One of the most exciting jobs out in the market today is video game designing. Many have the impression that it would take too much time and skills to accomplish this. Well reality check people...it does not! If you are into video games and love spending your leisure time (even your work time!), playing games then you have already passed the qualifying stages to becoming a video game designer.

Grand Theft Auto IV has finally hit store shelves and it’s landed with a boom. Shattering sales records in the UK, selling nine million (that’s 9,000,000) copies during the American midnight release alone, and angering overprotective mothers and pandering senators across the nation – the 2008 Game of the Year has arrived...

If you had told me five years ago that Downey Jr. would one day play a very convincing and likeable superhero, I would have laughed in your face. However, the man does just that in Iron Man, playing Tony Stark with a real human glow that makes his dramatic character transition from a womanizing and boozing power player to a self-sacrificing idealist believable and understandable...

What was your reason for opening Animation Mentor?

It needed to happen. After several years of reviewing many demo reels for potential candidates and seeing how the work simply did not measure up to what we were looking for, I began to have a thought in the back of my head, "how can these schools produce work that is of such low quality? There has to be a better way."

AA: When you made the decision to be an animator what was the first step you took to make your dream a reality?

LN: If you think of reaching your dream as a journey, it's a good idea to be fully equipped and prepared before venturing out. The first step for me was simply research. I wanted to learn as much as I could about the animation world. This included borrowing animation history books from the library, renting animation classics from a video store, subscribing to animation magazines, checking out animation studios online and talking to some animators at the National Film Board headquarters in my city.