Last Week Adrian He started the Jedi Academy at Industrial Light & Magic.

He studied with Alpha Chromatica in 2024, a path Aneeta Thach recommended. Between then and now, he kept himself busy on indie projects, constantly updating his reel with every new piece he finished, all while managing his Bachelor of Arts at SFU.

He put his trust in my team and in Andrew, and he kept showing up with new work.

I've been training students ever since the Jedi Academy opened in Vancouver in 2019. ILM doesn't always run the program for compositing, but when they do, a few of my Canadian and Permanent Resident students get picked up. I'm grateful pathways like this still exist for juniors. They don't just train graduates to fit into a studio's pipeline. They help shape a young career.

Breaking in as a junior in 2026 takes more than talent. It takes real training and a large amount of iterative work, checked again and again against professional feedback, the same way making it in professional football does.

Even then, the players who weren't the best in their academy could often still find a spot in a smaller division or a different league elsewhere. Right now, a lot of those smaller and mid-size studios have closed, and the industry has fewer places left to land.

The photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen once described his hometown bus station in Helsinki, where dozens of different routes leave from the same platforms and follow the exact same streets out of the city for the first stretch.

Only after several stops do the routes start to split off toward their own destinations.

He used it to describe young artists: early work looks like everyone else's, shaped by the same influences and the same training. Most people who quit do it right around that point, convinced that looking like everyone else means they have nothing of their own. The ones who stay on past that point are the ones whose work eventually splits off into something that belongs to them alone.

Adrian stayed on the bus. He kept refining his reel, shot after shot, through every round of feedback. Last month ILM recognized that and said yes.

The odds aren't always in your favor. Keep at it and you'll catch a break, maybe not right away, but eventually.

Congratulations, Adrian. This one's yours.