Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario (about an hour West from Toronto where I live).
My school is really renowned. Steve Williams (basically the god father of everything that is animation) graduated from Sheridan before computer animation every really existed / took off (in fact he is responsible for pretty much solely inventing the concepts of motion tracking footage and compositing computer animations into real videos, along with many animation principles. Really interesting story, when he got the job working on Jurassic Park, he was hired as a Stop Motion blur animator, because at the time nobody had ever fathomed modeling and animating dinosaurs on a computer and incorperating them into a live action movie, Speilberg had hired a slew of people to create huge robotic dinosaurs to be used in stop motion that Steve Williams would then have to go in and blur each frame for to create a motion blur effect. Long story short, Steve secretly modeled and animated a T-Rex doing a walk cycle at home, made it Speilbergs screen saver at work, and when Speilberg came into the studio and saw it he screamed from excitement, looked at Steve and said "you just changed the world of films and animation", then announced to the entire studio "thats it, from now on the entire movie will be animated, Steve is in charge."). Steve went on to help create Industrial Light and Magic (ILM)'s studio along with Star Wars and a slew of other huge animated pieces.
We've got a 99.something% hiring rate right out of the program (both classical animation and computer animation). The beautiful thing is Sheridan is so well known that at the end of the year, inside one of Sheridan's theatres (yes, we have movie theatres to screen our animations on) over 300 companies (including little names like Pixar, Dreamworks, EA, Rockstar, Ubisoft, ILM, etc etc) come to see our final films and essentially when its all over with walk around and head hunt the animators they liked.
I love my school Im having the time of my life in it, the entire college is primarily geared towards the arts. Ive completed 3 years of classical and fine arts and I was hoping to go into the Classical Animation program last year to get the Bachelor under my belt however opportunity arose when a teacher saw my portfolio and immediately suggested I be bumped to Computer Animation instead since that was my focus, which is what Im doing now.
Ubisoft Toronto just opened it's doors, and they visited our class a few weeks ago letting us know they'll be hiring one student from my class at the end of the year to do character animation for their next xbox title. Apparently right now the teachers feel I have the job, so that should be cool.
Huge sound recording studio... every student gets a dual monitor setup to themselves with amazing specs... free life drawing classes at night, huge sound database, tonnes of famous guest speekers in all year, access to software thats just coming out, so many awesome things
.
Plus to top it off we've got an amazing pub right at the heart of the college, and a building dedicated to models (no, not 3D models, hot women models that like to go to pub night and drink the night away... bonus.).
So... I dont wana brag but... I love life right now
. Aside from the whole stress thing for the animations (From last Sunday night to Thursday, I got 7 hours of sleep. Total. Thats unheard of!)
<edit>
If youd like to get an idea of what Im working towards for the end of the year, here's a video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY3Xkxm3sSg
