 Hi, I'm Sibiran Kumar, I'm the Academic Director of FX School, which is in Mumbai. We are a digital training institute. Basically, we teach a lot of stuff, filmmaking, photography. And of course, we are teaching Blender, and this is kind of our story. So, I'm kind of like to tell you something about how we became the biggest Blender Training Institute in India. Something about my own background. I've been a light wave and 3D studio user for a long time. I created an animation series called Jungle Tales for Cartoon Network, that won the National Award. It was the first 3D animation series ever made in India. And then I also did India's first animated item girl, which is called Lady Chatterjee. She was like, you know, Bollywood item girl, so that was that. And at this time, we were using Max. In 2009, I shifted from production to starting the school. I was the Academic Director and Co-Founder of a school in Mumbai. That's our school. And FX school was an all-Max school, you know. So all our machines were I-Max. So it was kind of bye-bye Max, hello Maya. And I was never very comfortable with Maya, you know. So I was like, ah, you know, what do I do? And for the first time, I didn't know the software that we were teaching. And so we had the instructors teaching it. And that's when I got very curious about Blender, because I said, ah, Blender works on my, you know, I had that 17-inch MacBook Pro then. I used to work on that. So I said, oh, this is really cool. And I was fiddling with it and I was fiddling with all the various versions. And, you know, I really couldn't get anybody else that interested in it. People were not, you know, ah, no, no, you know, Maya, what's this? It's like free, it's cheap, it's not good. And it went on for a while till, you know, we had tears of steel. I kind of, you know, paid for the DVD, supported it. And, you know, eventually I said, okay, the only way we can do it is that we have to take a hard decision. Do we keep teaching Maya or do we make a change? And that's what I did on, you know, in April 2014. I took what was probably a very radical decision in India. I said, I'll shift our entire CG pipeline from Maya to Blender. Okay? Yeah. Entirely. No, no more Maya. We'll just teach Blender. And I could do this because I had the full support of my, you know, my director, Abhidhe Muraka. He said, yeah, if you believe in this, do it like it's okay. You know, he didn't know what he was saying in that sense. So we became the first school in India to say, no, we don't teach Maya because people don't come and say, I want to learn CG animation. They say, I want to learn Maya. They don't say I want to learn editing. They say, I want to learn Final Cut Pro. You know, this is how people are. They want to learn the software. So we said, no, we don't teach Maya. We teach something better. It's called Blender. Blender. Okay. So yeah, it was a tough call because India is, you know, what you call an Autodesk universe. They have Maya, Max, Flames, more cluster, the whole works. And they spend mega bucks advertising it. You know, it's a lot of money spent and everybody's told, you just learn the software and you have a job for life. And, you know, that's not kind of true. But it's a dream. They can sell it, you know, to lots of people. And they come from poor families. They spend a lot of money learning a software and they feel, you know, we can make it work. So in six months, we completely phased out Maya instruction from our school because there were students who were already learning Maya, so we had to phase them out. And by the end of 2014, we were only teaching Blender. So this is kind of our story and I'll let you know what all we did and how our students are doing. But first of all, in order to learn Blender, my instructors were also Maya people. So we said, let's make a small film using Blender. And you'll all see how easy it is. Of course everybody said, ah, right click, left click, you know. But we don't know what to do. But I said, no, you lose your job or we learn Blender. You know, sometimes that's the only way to do it. So we created this small test film, you know. Very simple little film. But people said, yeah, okay, at least we can make it. I mean, it is kind of symbolic. You know, we are escaping the Autodesk police. So we did that and we said, okay, we can start teaching Maya. And currently we have two instructors who are mainly teaching Blender. There's Ruth Mubgonga who teaches the Blender foundation course. That's a three month course. And we have Atenu who teaches the specialization course and the pro courses. So what happens in our school is that everybody has to do this foundation course. So everybody is kind of forced to learn Blender. Anyone who wants to do CG or VFX or gaming. So it's the base for our visual effects, CG pipeline and for gaming. And we are a certified, Unity certified training institute. And we also teach Unreal. So for everything, all our modeling is done now in Blender. So that's the Blender three month foundation course. And okay, this is the number of students we have taught Blender over the three years since we started. And it's an accelerating figure. You know, we taught 566 students. It's going to be like 800 students the next time we meet. In fact, when I spoke to Torne and SIGGRAPH, we had taught 440 