10 Jobs in Animation You NEVER Knew Existed!

i got a lot of questions about what it takes to get a job in the animation industry whether it's demo reels resumes software schools whatever a lot of questions and almost always the answers boil down to some form of it depends based on where you want to work and what you want to do but the barrier that it seems that most people run into is they don't seem to know what's out there no one really realizes how many options there are because i only ever hear the three same options if i want to be an animator a modeler a director my life's purpose is to work at disney pixar dreamworks it's kind of all anyone ever says no one ever brings up all the other many things there are to do because i don't think anybody knows i don't think schools are talking about all the different jobs that you can have careers stepping stones whatever there's a lot of options so today let's talk about them i want to talk to you about 10 different jobs and feature animation some movies that you've possibly never heard of that you could attainably go and get a job in and have a great time whether it's temporary whether you're just trying it out or whether it's something you will end up doing long term and if you end up liking this video maybe we'll do one on games people do it on tv there's a lot of different parts to the animation industry this is just one of them so let's talk about it now before we jump into the jobs on the topic of learning new things i want to give a huge thank you to today's sponsor curiositystream curiositystream is a documentary based streaming service it is a website where you can check out thousands of documentaries in all kinds of different categories to learn new stuff that you've probably never considered before they have 35 different collections and categories of different curated programs things like ancient history space science and tech food adventure and travel unsolved mysteries and crime tons of cool stuff personally i really like the physics-based ones 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sign up and make sure you use the code sir wade to get the entire year for 15 now something interesting that i've noticed is whenever i get to speak at a school or talk to students who are learning animation but one of the things that i've always kind of noticed that i found kind of odd was how almost every single person in all the classes always just says i want to be an animator which is great i mean that's what i wanted to be and that's that's what i do however i find it weird that just everybody says animator or modeler or sometimes like director or something a little bit more abstract but very rarely do i hear anything else there are so many other jobs in the animation pipeline which i would love to do a video on if you're curious of like how does the pipeline work let me know in the comments but today i want to focus on a few different parts of the feature animation pipeline that i don't think get a lot of attention or at least i didn't know about them when i was going to school and by the way if you have any questions on this if you want to talk about it live i'm live twice a week down on twitch link in the description below and also if you want to support the channel i'll link to my patreon all that down below so let's get into it ten jobs number one pre-visualization previz postviz techviz pitchfizz even there's a whole bunch of different kind of categories here now for a great explanation of how this all works together i'm just gonna pull up the third floor's website the third floor is a company in la they handle a lot of this kind of stuff they are one of a couple different companies that do this that i know of but i have some friends who work here so i'm going to use this as the example if the script is the verbal explanation of the movie and storyboards are the visual kind of story pieces of the script and if an animatic is taking the storyboards and putting it to motion it's kind of an animated storyboard well previz is the 3d version of that basically the entire movie gets made in previz with kind of proxy assets temp voices the whole thing's tested ahead of time it allows the director to make a lot of kind of big decisions early by seeing some rough versions refine stuff down that way when we get to final production a lot of that iteration has already happened and you can move forward with confidence by doing this you also open the opportunity for techviz which is by having a camera move through the previz space they can actually analyze all that information what's the focal length of the camera what lens are you gonna be using are you gonna be on a dolly a jib some kind of a different crane that you're attaching the camera to how big is the green screen how far is it from the camera all the technical details of the actual physical production get calculated based on the previous visualization visualization god that's hard to say that's why they say previous i guess this is now even being mixed with virtual production which is kind of like that whole mandalorian thing that we saw with i mean that's pretty sweet and once you start recording you can actually use post vis which is the process of taking the actual live action footage and putting it into the pre-visualization that way you can make sure everything's working before you go ahead and do the final step so this entire process is uh it's a whole nother pipeline that exists at the very beginning of the vfx feature animation production and something interesting about working in that area is often you're going to be using a more generalist skill set so i get a lot of questions about do i need to specialize in animation or do i should i also be doing td work should i be doing modeling should i also be trying with lighting and rendering and you know if you have a skill set that's more broad you can do all that stuff you're going to be a huge asset on a team where you're going to be probably wearing a lot of hats doing a lot of jobs because you're just kind of putting it all together versus if you're working at a big studio you may only be doing one thing so when you hear that answer of what depends on where you're working that's kind of what we're talking about there's a whole nother area that you can work and you can work on these movies way before anyone else even knows those movies are being slated because they're being planned and you're part of the planning process job number two production assistant production coordinator you've probably heard these terms as being a pa on something but do you really know what that means i didn't when i worked at dreamworks there were a lot of pas and a lot of production coordinators the entire kind of production workflow of a movie is you have all the artists working on the movie and then you have kind of the the studio overhead legal accounting recruiting marketing like there's a whole bunch of stuff to keep kind of the studio running depending on the company and then you have production which is this interesting blend where it's not like legal and accounting but they're not necessarily the artists either they're kind of the artist wranglers they make sure that the movie