My thoughts on “The big question”….

I want to be a disney animator, storyboard artist, character designer, layout/bg artist, color designer etc..

I want to draw anime and move to japan to make the anime I love…If you can draw disney standards, you can draw anime easily

 

How do I choose a good school?

Well a good school will….

-teach you dedication, time management, good work habits

-have great teachers, who have been in the industry and have trained with greats, and most important, motivate! 

-Will teach and emphasize to you traditional artistic skills as oppose to modern day computer skills.

 

How do I know if they have great teachers?

-        go visit them, ask what are the teachers backgrounds, who they trained with and research them on the net

-        look at students work, if it is abstract out of proportion hideous stuff, then you know

-        ask people on the net(awn.com)(animators ML)

-        Make sure they aren’t some clown who took a couple classes and all of a sudden they are ready to teach a class.  They need to go through a good amount of years of training themselves in order to teach well.  Some people who are good may not be great teachers as well. 

-        Good teachers will tell you who some of the good great masters in the past are and you can look them up at libraries

-        Go sit into one of their classes, are they entertaining /motivating teachers?  Part of being a good teacher is making sure the students are entertained and interested, if they are boring as a bag nuts well…

 

How do I know if they will emphasize traditional art skills as oppose to computer skills?

-when you visit them on a tour, and are they flashing SGI labs at you only?  Are they showing you how powerful their NT boxes are?  How expensive their software is?

-do they have 1-2 art class as compared to 10 other computer classes?  Personally I wouldn’t trust a school that had more computer classes then traditional art classes.

 

Why do I want traditional art classes if I want to be a computer animator?

-        animation is worthless if you don’t have a good amount of traditional knowledge.

-        Animation is an art/film medium,  if you learn art through drawing and painting, you will learn how to plan/prepare your computer animation through drawing and possibly painting. 

-        If you head straight to the computer you’ll build a modal(probably not very good one b/c you don’t know proportion/anatomy etc) and then you won’t know what to do with it.  Do you know gesture and how to incorperate strong gesture into that computer modal?  No b/c you never learned how to draw gestures well.  Do you know acting, silhouette, mannerism? No, b/c you never learned how to incorperate that into your art in the first place.  This is a film medium, you are giving your audience entertainment.  If you don’t know how to entertain your audience in this field, you are worthless and won’t get hired.  You need to make your art believable!  They probably are not entertained if they don’t believe in it.  The computer is not going to teach you how to entertain your audience.

-        A side note, I’ve heard stop motion animators incorperate well into computer animation, but keep in mind most know how to draw and if they don’t know how to draw well they know gesture well enough to incorperate it into their puppets.  

 

If you disagree with anything or have a question to add email me [email protected].