Apart from the fact that Blender is extremely good software, I also view it as a very strong enabling technology: Blender is able to provide people – who would normally not be able to afford 3D training – the opportunity to start a career in 3D.
Most of Africa falls in the above category. Therefore, when I was recently invited as a Blender Foundation Certified Trainer to present a 7-day introductory Blender workshop in Nigeria, I decided to go despite rumours about the country – and was pleasantly surprised by what I experienced there at ground level…
Nigeria is a tropical country, so it was very hot – even though it was only Spring. Fortunately, I presented the workshop at Media Village in Jos, which is on the Nigerian plateau – and therefore one of the cooler spots.
As a South African “Westerner”, I experienced the conditions on the ground as quite challenging, but it was very obvious that they were very used to it and have learnt to live with it. Some of the hurdles we had to overcome were:
They usually only had electricity for about 40-50% of the day. They compensated for that by having their own small generator, which was marginally powerful enough to power the laptops and the projector. Whenever somebody switched on a light, the generator would start protesting and the power would start fluctuating. Therefore, while we were busy with training, all other electrical activities ground to a halt, including Media Village's video editing. Although we usually went on till about 18:00 in the evenings, they overcame it by merely doing their video editing after hours.
There was no running water. The water we used came from a well, from which they drew water with a container stitched together from a tube of a tyre. They then heated the water on the paraffin stove to be used for food, drinking water and also bath/washing water. (Obviously the water was poured into different containers, depending on their use.)
I felt so spoilt as a guest: I was given a separate room to sleep in, with an on-suite bathroom (even though bathing meant washing myself in the bath from a bucket of warm water), as well as being provided bottled drinking water, biscuits, fruit, sweets, etc. I got this special treatment, while the students were willing to share 4 per room on “bunk beds”. They also had to share a common bathroom in the passage.
I found the food to be very healthy: mostly freshly picked, then cooked. They also love carbohydrates, and fish made up a larger part of the diet than I am used to. Their food is not as refined (and therefore not as unhealthy) as most the food found in the developed countries.
But what really struck me was the eagerness of the people to learn, despite their circumstances. They brought their own laptops, etc. and stayed over at Media Village, because it was about 15km out of town. They hung on my lips and eagerly listened to what I taught them. One of them had to go back to town twice to find another laptop, as the ones he initially brought were either too slow, or did not support OpenGL. Some of the students had previously done an introductory Maya course and commented that they found Blender a lot easier to learn: they found the hotkeys easier to memorise than Maya's relatively complex menu structure and many settings to set up in order to accomplish something. They were also pleasantly surprised by Blender's capabilities and feature-richness and agreed with me that “Blender is the way to go for 3D animation in Africa”, because:
- From a capability and quality point-of-view, it compares very well with top-end commercial software
- It does not require such high-end processing and RAM requirements as commercial software – therefore lower cost hardware
- It is free
Nigeria's 3D capabilities is in its infancy and there are not many 3D animation schools worth talking about. The students were therefore extremely grateful for the workshop. Statements such as: “I am doing 2D cell animation. I have been trying to get into 3D animation for the past 10 years. This training was life changing - beyond comprehension” really made the trip an investment in people's lives – and worth returning for more… because my life was also touched. *****
If anybody is interested in inviting the author to present Blender training courses or becoming involved in supporting the move to use Blender as a life-changing, career-enabling 3D animation technology to disadvantaged communities, please contact him via his web site: http://www.dnapixels.com.
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