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’ Â (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.Â
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.
