There are a wide variety of jobs that require animation skills. These range from working in special effects on motion pictures, television and advertising, to doing medical illustration animations or 3D fly-through for architectural firms and product designers. Animation Mentor specializes in training people who want to do character animation, which is the art of bringing animated characters to life in animated feature films, TV shows and video games. In addition to character animation, other jobs in this industry include creating storyboards, building rigs, rendering and lighting scenes, illustrating backgrounds, creating hair and clothing, creating models and doing 2D or stop-motion animation.
Many jobs require both creative and technical skills, but some are exclusively creative and others are exclusively technical. Some people specialize in the art of animation, while others choose to become technical directors. Character animation, for example, focuses exclusively on making a character act. The job relies on the animator’s creativity to create an acting performance and bring a character to life through movement and expressions. On the other hand, building rigs is almost exclusively a technically oriented job that requires the ability to create algorithms and handle complex programming.
In professional visualization and simulation, you may be doing things like architectural renderings for interior designs or landscaping for amusement parks and arenas. Another area of simulation is in medical animations that show how a pharmaceutical interacts with the body’s circulatory system, or demonstrates surgical techniques. Another avenue is machinery and industrial design. Animation is used to show how all the gears and levers inside machinery work. Animators are also used in law enforcement for crime scene reconstruction to show investigators and juries how an event might have happened. If you are looking for a degree and a general education, this may not be an issue for you. If you are looking for specific training that will help you land a job in the industry, you may want to complete the training in less than four years. Consider what type of program will best fit your lifestyle and finances.
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