Yesterday I attended a webinar organised by Careers & Employability at UAL, presented by Patricia van den Akker from The Design Trust.
The presentation was mostly about selling to trade shows, which h might not be as relevant to animation artists – however, having looked at THE LINE Animation Studio, there’s often more than one application to animation. And what’s there to stop us from making our own merch inspired by our own animations? Perhaps someone who likes a t-shirt will find our animation work? I think it’s definitely something I could take advantage of – and with my background in mould making and casting, I can see myself mixing those skills together.
Also, Patricia did talk a lot about marketing yourself – and I think that applies to all creatives whether you’re selling a service or a product 🙂
THE LINE works on a lot of advertising but what I know them for are their music-driven game-themed promotional/official videos – their main client is Riot Games with Valorant and League of Legends. Their work is heavily influenced by Japanese animation, and they often work on wide canvases.
Also, the way THE LINE uses a coloured lineart to the shadows that’s a more saturated line (I talk about it in the ‘Star Walking’ window) reminds me of Mika Pikazo’s art: https://www.pixiv.net/en/users/1039353/artworks who is definitely an artist whose work I’d like to dive deeper in.
To prepare myself for the graduation film, I watched Howard Wimshurst’s short video and took notes. While I knew most of these tips, it was good to get them reiterated. I also highlighted what I found to be especially useful:
Watching his video definitely made me much more excited to get started on the animation. Next up, I will be looking into case studies of studios I’d be interested in working at – I will be looking at the styles they use in their animations, and perhaps how to adjust my film to make it relevant to them.
I had a fantastic time working alongside Mandy and helping her out – I have done research, created posts, and even had a chance to try making an ident.
I spent the first few days researching the relevant hashtags and groups for the relevant target markets, as well as collecting the artits’ details. This definitely made me realise how much easier it is to make promotional posts if all the information is already prepared. It also made me realise how much time it takes to collect people’s socials to tag them accurately – please send your socials along with your films. It will make everyone’s life easier. As well as this, I got much more confident using Google Sheets.
And then I had a chance to get creative with making the Instagram posts. Mandy was such a great teacher, too – I haven’t worked with Adobe InDesign before, but Mandy took the time to talk me through the program’s features. She already made templates for me, and it was up to me to update them with new information – however, I had free choice in what stills I chose from the films and was allowed to find the best spots for logos etc. Having this experience definitely made me realise how useful InDesign is for anything like promotional posts or flyers. Having a template to follow and pre-making the posts makes the whole process much more streamlined, and something I would implement on professional pages.
Some of the images I got to put together from Mandy’s templates:
As you might have noticed, I tried to give each post some sort of a colour theme.
As well as this, I had a chance to try animating the LIAF logo. It was a simple zoom-out and sketch effect of the logo. I won’t be posting it at the moment, as I would need to double-check with the team. However, I had a lot of fun with it and experimenting in Adobe After Effects. I got to research additional techniques – like how to make hand-drawn text from an Illustrator File. And I also learned how to package the file so that it could be sent across and re-opened and re-edited – which, previously to this I haven’t really looked into and didn’t think was an option.
I also managed to go the Best of the Fest to see all the winning animations, too. I think ‘Catisfaction’ by Andre Marques Almeida definitely caught me off-guard. It was definitely one of the most bizarre stories and visuals I’ve seen – and despite having seen stills from the film previously, I totally did not expect what I was about to watch. My other two favourites were definitely the ‘Zoon’ (Dir. Jonatan Schwenk) which definitely deserved its award for the best original score, but the visuals were also gorgeous along with an unusual storyline; as well as Luce and the Rock (Dir. Britt Raes) which impressed me with its use of 3 primary colours in its design.
I must say, London International Animation Festival is definitely one I will be looking forward to next year!
It was really useful and encouraging to hear Margaux from Moth Studio talk to us and advise us about our graduation films. She encouraged us to try something we’ve been wanting to try for a while but also highlighted what studios might be looking for in our films and showreels.
Just like in your personal projects, when you work for a studio and fall behind on your work, it will have a domino effect. This is why it’s especially important to communicate effectively so that any issues can be mitigated.
After completing a short film for LIAF and reading Levy’s book I decided to reach out to the LIAF team to see whether I could volunteer. I couldn’t find anything on their website or Social Media, so I emailed, not sure if they even remembered me from last year.
Turns out they did! Mandy quickly set up an online meeting so we could talk about expectations and perks, and general organisation. And… They were also looking for a Social Media Assistant! Reaching out definitely paid off and I’m super excited to work with the LIAF team!
I’ll definitely post an update in late November, once I’ve attended the Festival.
Victor, Marco, Neale, Rebecca and I entered a 24 Hours Animation Contest for Students. In short, we had 24 hours to create a short animation for the “imagining the future” theme. The theme was announced at midnight, and we had until the following midnight to come up with the idea, script, storyboard, animate, and composite a short 30-second film.
We followed the theme of radiation that killed animals on earth, leaving humans to exploit cockroaches for their milk.
I had a great time organising the team and taking care of the production, as well as clean-up and colouring, and designing the milk carton. As production is definitely an avenue I’m interested in pursuing, I was glad to have a chance to be responsible for keeping track of everything.
Before the contest started, I organise a whatsapp and a discord group, including a system to figure out who was happy doing what, as I wanted us to use our strengths and learn from each other.
I also organised folders in an Online Google Drive so that we could all share the files as needed, and it doubled up as a backup. Additionally, I created a simple spreadsheet to track the progress and divide the work when needed – due to the nature of the contest, I didn’t want to spend too much of my time on this.
Different production tasks. Click to see full image
This was the first time our school entered the contest in the 20 years it’s been run. And the results announcement happened a week later, on the 21st of October… And…
Drumroll, please… We came 8th!!! Honestly, we couldn’t believe we managed to place in the top 10! It was a little disappointing, as only the top 5 get prizes (so close-) but still! The experience was absolutely wonderful and, actually, not as stressful as I imagined it to be. We all worked together really well and trusted each other to do our job. Teamwork truly makes the dream work.
Today we had a meeting with Ko about Production and tools that will help us keep on track. We’ve learnt about Gantt charts and Route Sheets, both of which I found extremely helpful. And the more complicated the animation is, the more helpful they are. As well as this, these are extremely important if other people are going to work on the animation – especially to endure clear communication or when dividing the tasks.
I have put both the Gantt Chart and the Route Sheet into the same Excel document, so that I could keep them all together and not have a lot of the tabs open.
Having started to look into internships, some of them require cover letters. I have contacted my mentor for advice, as well as done additional research. Ellie particularly recommended advice from Thinking Animation, which I found helpful. I also looked into career resources from a number of discord servers I’m a part of.
To save myself time in the future, I decided to write a draft cover letter that I could alter depending on the company and the position I was applying for. It makes future applications a lot less daunting and I’m glad I spent some time doing that.
I attended an online event with Anna Hollinrake whose work I absolutely love. I met her and came across her work during MCM last year and followed their work since. I managed to get both prints signed, too! Anna was absolutely the nicest person ever. This just proves that even just a convention might get you new clients and people excited about your work.
So, I was super excited when I found out they were doing a webinar. It focused on game illustration, but I definitely feel all of her advice could be applied to any other form or genre of art. As well as this, animation is still present in games and this might be an avenue I’ll look into.
