Hi everyone,
I have a career dilemma I've been struggling with for a long time, and I hope I can get some input from some members here in order to resolve it.
Here's the thing: I absolutely love animation (especially anime) and think it's a gorgeous medium to tell stories in. I like to spend a lot of my free time sketching and dreaming up story lines, and whenever I do, the plot unfolds like a 2D feature film inside my head. In fact, I even have multiple notebooks lying around filled with character descriptions, bits of dialogue and scenes I've dreamt up over the years. It would be a dream come true to create a series for television that is as sophisticated as The Legend of Korra or Gargoyles.
However, I keep running into single problem: I don't like animating itself. And by that I mean the physical act of drawing 24 frames per second just so the character can move.
I actually enrolled in animation school several years ago, but ultimately left because of this very reason. Don't get me wrong, though, I absolutely love it when other people animate well and have gained an appreciation for the amount of skill it takes to make a character act convincingly. But for me the love has always been about the whole scene and the whole story, and focusing on just a few seconds of it slowed my imagination to a halt, sort of like pumping raw sewage through a straw. I also found myself averse to animating really cartoony type characters; the less human they appeared the more detached I felt towards them as people.
Since then, some of the classmates I've kept in touch with have gone on to become background designers and storyboard artists and have chided me for not sticking it out. This makes me wonder if I should give animation school another try, but I'm just not sure about that.
Other people have told me that since I love story so much that I should enrol in classes offered by CGMA and become a storyboard artist, which sounds good but I also like to write as well and have been told I that should focus on one or the other but not both.
And finally, there are those who have seen my notebooks and advised me to just make a graphic novel or comic and post it on the web. But I also want a day job in the arts, too.
In the end, I'm just not sure what to do. I'm approaching the end of my 20s soon and feel my soul deaden with each day that I work at the warehouse job I don't like. All I want to do is tell stories, especially animated stories for TV, and I feel that life would be unfulfilling if I don't.
Anyway, your insights and feedback are greatly appreciated.
well there is a solution, you will have to bear through it, but what you can to is a dense storyboard, its how i get through it, though, i love animating, i love anything im good at, or at least i think i do, i can sit for hours animating, so long as what im making is good, if not, i cant work at all.
Anyway, what im getting at is animate every single movement, then send it to india to have it all filled in, or go hire some people elsewhere to fill in the gaps, im asuming your planning on doing framebyframe like anime correct?
a dense storyboard should contain every movement in 2-4 stages, so that all thats left is to fill the gaps.
If you want to work in the industry, you have to remember one thing:
You'll be hired to work on "their stuff", not your stuff.
If.......IF all you are drawing yourself is anime/manga stuff, you are crippling your job opportunities unless you are very, very good at it. Most work out there is in other genres and styles, and frequently in stuff aimed at pre-school audiences. If you have trouble with cartoony characters, then you've just shut the door on about 85-90% of the potential work out there.
You'll mostly be asked to work on stuff where a lot of the material is dictated to you, with a lot of specifics about it. Frequently you will be just a "hired wrist".
Trust me on this, when storyboarding an action-adventure show in a faux anime-style, the page count often exceeds 500 to 800 ( OR MORE) 'board pages---at 2-3 panels per page---yeah your phrase " pumping raw sewage thru a straw" will come to stark real experience.
It's as tedious as animating, if you were wondering.
And you are not "telling the story" as a storyboard artist per se, you are frequently just visualizing it--taking your cues off the supplied script.
Now, not a lot of the work is animation itself, it's mostly pre-prod.........stuff like character/prop/location design.......or things like storyboards......or more technical stuff like builds and rigging. etc. You don't NEED a specific animation background, but it certainly helps. I'd say it's certainly essential if you aspire to work as a director or supervisor, or in a controlling creative capacity.
But to that end, you need to be able to demonstrate that you can do the work, be it 'boarding, or designing.....and do it at the level that the studios demand.
