Animators must constantly harness their skills to deliver artwork that makes the viewer, buyer, or consumer rebuy or repurchase. Such artists develop animation skills only if they have the passion, love, and commitment for their artwork. Later, they have to enroll in academies like Frameboxx 2.0 to get the best of the education in terms of training in software, and knowing how to create the best type of animated art and stand out in the job market.
If you’re an aspiring animation artist, read the structured and well-researched post below. Get to know the animation skills you will need to acquire, harness, or sharpen this year. Then, it will increase your chances to get hired or retained by the top-notch production or media houses in India or abroad.
What are the top 8 animation skills to learn and get hired for in 2024?
Visual effects
Visual effects help animators to create worlds and environments on the shot they cannot create in real life. They need to manipulate a character's surroundings using the VFX software or tool.
They must know what type of VFX elements to add in the shot, frame, or a motion picture. This will enhance the final product's overall quality and extract the desired emotion from the consumer or viewer.
Drawing and composition
Sketching and drawing are two of the important animation skills to harness this year and get hired at the best studios in India. When you can draw or sketch, it means you have strong and purposeful visualisation skills.
You can drive the story's narrative ahead by compositing the frames one after another once you draw the sketch properly.
Graphic and web designing
If you want to work at an animation agency that provides animation services to their clients, this could be a skill to learn.
You can learn to create multiple websites and graphics for your company’s clients and help them stand out in the market with uniquely crafted animated designs.
Character rigging
Character rigging makes you segregate your 3D character into two parts:
- Skin and other grooming elements for surface representation
- Connecting body parts hierarchically
Through rigging, animation artists learn how to weigh and measure each limb of the character’s body. They also learn how skin colour, type, or tonality can affect the character’s representation and grooming.
The way you put together the character through rigging helps other designers set the mood of the motion picture or frame. You can also define the character’s way of expressing themself when you learn rigging.
If you excel at rigging, you will have a lot of scope to work for animation production houses to create animated cartoons, shows, or movies.
3D rendering
Learn 3D rendering to convert your 2D art into a 3D one. You need to know how to convert 2D files into 3D ones and how to make your way around 3D animation and rendering software.
When you are rendering 3D objects or files, you will be the one finalising elements, effects, and objects put together in a sequence to create a batch. Then, after the file is rendered, it would not let the other department edit the shot or sequence further.
So, 3D rendering artists can do great patchwork for animated movies and series for sure.
Basics of animation
Learn the basic concepts of animation through an expansive and updated course from Frameboxx.in. Get the basics clear when animating living and non-living characters, objects, or elements.
Know the scope of animation in India and other countries. Learn new software and applications on the go.
Get enrolled in a detailed course and improve your chances of getting a placement to start a new life in the media and entertainment industry without struggling much.
Storyboarding
Storyboarding is a skill to learn to design animation layouts for animation artists. From storyboards, it is easier to understand how to put together a scene and how to composite it with a fine balance of mood, expression, colour coding, sketches, etc.
A storyboard helps to understand how a character poses or moves around from one frame to another. It educates the animator to put different elements on the frame to block the scene.
Motion graphic software
These tools and software track your character’s real-life moves or actions and then help reproduce the same for computer-generated animated figures or characters. With ample knowledge of such software, you can create more realistic characters for your animated artwork, like a movie, episode, scene, or music video.
Other Four Essential Skills to Learn for Young Animators in 2024:
Attention to detail
Pay attention to detail when you are drawing sketches, conceptualising a story on the storyboard, or editing the entire sequence or scene (frame by frame). Such animation skills are important to harness to improve the continuity of the animated movie or video. Otherwise, the audience might feel disconnected whenever they find fault in the artwork.
Team management
Learn how to work with a diverse team for a single animated project. That will help you create a better rapport with people from the same industry to get constant references if you want to be a freelancer.
Also, when you manage a team well, you can delegate more projects to your teams and become a business aggregator in the long run to get more clients.
Latest software knowledge
As an animation artist, this knowledge is a must. You have to keep upgrading your knowledge about the latest tools, apps, and software as far as animation, video editing, and VFX go. This knowledge helps you stand out in the tightened job market.
Everyone is literally competing for that one gig, role, or job, especially in the era of the AI revolution. So, enroll in a course where you can learn new software and tools every day and prepare yourself to ace the job interviews of your dream company.
Time management
This is one of the other soft skills that animation artists should focus on. Know how much work can pull off in a given time. Study yourself and your work. Be self-aware.
Then, learn to prioritise your work and pitch it well to your senior, boss, project manager, or client. That way, you can produce much better work and remain honest about your time management skills.
Conclusion
The blog above talks about 8 top animation skills and four other soft and digital skills that animation artists can harness. By paying attention to these skills while learning your best from renowned institutes like Frameboxx 2.0, you can outsmart and outperform your own potential in the entertainment and media industry very soon.