Tom Haines is the director and co-founder of 3Dami, a nonprofit educational program in the UK that focuses on teaching 3D animation to teens with ages ranging from 14 to 18 years old. It’s a seven-day program in which students produce their own animated films from concept to final viewing.

At the 2015 Blender Conference, Tom gave a presentation about the program and discussed what’s possible with the power of Blender and the open source community. To see all of the student films produced during the 3Dami course, have a look at their YouTube playlist.

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Your program is only seven days long. Bringing together a group of strangers (and 14-18 year old ones at that) to cooperate on a single animated short film project is incredibly ambitious. What about film and animation makes it the right choice of medium for your program?

You can’t teach an unmotivated student. Making a 3D animated film motivates our students, so effectively we actually have to pull them back and get them to calm down for fear they are going to work too hard! Some of this comes from the glamour of film, the success of companies such as Pixar, and the coolness of visual effects. But I actually think it’s mostly about the thirst to create.

Education in the UK puts far too much emphasis on the regurgitation of facts, and opportunities to create something from scratch are relatively rare. This is why we get them to write their own film scripts and do the storyboarding—we are not teaching scriptwriting, but in that act of creation they are dragged into the following tsunami with the desire to do anything to make it a reality, something to be proud of at the premiere.

The team aspect is also important. Peer pressure makes them work harder and adds to that desire to succeed. When you have a team of motivated students, they are willing to work at the very edge of their comfort zone, where they will learn so much more than in a normal classroom. It also gives them a safety net for when they fail, as they have the support of the team in addition to the staff—there is less fear of the unknown when you have friends at your back (which they almost immediately become!). http://gtbensmag.com for full article and videos.