"We all grow older, we do not have to grow up"--Archie Goodwin ( 1937-1998)
Hi guys, thanks for chipping in.
Oldmanbeefjerky, I haven't had much experience with storyboards to be honest, except for a few short assignments in school. What's the difference between a "dense storyboard" and a regular storyboard? I know that in most cases, the board artist is responsible for all the cinematography, layout, and posing decisions and that it is the job of the keyframer to breakdown the action so that others can fill in the inbetweens.
Even if I shipped the thing off to India, would any studio want to work with me if I have no professional experience? I imagine it would still cost a lot of coin. Would they do it if I didn't have the rights to broadcast the material on TV?
Ken, I understand that in the majority of the cases I will have no say in terms of content and subject matter should I decided to become a board artist (I guess that goes for most jobs, really), and I can adjust my drawings to adapt to other styles as well. In comparison to animating I would think it would be more rewarding because the character ought to be doing something different after 24 drawings, rather than moving two steps across the page.
This leads me to some very specific questions about boarding: What is the best way to build a professional portfolio (is taking an online course a good start)? And, is it possible to write and storyboard at the same time?
This also segues into another question I have about pitching (sorry if this is starting to get a bit longwinded). Does one have to move down to the US in order to pitch to a big studio such as Nickelodeon or the Cartoon Network? I actually live all the way up in Edmonton, Canada, which is pretty much a dead zone for TV animation. What kind of background do executives look for? I imagine the more animation experience the better, but can that person be a writer, a board artist, actor, etc? Would that person have to have gone to animation school in order to qualify?
If you want to storyboard, show that you can storyboard. The best way to do that is to get your hands on a professional board and emulate it. How they stage shots, how they pose out action, how they label things, the jargon they use.
Gather about 25 to no more than 50 pages ( 2-3 panels per page) of continuity, showing proper staging, acting, camera movies. Have several samples showcasing action, comedy, acting etc. Don't try to shoe-horn all of that into a one-size-fits-all sample. Make sure everything is clear and reads.
Writing and doing 'boards at the same time is seldom seen because scripts precede 'boards and the board artists seldom write the shows they board. Some shows do this, but they are rare animals.
You don't have to move to the US, or to the bigger animation centres, but you should be accessible to them. Vancouver is a big centre now, and Toronto/Ottawa has been for years. A pitch package these days tends to be very simple: an outline, some images, sometimes a beat-sheet or a beat board. And you.....selling the idea of it.
I live in a neighbouring prairie province, and I've been here for going on 5 years now. I've been in the animation biz for 28-29 years now and been storyboarding on TV animation for around.....oh, 23 years or so. I work digitally now (on a Cintiq) and remotely, sending the work I do via FTP to my clients.
Once you establish yourself, it's very do-able to work freelance that way.
But you pinged on the keywords: "Once you establish yourself...", right?
To build up the rep it MIGHT be advisable to work in-studio for a spell......but that depends on a lot of things.
If you can demonstrate that you can do the work to meet the clients' needs you don't have to physically be in-house for them to work with you. I have colleagues that are working through burgeoning careers in just that fashion.
The studios are looking for what you would expect; artists that can deliver good, entertaining, clear usable work in a timely manner. They do tend to prefer/insist to have people that specialize in the things they hire them to do. Animation backgrounds help.......but writing backgrounds, acting....those may add nuances to the work, but they are less considerations. A storyboard artist is going to storyboard.....not write, and their acting is on the page. If you cannot translate those things in a meaningful way to the storyboard product........well, they aren't going to be that valuable.
Animation school......again.......your ability to demonstrate that you can do the work is your cachet. A paper pedigree is meaningless if you cannot draw/create to the demands of the studio/client.
I am self-taught and learned on the job, and didn't have the easy access to the wealth of learning materials and tools available now, back when i was learning how to do this.
"We all grow older, we do not have to grow up"--Archie Goodwin ( 1937-1998)