Agora Community is an interactive online platform designed for animators at all skill levels. It offers a rich array of educational content, community engagement, and expert mentorship to nurture members' animation skills within a supportive and playful environment.

Yes, Agora Community is free to join and offers a wide range of content and resources at no cost. While we plan to introduce some "premium" services at an affordable price in the future, we remain dedicated to providing free resources to ensure education and mentoring stay as accessible as possible.

You can obtain feedback through a couple of methods within our community. We hold regular live feedback sessions hosted by our mentors as well as live “office hours” sessions with mentors where artists can ask for career advice or discuss other related topics. Additionally, beyond mentor guidance, our Discord community offers peer-to-peer reviews in the feedback channels. Over time, we plan to offer additional formats such as pre-recorded reviews and direct one-on-one mentorship.

Currently, we’re offering live, free, group mentorship sessions in our community Discord server. These sessions are ideal for those seeking career advice, wishing to enhance their technical skills, or requiring specific feedback. Over time, we plan to offer additional formats including pre-recorded reviews, one-on-one mentorship, and more.

Agora.Community provides free, accessible, high quality education courses and content, with members only paying for direct mentorship and additional interactive education as needed. With no paywalls or time limits, this fulfills a wide range of learning styles and life schedules, allowing artists to learn at their own pace. We also invest heavily in building a community where artists can receive feedback, grow together, and have fun. Our Discord community and livestreams host a wide array of opportunities for artists of all experience levels to connect and offers a space for a diverse population of artists to interact. Within that community, we create opportunities for collaboration through structured animation challenges, where artists can apply what they learn and share their growth with the rest of the community. All of this is done in an effort to bring opportunities and resources to as many artists as possible.

The short answer:

We envision Agora Community supporting everyone from entry-level newcomers to seasoned veterans. Beginners will have access to everything they need to start learning. Intermediate artists will find advanced challenges and collaborative opportunities that refine their skillsets. While industry veterans will have the opportunity to share their knowledge and mentor newcomers.

If you'd like a more detailed breakdown:

Education

The idea is that each piece of Agora Community will work together to support artists' creative journeys. Courses are where you can learn new concepts. Our assets will let you practice those concepts with studio-level rigs. You'll put your skills to the test in AnimChallnge, assignments, and other community projects. The mentors and community will be there to offer feedback. And then, when you've accomplished a goal, you'll have a community of friends and peers to share that growth with.

Besides Agora-created content, we also want to foster a ‘pay it forward' environment, where community members can contribute their own educational material if they wish. To keep our ever-growing courses easy to navigate, we're also creating structured paths, grouping courses together that complement one another and provide guidance of what steps to take in what order.

Personal Profile

We will continue to develop the user profiles into a platform that allows artists to easily showcase their various projects, growth, and skillsets. Eventually, we hope Agora Community profiles will become a tool for artists to attract recruiters and other artists interested in collaborating.

Gamification

We all enjoy learning when it feels like a game! Down the road, we want to incorporate leaderboards, badges, and points systems that reward you for completing assignments and helping others. We hope this will encourage personal artistic growth and positive contributions to the community.

Mentorship & Internships

We will offer various models to obtain private and public mentorship at reasonable prices, as well as specific creative projects tailored for internships. Moreover, we will enable community members to offer mentorship through our platform, providing qualified individuals with opportunities to generate income as mentors without having to manage the administrative complexities of private mentorship.

Search Tool

We're proud of all the content we offer! But we also know the importance of being able to find want you need...and fast. We'll be implementing advanced AI-powered search tools that will allow artists to find the resources they need quickly.

Competition & Community Projects

Artists flourish when they have fun and work on things they're excited about. We aim to create opportunities for artists to engage in friendly competitions and contribute to projects they're passionate about. In Agora Community's future, we envision large-scale competitions that are exciting for artists of all levels, eventual crowdsourced projects (short films, video games, etc.) that foster both creativity and production-level learning opportunities for artists… and more!

Expertise Diversity

While we're starting with animation, our goal is to eventually include the full range of expertise within our industry. In the long run, we want to open our community to all aspects of computer graphics and digital art, such as modeling, rigging, texturing, lighting, compositing, visual effects, and more.