Many traditionally-trained stop-motion animators have moved into careers in the special effects industry. At Tippett Studio in Berkeley, California, animator Craig Hayes animates a puppet attached to a Digital Input Device (DID), which sends a digital record of the movements to a wireframe model in the computer. Tippett Studio is contributing all of the creature effects to the upcoming TriStar production Starship Troopers.

So, you're a traditional animator. You have years of experience in hand drawn, classical animation, but your knowledge of computers is limited to typing the odd letter in Apple's SimpleText, only to forget saving the file before you turn off the computer. Would any computer animation studio be interested in hiring you? Absolutely!

As any animator is very well aware, the success of films like Jurassic Park and Toy Story have led to an explosive growth in computer animation. If the need for qualified classical animators is huge these days, the need for good computer animators is even greater. This is ironic, given the fact that literally thousands of graduates from computer animation courses, as well as computer animation enthusiasts working at home, are applying for jobs. However, very few of these people have the talent required to do feature film quality work. "We receive about 2000 reels a year," says Pixar recruiting manager Rachel Hannah. "About 4 percent of those are interesting to us. There has been such a growth in animation that the supply of talent cannot keep up with the demand. Most skilled animators are already under contract for an average of 3 years, so most studios are faced with hiring inexperienced students with great potential. We've done so with great success."

The reason for this is simple: it doesn't take more than a basic home computer and $200 worth of software to start doing some sort of 3D animation. Many programs come with "out of the box effects," whereby anyone with the dedication to read the manual can achieve fancy looking effects just by pulling down some menus and punching a few buttons.

"Software today is so powerful that virtually anyone with the patience can do some tutorials and copy a walk cycle pose-by-pose from a book using built in shortcuts and effects to end up with a decent looking demo reel," says Jeremy Cantor, the animation supervisor at Tippet Studio. "But that doesn't make them an animator. Walk cycles rarely demonstrate animation skill these days because there are so many available sources from which one can simply be copied frame by frame."

"A lot of the people who want to become animators only know how to run a computer," says Industrial Light & Magic animator Steve Williams, who supervised the animation on Terminator 2, Jurassic Park and The Mask. "That's a real problem. I hired every animator at ILM while I was there, and to this day I have never seen one single good animator who couldn't draw, model in clay, animate or all three. Period. That's it. Most people who say that they can animate that have only worked on computers have no idea what they're talking about."

Cantor is a little more diplomatic. "A few years ago I would have said that a good character animator definitively must have traditional (cel or stop motion) experience. Now I believe that computer animation has been around long enough that people can become very good character animators even though their only training tool has been computer software. We do however absolutely prefer to hire `artists.' Traditional artists tend to have a creative sensibility that strict computer people lack. Those skills really do make a difference."