Tutorials Suck.

Does anyone else think online tutorials are the death of creative ingenuity?

This is the thought process of a 20 year old media major:

Wow that effect is so cool.
I wonder how I do that?
I know! I'll just Google it.
Oh man, After Effects? Well, I'll just figure it out as I go along.
SCREW THIS, AFTER EFFECTS SUCKS. -or- Awesome, it kind of looks the same but I have no idea why it looks bad.

This post goes along with what I was saying (complaining about) on a previous post with Video Copilot tutorials. Tutorials are a fantastic learning tool when they are used correctly. Unfortunately, almost everyone seems to use them as a way to quickly reproduce an effect. Instead of building from them, learning WHY they work, and applying them toward new projects, they're dropped for the next cool shiny thing.

If you just want to stick a canned effect in your reel, just buy someone's project file and move along.

The thing that made me think about this again is that I was thinking about school, and how my classes worked. I realized over the last few months that the way I was taught most applications was not from the ground up, or even by concept. It was just a string of tutorials that the teacher would learn well enough before passing along to us.

As time goes on, I continue to wonder what the point of going to class was at all if all that knowledge can be found in a half second on Google.

Would I have skipped college? No way. Would I have gone to a different program? Who knows. Would I have figured out how to get more student loans, work less, and put more time into intensive internships and self-learning? Absolutely.