College level courses
Chris Yonge has been teaching university and college level courses for twelve years, starting with what was then CMPS25 for the Baskin School of Engineering, UCSC, in the Fall quarter of 2010. The popularity and success of this digital modeling course, with an enrollment of 200 students, led to UCSC asking him to add an animation course, CMPS26, three years later. When the Computational Media (CM) department was spun off from Computer Science (CS) these became CMPM25 and CMPM26. A third course on the surfacing software Substance Painter, CMPM27, was added in 2018.
Students in these courses come from all majors, though typically around 40% are Game Design. The rest are divided between Sciences, Film, and Humanities, reflecting the versatility of digital media in communicating processes, events on the atomic or astronomic scales, making test animations for research subjects, or making special effects and titling for videos and web presentations.
In 2016 Cabrillo College invited Chris Yonge to teach two animation courses, based on the success of those at UCSC. One, DM72, was centered around 2D animation using Photoshop for frame based projects and Animate (formerly Flash) for vector ones. The second, ETech40, covered much the same ground at CMPM25 at UCSC and used the same software, Blender. Other commitments meant he had to withdraw from DM72 in 2021 but ETech40 continues and indeed was split into a digital modeling component (ETech40) and 3D animation component (ETech43) in 2023.
Two examples of final project work by students in DM72 are shown on the right. The top one is a vector animation in Animate, the lower one is frame based and made in Photoshop (with video elements). This second one is notable for the student not only composing the song but embedding a video of him singing it into the animation.