FX-Camp

When I was teaching at Frameboxx, I had a student named Shakti Murugan. He was from Pondicherry, and we were quite close. We discussed a lot, and since he was in the IT department, he was especially interested in starting his own institute after seeing the way I taught. He worked in IT and had some savings.

I had approached the manager at Frameboxx about opening a franchise closer to my home. The investment required and the returns expected didn’t align with a plan for affordable, entry-level education for people just entering the industry, especially since, after paying an exorbitant amount, they might not even be able to regain it after years of work. So Shakti and I decided to start our own institute. By then I had already decided I wanted to move away from the regular method of teaching at Frameboxx, because we were in the process of making demo reels for students.

We called it FX Camp. We leased and sublet a place near Domlur, Bangalore; it was basically an office shared by multiple entities, so there used to be quite a lot of noise. We painted the interiors, got the chairs in, and had the tables, desks, and woodwork done. We also handled acoustics by installing sliding doors. We could afford about two systems, the best we could get, and we created a syllabus meant to last around three months. We taught the basics of images and video, then the fundamentals of tracking, enough to demonstrate tracking skills, and then moved into compositing in Nuke, including how to get the passes out of 3D software. We did all of this in Maya and Nuke. From then on, we followed our own syllabus.

I generally used to have breakfast at home in the morning if time allowed; I was never one to always need a meal to function. In the afternoons we from the institute used to go to nearby hotels and have whatever one wanted, except for me, I only had Shawarma rolls for lunch daily.

We spent nearly the entire day there, from 7 in the morning until 9 or 10 at night; sometimes it used to be post 11pm before we packed up and left. While I was teaching at FX Camp, my house construction was also happening on the west side of Bangalore, while the institute was in the center. With Bangalore traffic, it used to take two hours to reach the institute, so I couldn’t focus fully.

Things were going well, and we even hired additional help to handle everything. But we weren’t exactly business people. Instead of focusing on business, we focused on doing right by the students. We didn’t worry much about collecting fees on time. We wanted to put this information out in a way that would attract people, but neither of us actually had time for marketing. That was our biggest mistake. We had also created a website, Facebook page, and YouTube channel for the institute, but we never marketed them, so we couldn’t get many students. The basic reel we shared on those channels was completed in a single day: we went to Cubbon Park in the morning and by evening had the reel ready. It needs a lot of polishing, but we did have a time crunch. Not many enrolled, though two did. They learned and went through the entire pipeline; Nitin was one of them. Beyond them, quite a few other people dropped in as well.

Being who we are, Shakti and I often taught for free and tried things out for free.

We also helped other organizations with graphics issues using our own equipment, without charging anything. Without many students coming in, we spent a lot of time experimenting and learning, but in the end we couldn’t sustain ourselves.

In the end, that bankrupted us. I couldn’t focus fully with the commute, and we had to drop FX Camp.

I tried to create and open-source most of the tutorial videos, but after a system crash, most of the videos were lost, and I couldn’t open-source them in the end.

Timeline on video