AUSTRALIA – International lighting and production design house Mandylights has launched a new online training platform designed to teach and up skill technicians, designers and programmers of all abilities with a unique angle. Mandylights U is a fast paced, event and entertainment industry web portal that focuses on education in specific software packages alongside broader insights in to both the design process and life in the industry in general.
More details from Mandylights (www.mandylights.com):
Like many others, the team at Mandylights spent a considerable amount of time during lockdown seeking to bolster their skills and broaden their knowledge across previs, CAD and console software. Although the concept has been in the making for over 4 years after a few too many hours of watching deadpan product videos and preaching from sales advisors, the designers from the United Kingdom and Australia decided to create a new platform that would teach real world skills with an unbiased, casual but informed approach. Enter Mandylights U – the education resource designed and built by actual, practicing programmers and designers to train other designers and help the industry skill up!
The brainchild of Mandylights designer Steve Bewley, Mandylights U has seen over a thousand hours of time invested into the platform to create meaningful, real-world training resources. Bewley said “Our aim is to provide an easily accessible platform for education and reference for the whole entertainment industry. We are committed to making this the largest online education platform the industry has. We believe that education on the tools that we use should
not need to cost the earth even more so at this time which is why we are bringing to the world this valuable tool.
Creating such a platform is a monumental task but will be an ongoing process as we attempt to provide a resource that users will be able to find the answers to pretty much every technical or practical question”.
Mandylights U launches with the largest resource of training materials for Depence 2; probably the most exciting piece of previsualisation software to arrive on the market in years. With over twenty hours and counting of content arranged in simple, bite-sized, straight-to-the-point chapters, the platform is guaranteed to be as valuable as a quick reference guide as much as it is for a first-time user wanting to learn from scratch.
Vectorworks is also featured at launch; another piece of industry-standard software that is ripe for a designer-lead training course that highlights the necessary parts and dives deeper into the more commonly used aspects of the Spotlight and Fundamentals packages. The most basic training for Vectorworks and most other software can creep in to thousands but the model of Mandylights U allows for courses to be brought to users that are specific to the requirements of designers and technicians alike allowing for top professional insider training at a fraction of the cost.
Just want to know what a specific tool does in Vectorworks? Then simply type it in and the internal search facility should display the result you’re looking for.
In the coming months, Mandylights U will expand to include detailed features on project design and delivery and seek to provide additional insight into the world of lighting design – as told by lighting designers instead of a salesperson.
Mandylights U is a subscription based service with varying rates in addition to a large number of free videos. The platform is supported by the in-house staff at Mandylights and is designed to thrive on user-feedback in the coming months.
Mandylights U can be found at www.mandylightsu.com
