Choosing Vancouver Film School

Hey there. I wrote this six or so months ago while I was researching my school. It's still relevant to me, and may be for you, too, if you are looking into a Game Design discipline as a career.

The Art Institute of Vancouver and the Vancouver Film School

Let me start by saying that, by all accounts, you don’t have to go to school to learn game design (much like you don’t have to go to school to learn to be a writer), but for many people the structure, focus, and relationships born of post-secondary education yield results. I believe it is the best path for me to earn broad experience in the field.

Unfortunately for me, short of taking a four-year Bachelor of Computer Science degree (and changing who I am), my local options for game design are limited to experimentation with the editors that are becoming more and more common in games these days. To that end, I looked west to British Columbia and found the Art Institute of Vancouver (Ai).

I should point out that you can find negative reviews of every post-secondary school out there, and the two I looked at most closely are no exception. This makes choosing a school to invest money and time into very difficult. More on that in my conclusions, below.

Ai

At the time of this writing, the Art Institute of Vancouver’s Game Art and Design curriculum covers a full range of game design principles including classes in writing, art, animation, design theory, and a large practical component where student teams create game prototypes. The program costs nearly $40,000 in tuition, and requires about $500 (Can) in books and materials. I was told that tuition will go up sometime soon.

I attended an open house held by Ai in Edmonton, and after expressing interest in the program I was promptly contacted by extremely helpful people from their enrolment and student financial services departments. Ai does an excellent job of selling themselves, and is more attentive than I would have ever expected from a post-secondary institution. The application fee was $150, and I was accepted in about 10 days after providing my college transcripts, fees, and other documentation.

I was set to attend until I discovered some troubling accounts of Ai exaggerating their success records, with specific examples from the Game Art and Design program pressuring their staff to deem a graduate working as a software retail clerk as “successful.” I have higher hopes for my very expensive and time-intensive education, so I started searching around for another institute. I didn’t have to look far before finding the Vancouver Film School (VFS).

VFS

The Game Design program at VFS offers a similar curriculum to the Ai program, but by all accounts it is much more intensive, with 30-hour weeks (in-class), and an expected 15-20+ hours of homework on top of that, which translates into one solid year of schoolwork (rather than the nearly two years for similar certification from Ai). The program has a strong practical component as well, with teams building game prototypes for the last six months of the program to present to industry professionals on scheduled “Industry Night(s)”. The costs are a little under $33,000 for the year, which includes all materials. They accept students 3-4 times a year, 30 students at a time, so competition is strong. As of this writing I am competing for one of the last open spaces in 2011.

UPDATE: I’ve been accepted, so it is officially decision time.

The application fee was $200, and I needed to include two work-relationship/personal references, other documentation, and (most enjoyably) a four-page game idea précis. If I want to officially have them hold my seat in the program, I need to provide a “probably non-refundable” 5% deposit of the entire cost, which comes to $1612.

VFS offers a shorter overall program with a similar curriculum for less money. They only have campuses in and around Vancouver (where Ai is spread throughout the United States), and there seems to be a great deal of success coming out of the program, including some notable talent working at (you guessed it) BioWare.

I read a half-dozen reviews, crunched the numbers, asked advice, spoke to advisors, reviewed my goals, and contacted one of the VFS alumni, a game designer named Grayson Scantlebury to ask him a million questions. (Thanks, Gray).

In short, I’m hoping to get in to the Game Design program at VFS for the reasons outlined above and also because my needs and priorities have changed. Both programs claim a 75%+ graduate success rate (with the online reports of unhappy students vehemently contradicting those numbers), but the actual success rate for me is unimportant—I am determined to graduate at the top of my class with a knockout demo reel to ensure I’m in that employed bracket. Later, after 5-8 years of experience in a variety of industry roles, I intend to open my own development house. I expect to have to work hard (and live a bit of a lean lifestyle) to achieve my goals, but I have no doubt it will be worth it. Ya gotta believe.

Here are some conclusions or thoughts I took away from this experience.

• Time and cost are strong influencers, but trust makes just about anything possible (or not). I see more success coming from VFS and less of an investment in time and money for identical certification. Finally, VFS is an accredited institution with a 20-year history (not including my chosen program, of course, but it’s nice to know that they aren’t new to this).
• You have to take reviews with a grain of salt—you will always find someone willing to complain about a given institution, and you won’t always find someone who loves it. Your best bet is to do your research and find out which program will drive/allow you to succeed.
• No education guarantees success, Don’t expect to just graduate and get a job.
• As with most things, you’ll probably get out what you put into your post secondary education. Attitude matters. Relationships matter. Grades may or may not matter, but being able to demonstrate your talent most assuredly does.
• Game design is a relatively new discipline, and is hard to define. Game design may not officially be broken up into sub-disciplines of art, level design, audio, story, etc., but game designers tend to specialize, anyway. A good game designer will have a strong grasp on each sub-discipline, too.
• Game designers are not idea people. They have ideas, but so does everyone else in industry.