Lynda.com - Online Training Videos - Free for our students!

Lynda.com supplies a huge range of online training videos - which are now free to access for all our students at Bucks New University! All you have to do is log in to Blackboard, click on the Lynda.com tab - and you're in.

What is Lynda.com?

It's an online archive with more than 1,400 training videos on a broad range of subjects, including business skills, photography, design, music and video, home computing, animation, and web design and development.

Go to Blackboard, and click on the tab above.

Is it up-to-date?

New courses are added every week. And you can access the lynda.com library 24/7—even from your iPhone, iPad, Android device, or mobile phone. You can watch entire courses or single tutorial videos as you need them. Exercise files let you follow along with the instruction as you learn, and bookmarks help you keep track of what you’d like to watch.

What use it is for animation and visual effects?

Plenty! There are 44 videos for Maya alone, including polygon modeling, rigging, texturing, lighting, dynamics. You name it, they've got it.

Some of the Maya videos

What else?

There are tutorials on tons of software packages that are super useful for animation. There are 50 videos for Premiere Pro - the main editing software you will use to put your animated films together. There are 101 videos for Adobe After Effects, excellent compositing software that you can also use for animation. There are 71 videos for Flash, reliable and well-tested 2D animation software which we have installed on the PCs at Bucks, and which we used to do two of our recent films, Rocketseed and What is Wrong With the Global Development Organisation?

So what are you waiting for? If you are having trouble with any aspect of the technical process of making an animated film, need to learn a new piece of software, or need to learn a new tool - get online, and study at your own pace.

---Alex

(Editor's note: For more on how we're using online study to revolutionise the quality of teaching at Bucks, and give our students access to the very best technical resources, check out this post on our own online videos. You can also read about how we're inspired by Salman Khan's Khan Academy - pioneering the idea of "flipping the classroom", studying lectures online, and then using classrooms as workshops.)