Fall 2025

 

From: boredpanda.com/illustration-before-after-ai-fails/

  It's been a turbulent season in the Ontario colleges system. Decades of underfunding combined with a sharp curtailing of international student visas has led to the current cuts to staff and program suspensions. Despite the reccomendations from their own expert panel, the povincial government has committed to fund only half of what was advised.

 I love what I do and believe in the importance of our mission, but it is disheartening that, while only a minority of ontarians want to underfund education they seem to control the political landscape. This is not a challenge unique to our provice, but more of a design feature to keep control in the hands of the wealthy and prioritze their narrow interests. Left unchecked, you need only look south to see where this path leads.

  AI continues to make waves in the creative industries. The voices sounding alarms seem to be drowned out in the race to create (and propfit from) Artificial General Intelligence. The superintelligence that will inevitable follow almost immediately afterwards is part that keeps me up at night.

  Currently, I have found any image generation tools to be of limited utility although the surrealist hallucinations provide some entertainment value. I continue to agree that the hype over AI has more to do with investor desperation to recoup sunken development cost than actual utility. The speed at which the tools are evolving does warrant attention. With a great deal of luck, the long term result will be a virtual assistants freeing us from drudgery, allowing more time for creative pursuits and not some malignant intelligence bent on our annihilation.

   Here are the classes I teach this term

ANI/VGD - Animation 1  (1027/1069)

6012 - Rigid Pendulum (RP) or Change of Emotion (COE)
6012 - Bouncing Balls (BB)
6012 - Ball with Tail (BT)
6012 - Leg Ball Jump (LBJ)

ANI - Animation 3 (5020)

5020 - Polishing Scene (PS) or Melee Attack (MA)
5020 - Weight Lift (WL)
5020 - 30s Reel (30S)
5020 - Short Lip Sync (LS1) or UbiSoft NEXT (UN)
5020 - Creature Animation (CA) (includes checkpoint) and Dailies

Winter 2025

The classic Picard facepalm: when no other meme can express the combination of frustration and fatigue

Update: the Union and CEC signed a memorandum of agreement. This means there will not be a strike. While many issues remain unresolved, both  parties have agreed to send all outstanding items to mediation-arbitration with Arbitrator William Kaplan.

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previous post:

Wait, hasn't this happened before? Only COVID could make 2017 seem like a minor annoyance.

  I start the term with the specter of yet another impasse in negotiations with the CEC. This time, the issues we're dealing with are even more troubling. A long worstening trend of underfunding Ontario post secondary education has combined with acute changes in international student visas to create a perfect storm.

  As happend previously, the CEC would happily cut 5 weeks of payroll to pad the balance sheet. (You can learn more about the CEC here). Unless students are quick to hold the colleges accountable for charging tuituion but not poviding education, I worry this will become a long and ugly battle. Even after the lawsuit was resolved, students ended up losing the most. 

  That is the part that frustrates me most.

Here are the classes I teach this term:

ANC Animation 2 (6017)

Leg Ball Turn (LBT)

Short Lip Sync (LS1)

Melee Attack (MA)

Weight Lift (WL)   *alternative assignment

Thesis Animation (TA)*

ANI 3d Animation 4 (5023)
5023 - UbiSoft Next (UN) ~or~ Shot01
5023 - Change of Emotion (COE) ~or~ Shot02
5023 - Mocap Cleanup (MC) ~or~ Shot03
5023 - Final Animation (FA) ~or~ Shot04 *under construction
Shot Assignment (SA)
30S Reel

ANI Client Studio (5025)
Dailies
Checkpoint (HW)
Shot Assignment (SA)