Training the Next-Gen animators

28 October 2024 - Wits University/Tshimologong

Four young South African 2D animators train with the world’s best to become teachers for a new generation.

The animators started the new training programme for animation trainers designed by GOBELINS Paris and Wits University’s Tshimologong Digital Innovation Hub’s Animation Academy, Mollo.

The objective of this programme is to address gaps in the South African training pipeline using well-known institutions’ know-how and expertise. GOBELINS Paris has been ranked the number one animation school in the world for several years and Mollo Academy achieved a 100% job placement for its students since its creation in 2018 – in skills development, program design and pedagogical techniques.

At the end of the program, these four professionals will join training institutions for both short and long-term training programmes to implement their new expertise and support the scaling of the South African animation industry.

Ayanda Gigaba, Anré van Rooyen, Lola Aikins and Deon Lodewick travelled to Paris for the first part of the program at GOBELINS’ Paris School. They attended a week-long workshop designed by GOBELINS Paris, followed by three weeks of shadow teaching during the GOBELINS Summers Schools.

Among the many opportunities that this programme offers to the candidates, are the possibilities to immerse themselves in GOBELINS Paris’ ecosystem of teachers, studios and creatives from all over the world and to grow while being trained.

This was followed by four weeks of training by the Mollo Academy team in South Africa. They also designed the first Mollo Academy summer school, which welcomed around 30 students in Johannesburg in October 2024, where they worked under the supervision of senior teachers from GOBELINS Paris and Mollo.

This project was funded by the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs, with the support of the French Institute of South Africa and the National Film and Video Foundation.  It is a collaboration with Wits Digital Arts.

Meet the beneficiaries:

From as young as five years old, Lola Aikins was already aware of her passion for drawing. Whenever she was struck by inspiration, she would pick up a pencil and start bringing her visions to life.  Her earliest memories are filled with cartoons she eagerly watched, yet characters who looked like her were rare, and often presented through an American lens. “Even if they are black, it’s not the same culture at all,” she reflects.

Today, Aikins is poised to make a significant impact on the animation industry. Lola, along with Ayanda Gigaba, Deon Lodewick and Anré van Rooyen, have completed the first part of the programme at GOBELINS School in Paris. There, they attended two weeks of intensive workshops, followed by three weeks of shadow teaching. This experience allowed them to immerse themselves in the vibrant ecosystem of GOBELINS Paris by engaging with a diverse array of students, studios, and teachers from around the world. This helped them better understand the animation market and expand their networks.

“We were taught by some of the leading professionals in the animation industry,” says Aikins. “We were taught techniques on how to be teachers, how to give feedback, and coaching other students. We also had lessons on character design and image composition.”

Ayanda cherishes the one-on-one conversations she had with veteran animation professionals during her time at GOBELINS. These personal interactions provided her with invaluable insights and approaches to animation teaching. “They are the people who have crafted the animation culture. To sit down with them and ask them questions directly about how to teach a person to capture emotion, something more abstract than just the physicality of movement,” Gigaba says.

Van Rooyen adds, “We had a lecturer who spoke about how teaching can change people’s lives, and how you have to earn people’s trust to be a teacher. It is not just in the pedagogy - teaching animation techniques - but also about how to work with people, which is very fascinating.”

Lodewick praises the psychological tools they learned for providing feedback to students. “We learned about the mental aspects as well, like how to motivate students, and not put them down. How we could help students grow while still allowing them to be who they are,” he says.

ÍøÒ×ÌåÓý the partnership

Since 2016, GOBELINS Paris has been developing a strong multi-partner network on the African continent, notably in South Africa (Wits University’s Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct, The Animation School), Ghana (AnimaxFYB studios), and Benin (Sèmè City). These strong connections are manifested notably by the admission of learners from the African continent to GOBELINS Paris (21 Netflix scholarship recipients), academic exchanges with The Animation School, the co-construction of professional animation training (Mollo Animation Academy), and the deployment of customized programs (in Ghana, Benin) to meet the training needs of the industry in these countries.

In 2019, Tshimologong Precinct initiated a capacity-building program in animation (Mollo Academy) aimed at emerging talents from disadvantaged backgrounds. For five years, Mollo Academy has offered a rigorous 11-month immersive program, intended for recent graduates or self-taught individuals who wish to produce professional-quality animated films as a team, under real studio production conditions. The program was designed in partnership with GOBELINS.

These programs have not only trained and enhanced the skills of several South African creatives but also created exchanges between the different programs and a genuine support pathway for these emerging professionals. The first trainers of Mollo Academy were thus trained at GOBELINS as part of the Master's program, and some learners from Mollo Academy were admitted to the GOBELINS Master's program for the 2023-2025 period.

To nourish this ecosystem of creatives who wish to share their expertise, GOBELINS and Tshimologong established a short training program in 2022 for two Mollo Academy trainers. In 2024, GOBELINS and Tshimologong aim to continue this path by deploying a "Train the Trainers" program for beneficiaries from South Africa and other African countries to enhance the skills of future trainers and educational engineers in the field of animation.