Yellowbrick Acquires Top Online Animation Faculty and Secures Sony Innovation Funding
3 min readTwo strategic moves have been declared that will further cement IndieWire education lover Yellowbrick’s status as a main learning platform for the creative financial system.
First, Yellowbrick has secured an investment from Sony Innovation Fund by IGV, which invests in technology-pushed businesses now shaping the potential of small business, entertainment, and society.
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Moreover, Yellowbrick has acquired Animation Mentor, regarded as the primary online animation faculty, and established by Bobby Beck, Shawn Kelly, and Carlos Baena, renowned expert animators driving some of the most significant hits from Walt Disney Function Animation, Pixar Animation Studios, and Industrial Light & Magic. Animation Mentor was launched in 2005 to address the need for field-skilled animators, uniting pupils with business specialists in a output setting. Animation Mentor has an alumni group of over 5,000 students during 105 nations now operating in world-course studios like Pixar, DreamWorks, Industrial Mild & Magic, Laika, WETA and many more.
As the desire for creator-centric applications and platforms has developed, so much too has the desire for academic options that offer you business understanding that aid innovative business owners thrive. Yellowbrick has emerged as a chief in this area owing to its strong partnerships with educational leaders like New York University, Parsons, and Match, alongside with significant media brand names like IndieWire and Rolling Stone, which are equally owned by Penske Media Company. Yellowbrick learners — from the substantial-college amount to NBA stars — have gone on to develop innovative company ventures significant and compact.
“Yellowbrick’s emphasis on rising the creator financial state via instruction matches with our mission to assistance promising startups who bring imaginative and promising improvements to the environment,” claimed Gen Tsuchikawa, CEO and main financial commitment officer at Sony Innovation Fund by IGV. “The team has designed large-high quality instructional information that has captivated top rated universities and marquee manufacturers to create the next era of creators. On top of that, their focus on schooling and marketing diversity by means of their work with firms to provide chances to underrepresented learners, aligns with our ESG endeavours.”
“We sought to generate the kind of instruction and mentorship software that we by no means experienced when we had been beginning out, and that dream turned a fact as we have taught thousands of aspiring animators and noticed many of them develop into increasing stars in their very own proper,” reported Bobby Beck, CEO of Animation Mentor. “Now, in signing up for the Yellowbrick platform, we’re ready to take what we have constructed and expand that encounter to other innovative industries like Film, Audio, Design, Manner — the places in which Yellowbrick has currently noticed so substantially achievement.”
“Over the past 20 many years, excellent strides have been created in STEM education and learning with flexible bootcamp offerings and on the internet mastering. On the other hand, with significantly of the concentration placed on technical fields, the ‘A’ for ‘Arts’ — which transforms STEM into the more complete ‘STEAM’ — has normally been underrepresented. That is the place Yellowbrick comes in to fill that educational gap,” mentioned Rob Kingyens, president and CEO of Yellowbrick. “The Sony Innovation Fund by IGV shares our eyesight and has come aboard as a great companion at the exact time that the staff from Animation Mentor is becoming a member of our ranks. Alongside one another, we’ll proceed to renovate training as it relates to inventive fields and the creator financial state.”
IndieWire and Rolling Stone partnered with Yellowbrick and NYU’s Tisch Faculty of the Arts for the launch very last yr of “Film and Television set Field Necessities,” a four-section on the web education collection for aspiring film and Television storytellers.
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