As we did last year, Hand Turkey Studios participated in this year’s Red Hat High program. Jason van Gumster traveled to Red Hat headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina for one week to teach 3D animation with the open source program, Blender, to a group students with ages ranging from 13 to 15 years old. Jason assembled a team of artists from the Blender community to co-instruct the class, including modeler and tutorial creator Jonathan Williamson, 2006 Suzanne Award-winner Sam Brubaker, and Elephants Dream director Bassam Kurdali.

The Digital Animation track at Red Hat High was the most popular track with students in 2006 and had the largest class size this year with 15 students attending. Other tracks at the camp included Audio, Illustration, Digital Darkroom, and Programming featuring other open source tools such as Hydrogen, Audacity, Inkscape, and The GIMP.

Red Hat intends to expand the Red Hat High program to other locations throughout the world and is in the process of developing materials to aid teachers in developing curricula that suit their needs. The team of Blender instructors is actively involved in this process. As part of this, Jason will be giving a QuickTake presentation about Red Hat High at this year’s SIGGRAPH conference in San Diego.

More Information

• Video of student work on Sheep-dot
• Article on Blender Nation
• Red Hat Magazine Articles
  • Red Hat High 2007: Getting Started
  • Red Hat High 2007: Update
• Red Hat High flickr stream