What they don’t tell you about animation, why you think animation is hard.

What they don’t tell you about animation

On this blog I want to elaborate on the things you’re not told that makes you to think animation is too hard to learn

Over 10 years of experience have told me that animation is truly a technical subject

Whether you do traditional animation which is hand drawn frame by frame or you do digital animation 2D or 3D the technicalities can still be overwhelming most especially for someone who is not fully passionate about art and animation

But I still want to emphasize that whether these technicalities scare a lot of people from going into animation for various reasons

Either for business or for knowledge maybe for Pure passion for the Arts and animation

Whichever it is animation was not invented to make people suffer but to entertain both for the creators and for the consumers

But still creators find it hard to get consumers to pay them for a great animation job and consumers also find it hard to pay animators for their great job

because creators feel they spend a lot of time illustrating and creating the animation and deserve to be paid properly

While the consumers feel that the creators probably just press one or two buttons on the computer and the animation is ready and they feel they don’t need to pay much for that type of job

A lot of creators can relate to this but the truth is animation is like any other business, the only difference is it’s time consuming and deserve your 100% attention

but what they don’t tell you most of the time is, animation is not just all about the technicalities like perfecting your squish and squash your work cycle, understanding your timing keyFraming, e t c.

The story you will tell with the knowledge you have gained as an animator is the most important thing you could ever learn to do as an animator

You may be extremely good at the technicalities your colours are perfect your characters are smooth your keyframing and timing is on point but with a bad story added to that all you have done is a waste

Yes it looks good but the truth is nobody wants to watch colours that doesn’t tell them anything that doesn’t relate to them , connect to them, their life, their family, their kids nobody wants to watch that.

On the flip side you can have bad animation where the key framing in nothing to write home about the lip syncing is bad etc but the story is good you would notice everybody would watch such an animation and be interested in it.

So my major point is learn to tell a great story understand how to tell the type of stories that connect with people their lives their family their children etc

Stories comes first they’re the great push that makes you want to learn animation about animation they Ignite the passion in you to pursue the call

So if you’re just starting out as an animator don’t be afraid don’t be discouraged just know that when you have a good story people would love to watch your animation

and as you go ahead you improve on the technicalities of your animation to make it look and feel much much better

For those of you who think animators push a button on a computer and wualla, the animation is done; spoiler alert we don’t do such a thing

Have you seen Maimuna The Day The sun Fell From The Sky, this is a great example of animation where the story is most important than the animation itself

This 4 minute short has won numerous awards and also featured in Hollywood

Not because the animation was super duper dope because the story spoke about something that a lot of people could connect to

Now this is why comedians have taken up animation to tell their jokes and if you notice most of the videos on YouTube get high quality views but the animation are sh***.

So learn the concept of storytelling and make great animations I can’t wait to see your animation that you would make with one of my courses the face animation course do feel free to check it out and create something