actually gets done but in the same way that you can have like a head of animation or a lead animator or a supervising animator like you kind of have this hierarchy where you know animators come in and you can grow as in your career producer is the top of another kind of food chain here which has production assistant production coordinator and a bunch of other roles depending on the studio they could be called different things but essentially the the role here is to make sure things get done so if you are organized if you like to get stuff you know logistically figured out scheduling knowing the different skill sets of the artist managing schedule setting meetings and recording times i don't fully know all the details someone who's a producer is probably watching this going you're forgetting all the important stuff i don't know i'm not a producer but that is a whole nother job section that movies would not get done without the production team i've seen a lot of people get their foot in the door at a studio by becoming a production assistant production coordinator and then moving into the art world if they find that that's where they want to be and i found a lot of people who thought they were going to do that but ended up really loving production and they stay in it and they're just they're going to be producers and whatever else comes of it which is hopefully going to set up a theme for you know some of these jobs is if you are a creative person if you like movies if you like games if you like the stuff that you're creating in these studios but you're not really sure if you've got the chops to be an animator or you don't really know if you love modeling all that much or something there are a lot of other jobs that you can still participate and collaborate and make cool stuff so you're going to see a lot of that here next up is cfx or character effects and every studio is going to be a little bit different about kind of who's doing what so this may not be a blanket statement for everybody but usually character effects are hair cloth animation of anything in the scene that is not a character but not like simulation based like effects stuff that's not entirely true to say because clothes are still simulated like there's still simulations involved sometimes this is a technical animator sometimes that means something very different it's not super standardized but usually i'm talking about hair cloth props animation of the sets things like that and i will be doing some videos about this kind of stuff simulating hair stimulating cloth it's not something i'm super amazing at but i definitely do have some experience from my time at dreamworks that i'd like to share with you but if you would like to learn a lot more about this if this sounds like something you really want to get into i'm going to link below a class from josh sobel josh i think that's how i say your last name hopefully i didn't butcher it you probably know him as the creator of some of these rigs that you've probably seen around and he also was recently a cfx artist at dreamworks he released a class recently on a lot of this stuff so i'm going to make a link to that down below if you want to check it out i've also bought it i haven't watched it yet and i'll be making my videos about this stuff before i watch his because i don't want to copy his and then make videos about it that's his stuff i'll be making my own videos but if you want the real stuff check out his link in the description job number four is the audio engineer or whatever they call it in the industry i'm actually not sure what they call it but the person who's in the recording studio recording the voice actors preparing the dialogue for animation sound effects all kinds of stuff like that again not something i have a ton of experience with but when i was at dreamworks we did have this really cool workshop which was like kind of a voice actor workshop where we had a professional voice actor who does a lot of work with the studio come and a few people could sign up to do a voice acting lesson workshop series for a couple of weeks and i did that it was actually super fun but there was a guy in there kind of you know in charge of this giant sound board of controls making sure levels and different effects and stuff were good and apply it to the animatics to the animation to make sure it all worked it was actually really cool so if you like audio and music and that kind of world i mean there's a whole section for that as well job number five something i am a little bit more comfortable talking about because i know a little bit more about it crowds and cycles the background animation for the movies now again every studio is a little different pixar has fixed animators dreamworks doesn't have that they have animation tas technical assistants i think is the the word for it a kind of a joint job between animation and rigging again every studio is different but there's almost always some form of cycles or crowds where instead of focusing on kind of the per-shot acting and mechanics of you know a specific condition of emotional state and what's happening in the movie there are animators who do the cycles the crowd the background the stuff that's going to be procedurally applied to the background characters with the big ai brain of you know have certain characters walk and offset the different actions and make sure they're all cheering and some studios will use motion capture to achieve some of this others will not touch motion capture at all but you have to animate the cycles and then use a more technical approach to apply those cycles to the crowd simulations and every studio is different sometimes crowds and cycles is their own thing separate from animation other times it is part of the same kind of hierarchy and can be used as a stepping stone and if that's the case then if you have for example only ever done games work and you've done a lot of cycles but you haven't done a lot of the you know specific acting stuff that may be a great way to jump into feature if you want to by using all your cycles abilities in that role and then eventually switching into character animation or not you can do it the other way and take the feature animation skill set apply it to cycles and then learn how to go do games so there's a lot of interesting crossovers that you can kind of mix and match your skill sets next up we have map painting if you look at any animated shot there's the foreground there's the background and then there's the really far background map painters take care of everything behind the actual modeled set of your environment because you know everything that's on screen has to be modeled textured lit and rendered but there comes a point where there's an end to all of that and everything behind it is handled by matte painting so a lot of mountains a lot of clouds and it kind of just depends sometimes that stuff is going to actually be created in 3d because you need dragons flying through clouds and stuff and other times it's just going to be background elements which leads us to the next job compositing you've probably heard of this before compositors take all the different assets from all the different departments