Performance and Instruction Standards in Animation Education and Training

A critical challenge facing recruitment for the animation industry in China and across the world is the lack of meaningful certification or code of practice for graduate and career performance standards.

Companies must rely on a labor intensive and time consuming process of sorting, grading and evaluating job applicants for a wide variety of tasks and levels of expertise. The disparate and uneven quality of graduate work, diplomas and certificates across(and also within) education and training institutions, means that academic certification is a very unreliable indicator of graduate performance and is of limited value to potential employers who must relay on demo reals and interviews.

This presentation will present the design and application of key performance standards in academic and professional environments using examples from applied animation programs in China and instructional standards used by a major animation software company to ensure instructor competency.
Standards that are recognized throughout the country or abroad serve as the basis for assessment, formal qualifications and they enable commercial production companies to pre-select and recruit applicants that have proven expertise, talent and skills.

Robin G. King
DeTao Masters Academy, Director of the Institute of Animation and Creative Content

Robin King is currently Director of the Institute of Animation and Creative Content at the DeTao Masters Academy in Songjiang, Shanghai as well as President of Imagina Corporation, a global consulting company based in Ontario, Canada.
For over 40 years his research into creative process has been published and applied to a variety of ground breaking programs starting with the computer animation program at Sheridan College in Ontario. The graduates from Sheridan have won and been nominated for many international awards and their influence continues within companies such as ILM, Disney, Dreamworks, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Blue Sky and many other production leaders around the world.
King’s global consulting expertise has been applied to a diverse of range of projects around the globe for governments, institutions and educational clients. In additional to designing ground breaking projects at Sheridan, he has contributed skills and training to projects in Canada, the US, Portugal, the UAR, India, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, India, The Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia and the People’s Republic of China.

In addition he has lectured and presented at numerous events and conferences around the world on aspects of creative process, animation education as well as related topics. In recent years, Professor King has concentrated on developing projects in the Far East with emphasis on main land China where he has served as Chair at Peking University as a consultant to the Communications University of China in Nanjing and has lectured at over 25 universities across the country. He also cofounded a private school in Beijing for several years.

At DTMA he has designed and developed an Institute for animation, visual effects and gaming that is implementing novel and creative projects in training and production. The Institute has brought together over fifteen of the world’s top experts including Academy and Emmy Award winners, senior corporate trainers, educators and production specialists who will be providing expertise for senior executives, production specialists and early career professionals.