"Now our students can take our entire program, which includes eight Maya CGI visual effects courses, along with an Adobe Photoshop and After Effects course, giving them more tools to compliment their education in visual effects," says Ward. "Our program offers a 476 hours of training, which includes 224 hours of lab time."
The school has plans to include training on other production software packages in the near future, including popular visual effects, animation, CG modeling, texturing and rendering tools.
"We are focusing on becoming a complete media educational facility" says Kevin Scolaro, dean of education for the school. "Our goal at M.I.A. is to offer training in all of the industry standard media production tools used by the film, television, video and gaming industries."
The school will continue to maintain its small class sizes as well as offer distance learning via its fully interactive, instructor led, online Web conferencing classes.
Registration is currently open for the next visual effects program with classes starting March 6th. Classes run in succession.