“An education in animation should be accessible to everyone and not an elitist few. Our goal is to teach those who have the passion, desire, and drive to make their dream a reality through the animation art from.”
Who We Are
Stop Motion University was founded by a 20 year veteran of the Hollywood Animation Industry, John Ikuma. The vision and idea to create an online school dedicated to stop motion animation grew from the inaccessibility to the traditional animation art form education and techniques. Sure, there is a lot of free knowledge out there and there are a lot of expensive colleges and studio programs that all teach a little bit about the art form. But there was no source for real world instruction and practical thinking in the animation art form of stop motion. Having not just founded Stop Motion Magazine but also serving as the executive editor of the magazine for over 10 years, John found himself constantly being asked which school was best to learn stop motion animation. Often times the schools that came up in these conversations were too expensive for the person and there was no real solution to this. So Mr. Ikuma created Stop Motion University to provide individuals around the world access to affordable courses focused on not just stop motion animation but all animation art forms.
Where We Are Going
Initially Stop Motion University started off as an online school to fill a small niche group of learning artists how to grow their skills in stop motion animation. Once the pandemic hit in 2020 a lot of schools and even animation studios switched to online teaching. The biggest problem with this is that the costs don’t equal the education of those institutions. Many instructors around the world that teach at universities have very little in real world experience or only know a small aspect of the art form and are teaching outside of their depth and knowledge. Not here at Stop Motion University. Our goal is to bring teachers and students together in programs that will address not just their educational needs in the stop motion arts, but also expand beyond stop motion into other forms of animation such as 2D animation, CGI, Visual Effects, Model Building, and Puppet Building. Our goal as a school to to keep our courses affordable and accessible to the world. We want to keep the arts alive and to do that we need more artists in the world. So Stop Motion University is here to help fill the void.
