Not yet. 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.

Group mentor sessions are free and open to the community, with each session led by an Agora Community mentor. We put an emphasis on creating an environment that allows for in-depth conversation between mentors and artists, so sessions with a focus on interaction (feedback and Q+A sessions) are limited to up to 10 artists per mentor per session. All sessions and session sign ups are held in Discord, so check out Discord to get involved!

Currently we offer live feedback sessions, live mentor Q+As, and live demos. You can receive live, interactive feedback on your shot or demo reel in a mentor feedback session. Live mentor Q+As are a place to go with any questions or topics (career advice, industry questions, etc.) you’d like to discuss with a mentor and your peers. And the live demos are where mentors demonstrate a variety of technical and creative workflows, processes, and tools. All the sessions are designed to help you further your skills and artistry, and the variety aims to offer a well-rounded experience. Got ideas for other types of sessions we could offer? Let us know!

Yes! In the future, we may offer private one-on-one mentoring or more structured mentoring that could require a fee. But we aim to build a model that keeps mentorship as accessible as possible to the community.

All our group mentorship sessions are held on Discord! To get involved, check out our Discord and go to our MENTORSHIP section in the server to learn more.

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.

Yes! Agora Community, AnimChallenge, and Frame by Frame are all part of the collection of community-focused projects driven by Agora Studio. Frame by Frame supports the project by providing educational material, AnimChallenges provides a space for artists to practice the skills they’ve learned and engage in friendly community-competition, and Agora Community is hub that connects everything together with access to mentorship, courses, community engagement, and studio-level assets. Think of Agora Community as the school and AnimChallenge and Frame by Frame as the clubs within the school!

AnimChallenge is a regularly-scheduled animation competition that allows animators to challenge themselves and improve their skills with creative prompts and friendly-competition. Started in 2019, AnimChallenge has gone through many evolutions, first starting as a monthly challenge, then partnering with Agora to scale up the challenges and offer studio-level assets for the challenges, and now, evolving into a format of smaller, shorter challenges and a couple of large scale challenges during the year. AnimChallenge has always kept it fun and creative, and we’re excited to keep that going in the years to come!

Frame by Frame is a long-running initiative to analyze and appreciate the craft of animation, animation principles, and all the cool stuff in between. Having now existed for 6 years, Frame by Frame has analyzed close to 1000 animated shots, live action shots, and illustrations, and they’re still going strong. Frame by Frame’s work is fueled by a small but passionate team of Agora artists who love both being nerds about animation and also sharing that nerdiness with the rest of the community.

Good question! Agora is the creator of both Agora Studio and Agora Community, with the two living side by side. Agora Studio is a professional studio that provides professional animation, rigging, modeling, lighting, and production services to clients, and now has expanded to create original projects like Transferable and other IPs.

Agora Community is the branch of Agora dedicated to education and community. We see the value and innovation behind online learning and communities, and, as artists, we’re passionate about giving back to the community as so many of us know we wouldn’t be where we are without the generous help and guidance of others. We all want to pay it forward, and this feels like the perfect way to do it.

There’s a couple of options! Asking questions in the comments section of the rig is a good option. Another option is to ask in the “tech-help” section of our community Discord. Just remember to be polite and courteous when asking for help, and that sometimes it’s good to do a 5 minute Google search before poking others! But if Google can’t help, the community is here to help.

For any challenge that relies on community voting to help determine the winner, the submissions will be uploaded a few days after the challenge deadline closes. In order to vote, you need to log in to leave a thumbs up. You can vote for as many submissions as you like.

Yes! We’re always happy to receive suggestions, and it’s very beneficial to our team as we can’t have eyes everywhere, unfortunately, and could be missing out on offering some cool resources to the community! Feel free to email us or reach out to our mod team on the Discord server if you have suggestions.

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 AnimChallenge, 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.