Career Advice

This is the third post in a series of getting a job storyboarding professionally. I started with Training, then Building a Storyboard Portfolio and now it’s on to Professionalism.

Here is Karen J Lloyd’s official definition of professionalism:

Show up. Do the work. Don’t be an ass.

Patent pending.

Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? But I’ve seen people in animation school and on their first jobs (and beyond) violate one, two or even all three of these principals. It boggles the mind. When you get that first job, great. Now you have to keep the job.

Mind you, this could apply to any industry or job. I mean if you were an employer, wouldn’t this sum up what you’d expect at the very least out of an employee?

Let’s break it down, shall we?

SHOW UP

When I was teaching, students would just saunter in 20, 30, or in the rare cases over 60 minutes late. No excuse. No guilt. Some would think because they ‘worked late’ the night before, it was justified. Well, it’s not. And let’s face it, some of them were probably playing video games all night.

The instructors are there for a reason. To lecture, give assignments and offer feedback on your work. If you’re not there, how can you get any valuable feedback? You should be getting as much as you can. That’s how you really learn.

And don’t think instructors don’t take mental notes. They do. I know I did. >>continue reading>>

Hell Week is over. I’m in recovery and I’ve promised this post, so here it is. Finally.

So far I’ve talked about Training for getting a job storyboarding professionally. Now it’s on to the portfolio.

What do you need for a storyboard portfolio?

Storyboards.

Sorry to sound so obvious, but you’d be surprised how some people expect to get a job storyboarding without any good samples. This is especially true when they’re trying to break into the animation industry. “But I can draw, see?” Um, sorry but that’s not enough.

ON A GENERAL NOTE

Students tend to put a little bit of everything into their first portfolio. Animation, character designs, layout, life drawing, backgrounds, storyboards and maybe a few other things.

On one hand it could be good to show all you can do. But on the other, it can also look like you don’t know what you want. And that can hurt you. The person trying to fill a position might pass you by because they just don’t know how to classify you. So you could be doing yourself more harm than good by including everything. >>continue reading>>

I wish I could be writing more than I am these days. But I’m chained to the desk right now getting through ‘hell week’.

Which for new readers, is the final week of a storyboard schedule where I put in the long hours. This is also how I’ll be spending my birthday on Wednesday (insert sympathetic “awwwwww” here). Fun times : ).

I am putting together the post on portfolio advice and it’s turning into a bit of a long one. I don’t want to rush it, so I won’t. You should see it next week though.

In the meantime here’s some good reading.

The first is an article I came across about working for free or ‘on spec’ and the kinds of people that will approach you for it. I’ll write about this kind of thing in the future but the author pretty much reflects my point of view on this subject. Check out:

Unfinanced Entrepreneurs

The next is about freelancing and that you don’t always have to be ‘amazing’ to be successful. That’s over at Freelance Switch entitled:

Why Being An ‘Average’ Freelancer Might Be Enough

The last ones relate to the portfolio post I’m working on for you guys. These ones focus on online portfolios, while I may be focusing more on the content of a storyboard portfolio right now. The articles may not be for storyboard artists specifically, but they are for artists/designers, so you’ll find some good tips:

Creating the Perfect Portfolio

Build A Killer Online Portfolio

Hope you enjoy those. I’ll be back on track next week after I survive this one!

Subscribe to the feed or by email if you don’t want to miss my post about storyboard portfolios.

OK, this is probably the kind of post most people struggling to ‘get in’ want to read about.

I’ve been very fortunate in my career to not have to pound the pavement too much to land my next gig. So I don’t have all the answers. But I can give some advice from the observations I’ve made from working, teaching and knowing people in the industry. This will be a series of five posts with each one covering one of the topics listed below.

Here are the main things you will need to get work in the animation industry. And most of them are needed for the film industry as well (but there could be other factors…like union stuff…which I will give more information on in the near future):

1. Training
2. A strong portfolio
3. Professionalism
4. Contacts in the industry
5. A good attitude

Not necessarily in that order. But I’ll begin with:

1. TRAINING

As I mentioned in my last post, the forum at AWN has a very long thread listing and comments on many animation and art schools at this link. So I’ll elaborate on that last post and tell you why training is valuable.

If you want to storyboard for animation, you need to understand animation. Knowing how much work is involved in the whole process from script to screen, is important when storyboarding. If you’re unfamiliar with the limits, possibilities and terminology of animation, you cannot storyboard for it effectively. >>continue reading>>

As I wrote in my ‘about me‘ page, I used to be a graphic designer. I had always loved animation but there wasn’t much available instruction back then in Montreal. And there were hardly any animation studios, so I hadn’t pursued it. But I was always a big fan of Warner Brothers and Disney animation.

It was the early nineties and the big re-boom of animation was happening. One day in our local paper there was a big, full page ad from Disney Feature Animation. They were looking everywhere for animation artists and needed people to work on their upcoming features ‘The Lion King’ and ‘Pocahontas’.

Whoa.

How cool was that? They had a list of jobs they were looking to fill and one was for ‘layout artist’. Well, I do layouts in graphic design, right? How different could it be? I went to college and studied Illustration and Design. I was a professional. This could be a my big break to work in animation and at Disney.

So I called the number. >>continue reading>>