and combine it into the final composition of the film because when a studio is rendering its final frames it's not doing the entire thing all at once it does it in pieces for the most flexibility for the compositors to then work with your characters your effects a lot of different things shadows are going to be separated out so the compositors can dial in the final look and when it comes to visual effects live action stuff it's then integrating the two scenes together now i'm not sure if this is a separate job or kind of within the composite department i don't know we're going to call it a second job image filing something that i didn't even know existed when i got to dreamworks imf we called it imf was a smaller department from what i understand that would handle rendering artifacts they'd make sure that the final renders would were actually correct sometimes there were weird artifacts sometimes there was like fuzziness or things would kind of render in front or behind it where they should have been something went wrong on a few of the frames and it needed to be fixed rather than try to go back figure out like where the bug was and re-render all the frames they would actually use photoshop or some other applications to manipulate the image and make sure it just looked right so they'd kind of tweak it a little bit with some movie magic to be real with you i have no idea how someone gets into that department or what the skill set is required to do it i don't know but it's a job that i didn't know existed so there you go technical director or td now again every studio is different i have to keep saying that because there's going to be someone in the comments who's like well at my studio a td is a rigger well my studio at tds someone who codes tools and plugins for the show and at my studio ours just makes sure everything doesn't break it totally depends but this is the job that's completely essential at any studio tds can be a bunch of different things one could be a department td where they focus on animation for example and they build tools for animators to do their work better or different other department servicing modeling and so on they could be a show td where it's more pipeline focused making sure everything doesn't break that way when data transfers from one department to another it goes through a different stage of production and something's weird they make sure it's all working the most important thing here is computer science coding someone who has a really technical mindset who can make sure things run smoothly create new things and so on sometimes it even means building an entirely new renderer dreamworks for example had one renderer when i started working there and by the time i left they had built i think it's called moon ray which is a path tracing ray tracing renderer so if you saw how to train your dragon 3 bilby or the new crew 2 trailer you should hopefully notice that the lighting in these looks amazing not that they didn't look good before but the technology they now have is far superior to what they had before and tds play a big role in that and last but not least training in case you didn't know or if you haven't seen some of my older videos i worked in the training department that's what i did at dreamworks i was a trainer i think a technical training specialist was my job title and so again this is one where studios all are very different some studios don't have this at all some have a couple people some have a whole department focused on this but production training is a thing that exists and different studios have different levels of it for example we actually had a whole team for all these different kind of subdivisions when i first got to dreamworks there were like 13 or 14 of us i think and when nbc bought dreamworks things changed there were layoffs and our department was one of those affected i think we went from 13 or 14 down to i think four of us after that so the department changed significantly during that but just to say that every studio is different and every company treats it a little bit differently i think at pixar's like the pixar university i think that's what they call it i don't know but production training is a job but that was a job that i had no idea even existed when i was going to school and i definitely didn't think that was what i was going to end up doing to get my foot in the door in the industry and so the point of all of this is just to point out that number one there are a lot of career options there's a lot of different things you can do so if you are trying to get that one job at this one studio and it's just not happening yet try working in other studios try working other jobs try lots of different things especially if you're a student and you've only ever focused on just animation or just modeling try more things taste all the different flavors like have fun trying new things and see what you like because you might end up finding something you like even better than what you thought or if not you might just have a better sense of what's going on in the production pipeline that'll make you a better communicator and collaborator for the other artists around you but regardless the best thing you can do for yourself is to have a diverse skill set a variety of skills if nothing else just so that you understand what there is out there and you can make a good informed decision of what you want to do but let me know in the comments what kind of animation jobs do you find interesting and what other sectors of the industry do you want to have another one of these videos do you want one on games do you want one on tv should we talk about youtube animation because that's the whole industry that again that exists i'd love to hear your thoughts and of course if you want to check out more educational stuff keep learning because you're in the mood now you're like yeah i like learning let's do more learning a link down below to curiosity stream thank you again for sponsoring this video and be sure that you do sign up use the code sir wade when you sign up to get the entire year for 15 bucks because honestly that's pretty crazy 15 even just to try it and just watch a bunch of documentaries and as always if you want to hang out live ask questions talk about these kinds of things and get more details on any of these jobs i'm live twice a week down on twitch or if you want to support the channel i'll link to my patreon as well in the description below but as always thank you for watching i hope this video was helpful and i'll see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Sir Wade Neistadt

Views: 82,274

Keywords: 10 animation jobs, animation jobs, get hired in animation, get hired, pixar jobs, dreamworks jobs, disney jobs, 3d jobs, previs, postvis, third floor, modeling jobs, how to get a job, animation, 3d animation, animation pipeline, 3d pipeline, feature animation, animation studio jobs, what is previs, entry level animation, animation internship, pixar intern, disney apprentice, animation assistant, highest paying jobs, 10 jobs, best animation jobs, best animation, jobs

Id: y4HJVsr7fV4

Length: 16min 26sec (986 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 08 2020