Getting selected for Animation design

Animation design is a subset of visual communication that uses motion of various elements as a primary means to communicate. Branches like product design and automotive design build products that are often executed by engineers and are usable products in themselves. While the animation design produces media that engages the attention of the human. This is most crucial element of animation design, that it is much emotion oriented than product oriented.

This post will help you build necessary skills for getting through an interview for animation design course. These principles can also be applied to admission to film making and motion graphics courses also.

Building necessary skills

Must have skills :

1. Sketching skills – This is the most essential skill. Your sketches should communicate the message. Its not just another groovy car sketch that is needed but, it should be saying how masculine the car looks! Your sketches can include any variety of sketches, but ensure that they have a ‘human’ factor to them.

2. Sketching of human anatomy – You must build skills for sketching human anatomy. For example it is often required to show hand movement in communicating body language. Also facial gestures convey much more meaning than words! Therefore you must practice sketching human forms proportionally and in different scenarios.  

3. Study those ads! - Now a days we are constantly bombarded by ads. Some of these are excellent examples of course you might be looking at!  You can study the ads you like and analyze them. By doing so you will get a grasp of how the messages are conveyed effectively using this medium.

4. Storyboard skills – Storyboards are simply sequence of sketches that indicate an event chronologically. The most common storyboards are cartoon strips that appear in news paper. You should be able to build simple story boards like making a cup of tea, stitching a  button on your dress, etc.

5. Music skills – No, no, you are not expected to play banjo during the interview! An action is often communicated most efficiently by the sound it produces. Remember the ‘dhishum’ sound in classic Hindi movies when the hero  punches the villain? Or the typical sound produced by gun? These are the kind of sounds you should know and their application to actions. Remember that music itself is excellent for timing any sequence of actions.

Optional skills:

1. Vector graphics skills – There are two ways graphics are made. Either they are made of very small “building blocks” called pixels or they are build based on their mathematical definition (called vectors). If you zoom in on a non-vector image you will easily see pixels. Thus you have a limitation how big you can make the non-vector graphics. Knowledge of typical vector packages like Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW or Inkscape can help you sell yourself with additional power to express yourself. Out of these Adobe Illustrator(AI) is an expensive and slightly difficult to learn package, while CorelDRAW is relatively easy to learn and Inkscape is a open source free package, that is earier to learn than AI.

2. Knowledge of Flash – Often Flash package is used to create vector animations seen on internet. This is additional skill set that will fetch you some additional points, but is strictly optional as this skill set can be very involving to learn and master.

3. Camera skills – camera is a simple device to capture real life images and creating movies, therefore it is a good skill to know a thing or two about photography and shooting

4. Study of representations of real world in animation – Have you seen a cartoon strip showing “zzz” over a sleeping person? That is how snoring is represented in world of animation. You can read an interesting article about cartoon laws on Wikipedia

Building an animation portfolio:

Animation portfolio often contains elements that have motion and is best recommended to be shown on a laptop or at best on your own web page!

A basic animation portfolio can contain all or some of the following:

1. A lot of sketches containing caricatures, cartoons, figure sketches, concept art work, etc.

2. At least one story board illustrating a story or an event. A fully functional, hand drawn page is considered to be ideal

3. Study of at least one animation. For example, study of your favorite Walt Disney animation, or an ad that you loved

4. A simple stop motion animation. Best ones are the ones made using clay dough, etc

5. A short film containing some of the subject you would like to talk about

6.  Graphic design samples like visiting cards, websites, illustrations, logos, etc

7. An example of animated typography . It can be simply done with MS PowerPoint if nothing else ;) 
8. Samples of your photography/video works

Additional resources:

[site] 12 basic principles of animation on Wikipedia

[site] Animation Book by Rick Parent, Ohio State University

[video tutorial] Video tutorial for making simple animation in Inkscape

[PDF ebook] A wonderful guide on basic techniques of story-board making from School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (ITEE)

[site] Resource page for animation on Wichita University website

The following tips are compiled by request from Tanvir Kaur. I really wish to thank a lot of people (especially Abhishek Joshi, who is in this field for last 10 years) for helping me to make this post credible and as complete as possible