Animation School? Keeping motived? Your questions answered!

these onions getting bad is animation School essential how do I stay motivated while I'm animating you asked me some great animation questions and today I'm going to try to answer them we'll cover things like how to keep motivated how important animation school is my thoughts on timing charts and loads of other stuff let's jump in oh and just a little side note this is a bit of a bonus class so rather than creating new visuals for every part of this class I'm gonna screen record myself making a stream of Consciousness animation uh so you can see that happening in the background and at the end you'll see how it looks uh the first question I got was pretty straightforward who are you I'm Alex Craig hi I'm an Australian animator and director I've been working in the animation industry for about 14 years now I spent a long time as a freelance animator in 2D and in 3D but these days mostly I get to lead my own projects with designers and animators from around the world I've made some fun projects for Cartoon Network and MTV and Netflix and a whole bunch of other places I've also made a couple of short films and now I'm splitting my time between paid work and creating these free YouTube classes when it comes to animation how successful can you be without any traditional schooling you don't need any special qualifications to be an animator so traditional schooling is definitely not essential I did go to animation School here in Australia I graduated about 15 years ago with a bachelor's degree but the landscape of education has totally changed my course for example is quite affordable it was about fifteen thousand Australian dollars for three years so that's about ten thousand dollars us all in so for that price it was really good value it gave me three years of focused time to learn guilt-free I still had a part-time job but I think I would have struggled to take the time off to study if it wasn't for University forcing me to do it it also gave me a lot of skills that it would be hard to find outside of the traditional classroom things like working in groups and receiving feedback regularly but it's worth saying that even after those three years I didn't really have enough skills to work professionally yet so I spent another year building a portfolio and practicing before I got my first paid job as an animator and I actually do like doing online classes as well so I've done classes with I animate schoolism and more recently with um project City I can't really give you personal advice on whether you should or shouldn't go to university there'll be a lot of different factors depending on where you live how affordable school is and what environment you learn best in but but if you can't access traditional schools it doesn't mean you can't study to be an animator so yeah University it's definitely not essential but a lot of people find it helpful isn't about animation but what brush to use and to use Adobe animate for these classes I use a basic round brush with pressure sensitivity I use a really wobbly pressure to make it feel textured this is something I learned with brush pens in ink but it works really well in digital as well I use a mix of TV paint and animate CC currently but I'm starting to experiment with a few free programs too onion skin or no onion skin good question um some people might not realize that there is a little contention around onion skinning in case you don't know onion skinning is where a program can show you the frames before and after the one you're currently making it looks like this I use onions getting loads but I also use flipping so one problem with onion skinning is that it can be hard to tell if your forms are changing size as you're animating if you're just using onion skinning so I test out my work by stepping through my keys and then mostly use onion skinning to refine the spacing this is essentially what animators on light tables used to do what are your top five tips for surviving the animation industry I've got a lot of thoughts on industry stuff that beginners might find useful but as far as long-term advice um I've really got only three things that come to mind and sorry it might sound a bit self-helpy so you know Skip it if uh you're not into that so firstly I think it's really important not to think about the people around you as competition it's really easy when you're starting out to get jealous or think about other people's competition for work but I've only ever seen the opposite to be true the people you study with or work with are going to be your most important collaborators in the future so yeah be nice to them secondly uh take care of your craft it's incredibly rare to have a hobby that you can throw yourself into and also make a stable career out of so I think it's important to nurture that passion if you feel like you're burning out take some time to recuperate pursue projects that get you excited and uh keep trying to learn new stuff and lastly get good at using the studio coffee machine you'll be the most popular person in the office I would love a video breaking down timing charts and how to apply them to both simple and complex animations I don't know if it's my dyscalculia that makes it more challenging but it's something that I really struggled with I got a few questions about this and I have to make a confession I've never really used timing charts in my work but if you're curious they basically look like this this stroke represents the first keyframe and then this stroke represents the second keyframe if there are three Strokes in the middle that means there are three in-betweens and they'll be spaced out like they are in the chart timing charts are really useful if you've got someone to help you in between and clean up your animation I'm guessing it could be useful for planning out your own work too and I've definitely seen people do that but if you've watched my keyframe like a pro video you'll notice that I really use the timeline to time out my work and the breakdowns to show spacing so timing charts are a little bit less important A variation on timing charts that I actually do use a fair bit works like this I draw a guide layer above my animation and sketch out the arcs I want the motion to follow and then Mark out the spacing on that guide I think this is probably a more practical way to do things for anyone that's not working with an assistant tonico has a great example of timing charts explained here if you're interested do you have any advice for people that feel discouraged about animating but still wanting to do it this seemed like a really popular question and I totally get why the first thing to know is that it's totally normal to feel discouraged it's really just an inevitable part of the process I remember when I was 14 or 15 I I got a student copy of Maya with a computer magazine and I was like holy heck we can make a Lord of the Rings now and I sat down and I thought I could make an incredible Rock troll or something like out of the movies um turns out you can't do that I couldn't do that the first tutorial was about making a hammer and I couldn't even do that so yeah I totally get the discouraging feeling one strategy that helps me a little bit with this is something called process goals this is where you focus on goals within the process rather than the end result these are small concrete goals that can help you focus while you're making something so for example I want my cleanup to feel really finished in this piece or I want this box to feel extra bouncy or I want the lip sync in the shot to be really accurate try not to use vague goals with values attached to them um like I want this shot to look awesome because it's really hard to tell if you've achieved that goal at the end and it doesn't give you any concrete way to succeed so yeah the idea is to set those smaller goals and when you achieve them use that success to help motivate you to do the next goal this is just one strategy I'll try to think of others and maybe we can do a video on that in the future the biggest question I always ask myself is whether I need good drawing skills to do animation especially 2D animation I don't want to make high quality anime I just want to make animation like ice cream sandwich can I do it without being good at drawing you can 100 make animation without great drawing skills you won't be able to make certain Styles um but you can definitely make cool work ice cream sandwich is a great example where it's all based on storytelling and comedy this is an animation I made based on drawings of crabs I made when I was four years old you can see I'm using some nice smooth animation but very simple drawings so yeah just pick a style that you know you can draw lots of times in a row or if drawing really freaks you out maybe you want to try out puppet animation or stop-motion or even 3D animation maybe start with simple shapes and focus mostly on the motion actually speaking of simple shapes let's look at how that stream of Consciousness animation came out I usually call these animation Doodles and they're a bit like the magic dot exercise that I talk about in this video where I animate frame by frame without any real plan it's a bit like meditation and I definitely suggest trying it out if you'd like to see a full class on this let me know in the comments below this has been a bonus class to say thank you for all the support over the last couple of months it's been amazing to see so many new subscribers here if you're new thanks for stopping by I'd love for you to check out the full series it's free and if you enjoyed this video I'm pretty sure you'll enjoy the others and I'll catch you next time

Channel: Alex Grigg // Animation for Anyone

Views: 145,921

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Id: L75tfRpisaU

Length: 8min 38sec (518 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 31 2023