Kai at Exceptional Minds

We had come to LA so that Kai could attend a summer workshop at Exceptional Minds, a professional training academy and studio for visual effects artists and animators with autism. They have a three-year full-time program, and in the summer offer two-week sessions for teens. We had enrolled Kai in the introductory class for digital animation.

As with many things with Kai, we hoped for the best but feared the worst. Kai has historically had difficulty adjusting to new things or changes in his routine. So we were very pleased when he came home from the workshop each day with a smile on his face. We never received the dreaded call that he had to be taken out of class or disrespected his teachers. Things actually seemed to be going well!

In the middle of the second week, parents can schedule a 15-minute session with one of EM's behavioral specialists to get feedback on how their child has done. While it was great that Kai was enjoying it, we were anxious to get the perspective of the staff.

And so it was with relief and joy that we heard that Kai was doing quite well. She told us that they evaluate their students on technical, artistic, and behavioral elements.

We heard that Kai has a distinct artistic style and is good with human figures, though he should work to improve on drawing anatomy.

When she talked about Kai's behavior, we were most nervous as Kai has had issues at various times at school.

But the report here was surprisingly good. Kai was described as a good worker. He's mostly quiet because he is always working on his animations. But during breaks, he was more social. The staff member said that Kai was inquisitive and asked his instructor what he could do to improve.

At this point I almost stopped her to make sure she was talking about Kai and didn't have us mixed up with parents of some other student. But then it became clear that she was indeed talking about our son.

On the afternoon of the last day of the workshop, parents were invited back to see clips from the work that all students had worked on the past two weeks. It was interesting to see the work from other sessions such as Storyboarding and Advanced Digital Effects. It is possible Kai could enroll in those in future summers.

From his own session on beginner-level animation, students created a wide variety of work. Kai had fun music and probably had more different animated figures in his piece, though he didn't have much of a plot as his feature was mainly just one guy fighting off a bunch of attackers.

My wife was a little disappointed that he didn't have a more coherent storyline. And it's clear that he is not exactly a child prodigy or young Walt Disney at this point.

But I came away feeling pretty good.

The purpose of enrolling him here was to see if he would be interested in computer animation, and to learn the basic skills. That he accomplished that and received high marks from the school for his behavior and inquisitiveness is wonderful.

So where do we go from here?

We'll probably invest in getting the Adobe suite of software so Kai can continue to learn at home. If he stays interested, we will also consider getting him private tutoring as Exceptional Minds offers private sessions virtually.

One thing we learned here that surprised us was that EM rarely takes students into their full-time program straight out of high school. They said that the vast majority of the students now come in with some college or working experience. Having a level of maturity and knowing for sure that the digital arts is a career passion is a requirement.

And so we will have to try to keep Kai on the college path before seeing if he can later attend Exceptional Minds' full-time program. Not sure how ready he will be for college in three years but this next year will be a good indicator on his readiness.

It won't be easy. We'll have stressful times, I'm sure.

But for the first time we see that there might be something that Kai can have as a career, something that he finds interesting and fun. That's not a small thing. It's a start.