Full Sail Stories

For the last two years of his 18-year career at Full Sail University, Michael Corinella has brought his expertise to the Environment Art course in the Game Art  degree program, but he’s taught several different courses throughout his time at the school. His Environment Art classes involve lecturing, showing students how to create a project in the Unreal Engine, then going to the lab and having the students execute it themselves.

“I enjoy actually lecturing and walking through the content with the students as opposed to just saying, ‘Hey, this is the lesson. Go do it,’” Michael shares. “In every one of my lectures, the content that I expect the students to create, I create it in front of them.”

To make things more engaging, Michael will often start a class by playing God of War on the department’s PlayStation 5 to show examples of what they’ll be learning, and how a real, successful video game translates to their coursework. He’ll hone in on a rock or a wall in the game and talk with his students about how those pieces — their depths, their textures — are developed. Then he’ll show students the exact technique of creating those assets, and they’ll have the opportunity to practice what they learned in the lab.

Michael first became enamored with animation and animatronics when he watched Jurassic Park in his younger years. In high school, his art teacher told him about Full Sail, and in 2006, he graduated from the university with his bachelor’s in Computer Animation.

After graduation, Michael moved to New York and worked as a freelance 3D artist doing projects for various companies, using skills like modeling, shading and lighting, and rendering. When Michael found himself without work, some friends recommended he come back to Orlando to teach at Full Sail, so Michael did. He started as a lab instructor in the Computer Animation degree program and eventually shifted to Game Art. Throughout his career at Full Sail, he’s taught model creation, shading and lighting, and Portfolio VI and VII, which he helped develop the curriculum for and taught for six years. Michael also taught what he considers his specialty — character rigging.

“I enjoyed character rigging the most,” Michael says, “because it was the translation from animatronics to animation, like building the inner workings of [a character] and getting somebody else to animate it. And that's where I found I most enjoyed that connection between what I couldn't do physically and the computer.”

Over the years, Michael’s teaching philosophy has evolved from more rigid and rule-following to more relaxed and understanding of when exceptions need to be made.

“I learned about the word ‘sonder,’” Michael reflects, “which means that everybody else has as complex of a life, as difficult thoughts, as interesting thoughts, and memories just like you do. So when I learned that, it was this crazy eye-opening [experience], just one word I had to learn and it turned my whole outlook on things into something different.”

Michael enjoys his work at Full Sail. One of his favorite parts is when former students contact him and share how his classes and his teaching specifically impacted their lives. Michael shares, “When they come and say, ‘You got me that job because of the content that you taught or the ways you showed me something,’ that feels damn good.”