Teaching
I am currently documenting what I’ve learned over the years, alongside artists I trained who have since become senior talent, at HeyGanz.com.
My teaching practice centers on visual judgment, sequencing, and decision-making.
I design curricula and instruct artists to reason clearly about image construction, constraints, and responsibility, rather than accumulate tools or techniques in isolation.
What I teach for
I teach for reliability.
That means preparing people to function when conditions are unfamiliar, requirements are incomplete, and failure has consequences. The goal is not stylistic preference or academic completion, but the ability to make defensible decisions under pressure and recover when work breaks.
This approach comes from operating across environments where instruction either works or immediately exposes itself as insufficient.
Breath of teaching Practice
Over more than two decades, my teaching has spanned a wide range of instructional contexts, stakes, and learner profiles:
- Advanced Visual Effects and Compositing diploma programmes
- Departmentalised VFX training aligned to studio production pipelines
- Curriculum design for accredited post-secondary institutions
- Adult retraining for mid-career learners transitioning into technical and creative roles
- Instruction across compositing, lighting, image integration, and visual effects fundamentals
- Military technical instruction within compliance-driven, operational environments
- Public workshops, mentorship, and independent instruction outside formal institutions
Instruction has included learners ranging from first-time students to experienced professionals, across creative, technical, and procedural domains.
How instruction is structured
I teach from first principles, using image quality and pipeline behavior as the primary evaluation criteria.
Instruction is structured around known production failure points: where artists misjudge scale, light, integration, or sequence; where procedural knowledge replaces understanding; and where work collapses under constraint.
Rather than teaching idealised workflows, I design learning paths that mirror real production learning curves, including ambiguity, revision, and recovery. This allows faster learners to advance without artificial ceilings, while preventing advancement without meeting objective quality thresholds.
Progression is competency-based, not time-based.
Curriculum design and responsibility
Curriculum design is treated as a system, not a syllabus.
Content, sequencing, and difficulty are continuously revised based on learner performance, observed failure patterns, placement outcomes, and employer feedback. Instruction is adjusted when it does not produce the intended behavioral or qualitative outcome.
Teaching decisions are made with the assumption that the work will eventually need to hold up in production, under someone else’s supervision, in conditions that are not controlled or forgiving.
What this teaching produces
The intent of this teaching is to develop judgment that transfers.
Artists trained under this approach are expected to reason independently, adapt to unfamiliar pipelines, and make fewer, clearer decisions rather than rely on repetition or instruction-by-example.
This work prioritizes clarity, responsibility, and coherence over speed, surface-level proficiency, or stylistic mimicry.
Teaching
I am currently documenting what I’ve learned over the years, alongside artists I trained who have since become senior talent, at HeyGanz.com.
I am currently documenting what I’ve learned over the years, alongside artists I trained who have since become senior talent, at HeyGanz.com.
My teaching practice centers on visual judgment, sequencing, and decision-making.
I design curricula and instruct artists to reason clearly about image construction, constraints, and responsibility, rather than accumulate tools or techniques in isolation.
I design curricula and instruct artists to reason clearly about image construction, constraints, and responsibility, rather than accumulate tools or techniques in isolation.
What I teach for
I teach for reliability.
That means preparing people to function when conditions are unfamiliar, requirements are incomplete, and failure has consequences. The goal is not stylistic preference or academic completion, but the ability to make defensible decisions under pressure and recover when work breaks.
This approach comes from operating across environments where instruction either works or immediately exposes itself as insufficient.
Breath of teaching Practice
Over more than two decades, my teaching has spanned a wide range of instructional contexts, stakes, and learner profiles:
- Advanced Visual Effects and Compositing diploma programmes
- Departmentalised VFX training aligned to studio production pipelines
- Curriculum design for accredited post-secondary institutions
- Adult retraining for mid-career learners transitioning into technical and creative roles
- Instruction across compositing, lighting, image integration, and visual effects fundamentals
- Military technical instruction within compliance-driven, operational environments
- Public workshops, mentorship, and independent instruction outside formal institutions
Instruction has included learners ranging from first-time students to experienced professionals, across creative, technical, and procedural domains.
Over more than two decades, my teaching has spanned a wide range of instructional contexts, stakes, and learner profiles:
- Advanced Visual Effects and Compositing diploma programmes
- Departmentalised VFX training aligned to studio production pipelines
- Curriculum design for accredited post-secondary institutions
- Adult retraining for mid-career learners transitioning into technical and creative roles
- Instruction across compositing, lighting, image integration, and visual effects fundamentals
- Military technical instruction within compliance-driven, operational environments
- Public workshops, mentorship, and independent instruction outside formal institutions
Instruction has included learners ranging from first-time students to experienced professionals, across creative, technical, and procedural domains.
How instruction is structured
I teach from first principles, using image quality and pipeline behavior as the primary evaluation criteria.
Instruction is structured around known production failure points: where artists misjudge scale, light, integration, or sequence; where procedural knowledge replaces understanding; and where work collapses under constraint.
Rather than teaching idealised workflows, I design learning paths that mirror real production learning curves, including ambiguity, revision, and recovery. This allows faster learners to advance without artificial ceilings, while preventing advancement without meeting objective quality thresholds.
Progression is competency-based, not time-based.
Curriculum design and responsibility
Curriculum design is treated as a system, not a syllabus.
Content, sequencing, and difficulty are continuously revised based on learner performance, observed failure patterns, placement outcomes, and employer feedback. Instruction is adjusted when it does not produce the intended behavioral or qualitative outcome.
Teaching decisions are made with the assumption that the work will eventually need to hold up in production, under someone else’s supervision, in conditions that are not controlled or forgiving.
What this teaching produces
The intent of this teaching is to develop judgment that transfers.
Artists trained under this approach are expected to reason independently, adapt to unfamiliar pipelines, and make fewer, clearer decisions rather than rely on repetition or instruction-by-example.
This work prioritizes clarity, responsibility, and coherence over speed, surface-level proficiency, or stylistic mimicry.
I teach from first principles, using image quality and pipeline behavior as the primary evaluation criteria.
Instruction is structured around known production failure points: where artists misjudge scale, light, integration, or sequence; where procedural knowledge replaces understanding; and where work collapses under constraint.
Rather than teaching idealised workflows, I design learning paths that mirror real production learning curves, including ambiguity, revision, and recovery. This allows faster learners to advance without artificial ceilings, while preventing advancement without meeting objective quality thresholds.
Progression is competency-based, not time-based.
Curriculum design and responsibility
Curriculum design is treated as a system, not a syllabus.
Content, sequencing, and difficulty are continuously revised based on learner performance, observed failure patterns, placement outcomes, and employer feedback. Instruction is adjusted when it does not produce the intended behavioral or qualitative outcome.
Teaching decisions are made with the assumption that the work will eventually need to hold up in production, under someone else’s supervision, in conditions that are not controlled or forgiving.
What this teaching produces
The intent of this teaching is to develop judgment that transfers.
Artists trained under this approach are expected to reason independently, adapt to unfamiliar pipelines, and make fewer, clearer decisions rather than rely on repetition or instruction-by-example.
This work prioritizes clarity, responsibility, and coherence over speed, surface-level proficiency, or stylistic mimicry.