without a doubt, live technical sessions are great. However, watching and listening is only one step of the learning process. Being able to replay the content, repeat the steps (many times if need be) and then complete the steps without instruction is when you really start to pick up new skills. And then having the confidence to take the learned skills and apply them to different scenarios is when you really start to fly.

Weekly assignment

Practice, practice, practice is the key to becoming a successful artist and therefore, for each lesson, you will also be expected to complete an assignment. The assignment is for you to demonstrate that you understood the weeks training and are able to put it into play.

Live feedback session

Finally, at the end of the week, we run a live 2hr feedback session with the course tutor. For the feedback session, we expect all students to have submited their assignment via Shotgun for review. The feedback sessions are a time for you to get dedicated notes, and also a time for you to ask questions. If a workflow worked well, great, mention it. If you did not understand a concept from the weekly lesson, make sure to flag this. The feedback sessions are a great way to get involved, both with the tutor and also other students. The more information you share, the quicker you will learn. We also encourage you to listen to the feedback that others recieve too, as at some stage this will more than likely be relevant to your work.

Class size

To allow the CAVE teaching team to give each student dedicated weekly feedback, we restrict the number of students to a maximum of 15 per course.

Please note that for our FREE courses, we may enrol more than 20 students.

Course details

When you enrol onto a course, you’ll be able to find the course(s) on your Dashboard, along with any upcoming Dailies and Masterclasses sessions.

Selecting a course from the MY COURSES list will take you to the course homepage. From here, you will find information about the course, and all the weekly lessons on the left hand coloumn.

This will include:

  • Weekly lesson release – this is the day and time that we’ll be releasing the pre-recorded content for you to work through.
  • Weekly assignment deadline – the deadline for you to submit your weekly assignment via Shotgun.
  • Live feedback session – the day and time that we’ll be running the live online feedback session and Q&A.

Lessons

As mentioned above, the lessons are listed to the left and we’ll be releasing a new lesson each week. The release date for the lesson will be listed under the lesson module (as illustrated below), and hovering over the lesson will give you a summary of the lesson.

For active lessons, you will find:

  1. The objective of the lesson.
  2. A series of pre-recorded videos for you to work through.
  3. A selection of resources for the lesson
  4. An assignment brief for the weekly lesson and a link to the Shotgun playlist where you will need to submit your work.
  5. A link to the live feedback session that we’ll be hosting via Zoom for the end of the week.
  6. Some lessons will also provide additional content in the form of text/imagery to supplement the lesson.

Class objectives

Here you will find a description of what the lesson will cover. Primarily, you will use this section to launch the live weekly session. The weekly session will also be recorded and then uploaded onto the lesson page for you to review.

Resources

Here you will find additional resources for the lesson. This could be reference images, templates, scene files, etc. We will also use this to point to useful software, links and supplementary content that we recommend for you to download.

Assignment

This is your weekly assignment. We keep our classes small to ensure that we are able to give every student dedicated feedback, and we expect all students to submit weekly.

For more information on submitting your assignment for review, please check out this page:

Final assignment

At the end of the course, a final assignment will be set. This will be to finish the model, the rig, the lighting for a shot, etc. For the final assignment, we will allow you 2 months for completion. After which a follow up feedback session will be scheduled.

Moving on

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