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How to Become an Animator

Your guide for evaluating animation jobs and animation schools

By Kris Larson

AbouttheAuthor: Kris Larson was a senior marketing executive and hiring manager in the entertainment industry for many years. She currently works with Animation Mentor to develop eBooks and articles about the animation industry.

(Shameless Plug)

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If you want to be a character animator, you’ll need to know more than just animation tips and tricks. Bobby Beck, Shawn Kelly, and Carlos Baena cofounded the online character animation school in 2005 because many aspiring animators weren’t learning the art behind animation. Animation Mentor teaches you the art behind animation under the guidance of professional animators who are currently working at leading studios. Our approach also prepares you with the skills and experience to succeed in a studio environment. At the end of the program, you graduate with a killer demo reel that’s your resume for a job and connections to jobs at film studios and video game companies.

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LETTER FROM

ANIMATIONMENTOR.COM FOUNDERS

Dear Aspiring Animator,

If you’re reading this eBook, that means you’re interested in becoming an animator, the coolest job in the world! We’ve been animators for a while now, working at Pixar Animation Studios and Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). We’ve fulfilled our dreams of becoming animators and want to help you fulfill your dreams too. This is why we created Animation Mentor. We wanted to share what we know about character animation with you so you can achieve your dreams. Our total enrollment is 900 students and growing, and we’ve seen our graduates go on to exciting careers.

We believe the keys to a successful animation career can be found in“TheThree P’s: Practice, Perseverance and Personality.” We cannot give you any of the Three P’s – you must bring these to the table on your own in order to become the best animator you can be. What’s unique about Animation Mentor is that we provide you with unparalleled animation training and support so you learn animation and graduate with an awesome demo reel. Our 18-month animation program teaches you everything that we know about character animation.

We hope you enjoy our eBook on How to Become an Animator! This eBook is a guide to help you evaluate animation jobs and schools to find the best fit for your interests and talents.

Wishing you the best of luck in your animation journey!

AnimationMentor.com School Founders

Character animation, for example, focuses exclusively on making a character act. The job relies on the animator’s creativity to create an acting performance and bring a character to life through movement and expressions. On the other hand, building rigs is almost exclusively a technically oriented job that requires the ability to create algorithms and handle complex programming.

In professional visualization and simulation, you may be doing things like architectural renderings for interior designs or landscaping for amusement parks and arenas. Another area of simulation is in medical animations that show how a pharmaceutical interacts with the body’s circulatory system, or demonstrates surgical techniques. Another avenue is machinery and industrial design. Animation is used to show how all the gears and levers inside machinery work. Animators are also used in law enforcement for crime scene reconstruction to show investigators and juries how an event might have happened.

For any of these types of jobs, you will need to have detailed knowledge about the industry you want to work in and specialized training to develop the specific skill sets required for those roles.

Production work usually involves building, rigging and texturing models as well as animating characters, and creating and lighting the final scenes. Rendering is used to output animation sequences that are ready for editing and compositing.

Below is a brief look at some of the job titles and job descriptions you might encounter in a typical production type of environment in the animation world.

• 2D Animators use drawing, composition, and perspective to create proportion, line of action, structure, and basic anatomy, while working in areas as varied as animation, character design, clean-up, doping, modeling, slugging, and storyboarding.

•3D Animators use software tools and rigs to accomplish many of the same things 2D animators do.

•Character Animators create an acting performance and bring a character to life through movement and

expressions, regardless of medium

• Character FX (hair/cloth/fur) artists are responsible for the design of character effects such as cloth and fur simulations. They develop tools to enhance the pipeline. A knowledge of Maya, rigging tools and surface modeling techniques is helpful.

• Lighting supervisors create the lighting look, processes and techniques necessary to portray the art director’s vision of the movie. They recommend lighting pipelines, tools and procedures for CG production.

• Matte painters design environments based on the story and script. They are painters and artists who can conceptualize and visualize ideas including complex backgrounds, landscapes and environments. They use tools like Photoshop, Maya and Renderman.

•Modelers create 3D models of characters and settings based on preliminary graphics.

•Renderers manage the “render farm,” the group of machines that actually render the 3D models into working

animation.

• Roto artists work to embed an animated character into a live-action scene and/or enhance the sense of depth (such as putting a character behind a tree).

• Storyboard artists interpret scripts into images that best convey the story. They plan and coordinate images from thumbnails for planning shots to final storyboards that visually demonstrate how the story will develop.