students. It's become 566. So it's accelerating. So I mean, I hope it's going to accelerate to a great degree. And this is what they do. They make, they're supposed to create still images. Okay. At this point in three months, learn the interface, create some stuff. So they do concentrate on creating, you know, static images, rendered images. They encourage to create whatever they like in Blender. So some of them are inspired by Tron. Okay. Some are inspired by Minions and 300. And of course, Transformers. And who can miss out Game of Thrones? So, but all this they do from zero in three months. And this is a part-time course. We're not a full-time course. They come twice a week to learn Blender. And in this much time, they learn it. And you know, one of the things we've realized is nobody could produce stuff like that with three months of training in Maya. Not even in six months. People are so much faster when they learn Blender from zero. When we try to teach people who already know Maya or Max or something, Blender, you know, they have to unlearn so much. There's so much resistance, it takes them longer. But fresh kids just master it in no time. It's really simple. And they love the fact that it's all, you know, cool. They don't have any preconceptions. So some people want to do like crazy science fiction stuff. So this is, you know, Ajit Prajapati who made this, you know, he said, oh my God, this is going to be complicated. And people who have some arts background, you know, this is Ajinkya. He created this beetle. And in the next phase, the specialization phase, he actually animated it. Check that out. That was zero to about eight or nine months all part time. And we don't have a render farm in our school. You know, so this is tough work. So he's rendering it on his laptop. He was rendering it. Please, your machine is free. I want to render it on this. And everybody would suddenly find this beetle is rendering somewhere on the other, you know. So, and that's it. And, you know, students really want to do stuff, do stuff. So again, what really happens in the specialization course is that students start, you know, refining. They start creating more complex stuff. Now the problem basically, it's not a problem. It's just that it's a natural progression. We don't have that many students doing advanced blender. We have about 170 students who have completed advanced blender courses. And since that takes a bit longer, they're still doing it. So I would say one in two or three students actually do advanced blender. Others shift to using it. They're still using blender. They use it in games. They're using it in VFX, but pure CG, you know, about 170 students. So these 170 students are hoping to make their living off blender. And some of them have problems because, you know, they go out and they say, wow, you're really so good. What did you make it in Maya? No, blender. No. But you have to learn Maya to work with us, you know. So there's still that problem. There are some companies in India now that's, you know, they are in blender, but it's still a bit of a thing. And this number, the good thing is it's accelerating. It's a lot more people are working with blender. And blender itself is getting faster and faster. And we are hoping that when we have hands-on with EV, students will be able to render that much more stuff out because, you know, that's what's stopping them from making animation. Currently with cycles, you know, it's a bit tough. So here's some work that these students do. So this Hugo-inspired image the student created. His name is Sayyam Jain. He created this and he said, oh my God. And then he realized, oh, I don't know, you know, how do I animate it? So he said, okay, you have to animate something. So this is what he did. He just moved the gears. Okay. So, you know, I said, okay, cool. He did the smoke effects and, you know, stuff like that. So he said, okay. So it's, so that's that. And another student created the shoe. Okay, Bhargav Prajapati. And we said, okay, can you make a shoe commercial with it as your project? You know, since you model the shoe, shoe commercials are big. Can you do it? So he said, okay, let me, let me do that. So that's that. Yet others, again, you know, they take on complicated things. And the thing that's stopping us from creating a lot of stuff, obviously, is that they're not able to render. But still, you know, here's another example. This is Jinnay Kumbhat. So some students create nice stuff. Okay. And again, they run out of time to do animation. So this student, we said, okay, why don't you make a making off? So she created the making off. Her name is Anugia Golcha. So one of the things they have figured out is that all students who can do this kind of elaborate modeling, they're able to plug in into the gaming, this thing, and they're able to provide their assets for the game guys. So that becomes really very useful. This was not something that was there three years ago when we started. We started teaching only gaming, gaming only a couple of years ago. We started with Unreal and now we are doing Unity. So suddenly Blender is that much more useful because you can open the file. You can take it to Unity or you can take it to Unreal and it's seamless. You know, it's pretty good and it's getting better. Again, some students do