I know a 19 yr old high school graduate who is very interested in animation. He draws a lot, has created his own comics characters,and spends lots of time on the web following stuff to do with “animation”–whatever that is.
He’s follows Japanese anime–(and says that the best ones are not the porno ones,apparently
He wants to go to college at a “School of Arts and Design”, which offers a BFA degree (bachelor of fine arts) in Animation.
I know zero about animation, and don’t even know what it is.(Other than Mickey Mouse and Yogi Bear, etc,from saturday morning cartoons when I was a child 4 decades ago)
Is this a reasonable career choice?What type of jobs does it offer for an average person with no connections in the industry?
I realize that a career in any of the creative arts is usually less secure than lots of other fields. And in animation, some small number of the best people will be very successful working for Steven Speilberg or Walt Disney.
But what about an average student who may be deep in debt after 4 years of college?
What kind of jobs are out there? I’m guessing that advertising is a possibliity. What else? Educational flims for schools?
I was about to say that drawing-based animation was mostly replaced with CGI in the US, but then realized I was thinking only of movies–there are tons of animated TV series. But most of them are animated using computers, too, just simpler “sorta hand-drawn looking” software. And often (maybe most of the time?) the creators of the series just do an outline of what they want and key moments and ship the rest of the work off to be done in an animation “sweat shop” in some other country (often Korea.)
So the best advice is probably find out which few animation programs are most used in the industry are most used and learn them. And accept that if you do get into the industry, you should expect a lifetime of long hours for low pay.
There are two categories of jobs for animators, low-paying and non-paying. Moving up the production line and becoming an animation director has some potential, but it’s still limited. The market is always flooded with young people who want to work in animation and will take any job for whatever is offered. CGI limits the number of jobs available, there are a small number of successful studios and video game companies that comprise almost the entire industry. You can either move up into production and management positions in those or find a new career. Well, there is an exception, one of the most successful animators I know is a professor at the graphics art department at Syracuse, but not too many of those positions are available either.
Lot of rot being talked about in this thread. Animation isn’t just used in film and TV, it’s a huge growth area in every branch of design and advertising. As the Creative Director of a design company I work with many animators, doing everything from online advertising to animations on websites, moving graphics on screens around sport stadia and shopping malls to corporate training videos. If you look, you will start to see that animation is everywhere.
As a result, good animators are in high demand. Many are freelance (and earn similar to what a freelance senior designer or design director would earn), many also set up their own studios, with small teams providing external support to he advertising industry.
I know many poor and struggling photographers and illustrators, I know none such animators.
Every few years there’s a spike in demand for animators because of a new market or technology. If it’s getting big in design and advertising right now the animator who did his first work in that field one year ago is one of the most experienced in that field available for new jobs and will be in demand. Until next year as all the other animators and new ones entering the market take the new jobs and start gaining some experience. And a lot of them will work for whatever is offered, the ones coming out of school and some of the others will be following their dream and work for free just to be practicing their craft. And then the year after that kind of animation is no longer wanted, or maybe not any kind of animation at all is wanted because it’s so ‘Twenty-teens’.
I fell into computer animation almost 40 years ago, and within a few years moved away because the writing was writ large on the wall in big cartoon style letters: “Everything will change in a few years and a new crop of people will do what you do for less money than you make now.” I wasn’t even an animator, I was a computer programmer and graphic interface designer, but even technical skills suffer the same fate, there’s a new crop of engineers and computer science students graduating every year and some of them will turn down high paying jobs in lucrative areas to work in the biz for much less, because it’s what they wanna do. I have a number of friends who limped along still following their dreams after all these years, and others who became successful by stepping up in the business process or moving into education. They’ve won Oscars for their technical and creative work. And I’ve even ventured back into the field occasionally to take advantage of those short-lived demand spikes, but the cycle has been consistent all this time.
Now if the laws of supply and demand have been thwarted and animators can start making a decent living that’s great. In the old days of hand animation it was even worse, very few opportunities, the image of anyone who kept at it long enough to become an old animator was a guy half-blind in one eye, hunch-backed, with one arthritic hand from thousands of drawings on an animators table. Now at least many of the people taking their shot in this field will find a transition to other better positions in the field and different careers, but since the craft began success as just an animator has been rare.
Read the biography of Chuck Jones (It is on Wikipedia)
When he was in art school, the instructor said that you had to have at least 100 000 (yes, 100 000, that is not a typo) drawings before you are getting anywhere good
Chuck was then relived as he had over 250 000 drawings by then.
okay, but I’m curious–what does “the work” consist of?
Is it mostly TV commercials, drawing dancing babies and M&M candies ? *
Who are the employers? And do they hire full-time employees with reasonable job security,or just free-lancers for a one-month project?
*Not that there’s anything wrong with that. At least it’s creative and maybe even artistic.Hey, if I had the talent, I think I’d rather spend my day drawing feminine hygiene products instead of making spreadsheets about how many women purchased them.
The people I know are primarily steadily employed. Now, most of them have been working since the early 90s or longer, but the jobs still exist. Go to a big school and they still recruit straight out of the school like the olden days.
There isn’t as much call to be an in between artists, inker or painter anymore (some of those jobs are fully dead.) But professional artists are in demand for video games, commercials, TV cartoons, movies. All sorts of stuff.
