Free Course Materials

About These Course Materials

There are two categories of course materials: videos and support. The support materials include the PDF handouts and the programs that we use in the course (along with any files they depend on, like images or fonts).

Each week, everything is broken up into numbered groups to make things easier to organize. The videos inside each group are also numbered.

I strongly recommend that you watch the videos in order! The videos build on one another, and if you skip around you're likely to get lost and perhaps frustrated. The easiest way to learn the material is to watch the videos in order.

Streaming vs. Downloading

There are two ways to access the videos: streaming and downloading. The pros and cons of each are on the right. Feel free to choose whichever is best for you at any given moment.

The support materials, on the other hand, are documents like PDF files and text files that hold programs for you to run. By their nature they cannot be streamed, so you have to download the support materials. They're in files that have been compressed using the .zip format. You can download the entire week's support materials in one big zip file, or you can get them in a bunch of smaller files, one per group. The programs, or sketches, will unpack into folders with names like "W5_G3_Sketches," to indicate that these are the programs for Week 5, Group 3. If you download an individual movie file, you'll get its associated programs as well.

Streaming

  • Watch any video immediately
  • Watch on any device at any time
  • No need for new programs on your computer
  • Requires a fast net connection
  • Cannot speed up or slow down the video
  • No choice of video player
  • Backing up to re-watch something can mean waiting a few seconds for the video to restart

Downloading

  • Play videos faster or slower than normal
  • Use your favorite video player
  • Watch videos without a net connection
  • You can't watch a video until it's been downloaded
  • If you want to use another device, you have to manually copy the video files onto that device
  • Downloading can be slow
  • Video files are big and use a lot of storage

The First Four Weeks

The links to the right will take you to individual pages for each week's materials, one week at a time. When you've viewed all the videos in a given week, just come back here to start the next week.

Week 1: The Basics

Week 2: Animation

Week 3: Interaction

Week 4: Control

There's much more waiting in the second half of the course!

The links above give you access to the first half of the course, which are enough to get you started. But things really get exciting in the second half, when we introduce lots of new tools and techniques that let you stretch your imagination even farther:

To get access to the rest of the course, head over to our Free View and Enrollment page and sign up!