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Internships - let's hear your stories.

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Internships - let's hear your stories.

It seems internships play an important role in the animation industry. A foot in the door, learn the ropes, pay your dues. I'd like to hear about experiences (good, bad, and indifferent) from both sides - those that are/were interns and those that hire them.

Internships are a fantastic way to move ahead and get your foot in the door. I was lucky and literally got one out of the blue...didn't even see it coming. Regardless I had a fantastic internship and right away was put on a project that involved 15 minutes of pre rendered cinematics for a video game. I never was a gopher and was soley used for my talents and to help out production. It went so well that after three months I was hired full time to finish the project to it's completion.

Eight months later I returned to school, earned my degree and ventured back to the west coast for another job. The experience I gained at my internship opened alot of doors for me as so my last year of school I was fortunate to have multiple job offers and got to pick and choose where I wanted to work. Thus coming out of school I had a demo reel with professional work on it, experience working on a pipe line, and worked on a full cinematic project and two TV commercials. It was the best choice of my life to accept the internship.

If you are looking for one...find one that will use your talents and allow you to work on the project itself. It will help out immensly later on.

The magazine 3dworld has a blog doing just that thing. I have not seen it but you could goto www.3dworldmag.com , I think it is called real-life diaries.

I worked for a couple of months for Trickompany, a renowned German studio. They let me do more than I expected, even some character designs for a show (which never took off, although I think they used material from it in another way). This being Germany, they paid comparably well, too (the internship was part of my animation course). In short, I got to do some designing, layout work, scene planning, even dialog timing and X-sheet preparation - yeah, a good experience. Just too bad I haven't been able to get employed by them afterwards. They almost hired me for that one feature film project but the financier had to withdraw funding and the whole affair went nowhere. C'est la vie.

Interning in Animation

Hi. I interned last summer for animation director John R. Dilworth (courage the cowardly dog, dirdy birdy). I was his pre-production assistant on a pilot for a new show. The work was not really animation - but more drawing, design and coordinating. It was very intense and painstaking work, but I got school credit for it (I am a grad student at SCAD), a little money, a summer in NYC and a chance to work with a real animation master - not to mention my name in the credits....

My animation work:
http://www.aniboom.com/Pages/Application/Animations/UserZoneZ1.aspx?zoneID=3036

My non-animation work:
http://www.royiddan.carbonmade.com