Animation Jobs

Although there is a lot of fierce competition out there for jobs in animation, there are also more opportunities than there have ever been before. The thing about animation jobs is that there are so many routes to get there. If you go back to the dawn of animated art, things were a lot different. The only place that people went to watch cartoon animations was the movie theater, so if you wanted to break in to the big time, you had to get up on the big screen. There were just not that many opportunities, and those who made it were the extremely talented and lucky few.

Times have changed a lot since then. Nowadays, you do not even necessarily have to go to an animation school to get in on the game. A lot of people get their animation jobs by putting together a good portfolio and getting the attention of a studio. Some people will even make their own animations as a way to start. Flash and other computer animating tools have made it much easier for an amateur to get started without any formal experience. If you can get people to look at your stuff online, you can carve out your own niche. Even amateur computer games sometimes provide the start that people need to get in to the world of professional drawing.

Of course, the traditional routes still are the easiest way to go. Going to a good art school will not only give you the skills to draw like a professional, but it will also let you network like a professional. A lot of the best animators opt to go to animation schools not because they need the teaching so much as because they want to get the inside scoop on the business end of things. They want to learn, step by step, how an idea becomes a full length animation.

Once you get into it, you quickly realize that animation jobs take more than just raw talent. A lot of the animation is done by computers nowadays, so the artists really need to understand the technical side of things as well. A good animation school will teach you how to program as well as how to draw. You will even learn a bit about architectural 3d rendering, as this is a big part of many modern animated movies. The more you know, the more animation job opportunities will be open to you.