Living Arts College

Complete digital education. This program moves fast, so you can't be lazy - a lot of your success depends on self motivation. I must stress, it is not an easy program and you can't expect to pass a class simply because you show up. Every professor I've had has been wonderful and knowledgeable. The digital filmmaking program is a year and a half long. It consists of 6 quarters, each ten weeks in length. The school also specialises in animation, which sometimes crosses into the film program. As a digital filmmaking student I learned how wonderful after effects can be (I love that program) in the film world. I'm currently in my final and sixth quarter at the school where the emphasis is on self promotion (websites, demo reel, branding, resume, etc.) and my final film for the school will be a documentary. On a side note, the school is three huge domes, and there is a digital theater with awesome sound and image quality.

"This school is nothing more than a hardware facility. You'd be better off just buying a nice machine and the software you want to learn. Our XSI teaher wasn't contracted appropriately and left us in the first quarter of our advanced semester. They replaced him with a Maya teacher who couldn't use XSI. They refused to compensate us for the wasted XSI quarter so we continued with what we knew, teaching our teacher along the way. Other 'elective' classes became suddenly teacherless, such as our Soundforge course. They gave us an administrative baby sitter who didn't even know the title. In our final quarter, our class was the 'golden child', so they kept parrading prospect students through to see our skillset. We hated it becuase we wanted to warn them not to come. One day, we told the administration to keep prospect students out of ourroom or we would tell them all about how we felt ripped off. They sent another set through the following week and we told them what we thought about the school. None in that group returned. I was almost expelled for saying what I believed. The certificate is valid, and I believe my skills are developed. I just don't think that the school had anything to do with it. Either teach yourself, or go to a different school for certification. One of my classmates fantasized about firebombing the building... Good thing he went to Afganistan. Let me make it clear that our entire class felt unsatisfied, not just me. There wasn't a single one of us that didn't feel shafted. Seeing the commercials on TV and the radio makes my skin crawl."