really complex stuff like this one. You know, this is by Priyanka. She made this train in a station. And boy, she couldn't get a computer that could do anything to animate it. It was stuck. So she said, okay, we said, okay, fine. Others also do them. So, you know, this is another stuff. This is more stuff. Now, here is a really ambitious project. This was supposed to be ready for us to use here. But some of the test renders they've done. But as usual, the student could never complete it. So, you know, we are hoping, when will you do this? It's pretty long and, you know, it has to be rendered. So the final thing that a lot of students do is the digital film project. Now, here, there's no escape. You are expected to make a small film. And that's what you have to do. You have to make this film in Blender. Now, the first student who made his digital film, his name was Nishad Patil. And he had originally studied in Maya. And, you know, he was part of the students who were switched from Maya to Max. Sorry, from Maya to Blender. And he said, oh my God. And we said, no, it's easy. You know, start. We can do this. And he created his little film. And he never did the foundation in Blender. He had done that in Maya. He did the entire film in Blender. So this is his film. So the student did this from beginning to end in three months, flat. You know, we thought that was really, like, you know, quite tough. Because, again, like I said, the biggest problem we have as a school is rendering. You know, a lot of students have this problem, how do I render my animations? And we have these students who got all these projects that just need to be rendered because they render a bit of it, then they realize textures are crawling, problems are happening, blah, blah, blah. Okay, you know. And nobody does the thing, okay, render it out in a small size. No, no, no, we want to see full HD. And it takes half an hour, 40 minutes. And cycles is not exactly fast. Okay. So that's it. And that's one of the things. So here's another 30-second commercial on which some two, three students work together on it. This was kind of different because a lot of the stuff is very modeling-based. This is quite a bit of, you know, FX-based. Let's check this out. So the idea is every student has to create some kind of an animation like this, or if they do that. And sometimes we say, okay, you can get together and do it, you know, so that you can all take a few shots each and do it. And I think this was pretty decent for. The last film is by a student, Deepthi Rajan. This is a part of her, you know, film. A curious dog finds an unexpected midnight visitor, raiding the refrigerator in the house. This is the story. So here goes. So her film is much longer. She hasn't yet finished it, but, you know, we thought, okay, great. And she had some texture-crawling problems like you saw. But nonetheless, you know, it's really cool that they do it in a part-time course. You know, and this is, I think, one of the really strong things that we've been doing. So that's what we've been doing. And that's some of the, you know, stuff that students were doing while learning Blender. But many of us and the instructors, we come from a really, you know, advanced. I was working with Pixion, which is one of the biggest post-production houses was in India till it was, you know. Now we have Prime Focus, which is like the biggest, but whatever. So the next thing that we wish to do, and we've started pre-production work on it, is what we call the FX Cool Short Film Project. So we have a name for this story. It's called Dirty Business. And what we are doing is we'll be creating a short animation film, and we've been so inspired by all the films that Blender Institute is creating. So we said, all of us, not just a single student, team of five or seven people, we'll get together to create this film at possibly the highest production value that we can do, and we'll get it rendered and we'll make a nice stuff. And it's an action-packed comedy series. It's like something like Spy vs. Spy kind of thing. So we've got to do that so that we have it ready for the next Blender conference. And we'll hope to see you then with another 500 students and a lot more stuff. That's what we have been doing in our little way. We have been trying to put Blender out there. There are a few studios in India that are doing really good work and you see their work regularly. But very few schools teach Blender, and the students still have difficulty going and finding jobs in Blender. And sometimes what happens is the people need the student and they come and ask us for students. At that point, the student is gone and joined somewhere else. It's a bit of a mix-and-match problem. There is a perception that, oh, we want to work with Blender studios, we want to work with Blender, but they've got a lot of senior people who are very uncomfortable actually shifting the pipeline. So the more, it's been two and a half years, three years now, the more and more students we turn out as you're seeing they start creating really good work on their own. And I'm assuming a lot of them will end up changing things in the industry. A lot of them are already doing that. So, you know, we are hoping to see a much more Blender-filled future in India. So thank you, everybody. That's that. Thank you.