Animation

What is Animation?

We often think of animation as full-length Disney movies and Saturday morning cartoons in which illustrated heroes and villains and especially animal characters come to life.

Television programs, movies, and videos are part of our daily lives. Animation plays a huge role in entertainment (providing action and realism) and education (providing visualization and demonstration). Entertainment multimedia titles in general, and children’s titles specifically, rely heavily on animation. But animation can also be extremely effective in other titles, such as training applications

Animation adds visual impact to the multimedia project. Many multimedia applications for both the Macintosh and Windows provide animation tools, but you should first understand the principles of how the eye interprets the changes it sees as motion.

Nature of work: 

3D animation is a complete teamwork and works on the creative ideas.3D animation itself is a combination of wide variety of career combinations. The various steps included in the making of a 3D animation movie consists of:

Story → Story Boarding → Character Sketch → Concept creation → Modeling → Environments → Rigging → Character and Mechanical Animation →Storyboard Animation → Lighting → Texturing → Dynamics → Voice Recording → Digital Editing → Vfx → Final Film

So one can work as a

• Modeler
• Layout artist
• Clean-up artist
• Scanner operator
• Digital ink and paint artist
• Compositor
• Key frame animator
• Background artist
• In-between animator

Every role is crucial for the successful creation of the Animated project.

Personality

Animation is a creative thing and one needs to have creativity while handling it. It not being a mechanical subject needs lot of passion and imaginative skills. One should have flair for sketching/drawing. It needs long hours of continuous work with a whole lot of dedication. One should be good at visualizations, choice of colors and acting too. Though this profession seems to be quite unglamorous, yet it is very exciting and unless one has the complete dedication and interest in it one should not enter this field.

Educational qualification

 For a diploma and for a bachelor degree in animation one needs to have passed 12th standard from any recognized board with minimum of 45% marks. For postgraduate program one should have a bachelor's degree in any discipline preferably arts. One should have a basic knowledge of handling computers.

Some of the institutes like Industrial Design Center (IDC), Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and Indian Institute of Design (NID) have a strict eligibility criterion-only graduate of architecture, technology and engineering, fine arts can apply for this course.

Professional Courses

There are various diploma and degree programs in animation and multimedia. These courses focus on teaching and equipping a person in various styles and techniques of animation, which may include:

• Traditional animation
• Stop-motion animation
• Rotoscoping
• Computer generated 3D and 2Danimation
• Clay-mation
• Photoshop
• Human anatomy
• Drawing

Job Opportunity

NASSCOM says that India's gaming industry (computer games and mobile games) is expected to generate $424 million by the 2010. There has been a US$14 million deal between Italy's Mondo TV, Europe's No 2 cartoon producer and distributor, and India's Padmalaya Telefilms. This is expected to boost India's creative reputation. NASSCOM has projected a creation of an additional 300,000 jobs in this sector in next few years. Indian animation industry though a late starter is on the threshold of a boom period and so has a great career potential. India has great mythological stories and characters, good artists and technicians.

Animation application areas include myriad avenues in the following areas

• Entertainment (movies and television)
• Business (product promotions and marketing demos)
• Sales (presentations)
• Education (Computer Based Tutorials/Web Based Tutorials)
• Publishing (graphics and printing)
• Virtual reality in Defense
• Web designing
• Engineering
• Advertising (commercials and print ads)
• Fashion designing and interior designing
• Development of computer games/mobile games
• Medical, legal and insurance industry (presentations and models)
• Leading studios and training institutes

Salary

Animation is a sparkling career option even though it is at its nascent stage in India. It is rightly said that animation is a career where one can literally 'draw' ones salary. The training institutes help the candidates in their placements. After finishing the in-house training in some leading animation production studio, you can be a junior animator and can start earning between Rs.12000 to Rs.14000. A senior animator with an experience of 3 to 5 years can take home a sum of Rs.25000 to Rs.35000. But if you have a portfolio of some good and outstanding animation work you would even be able to earn more than Rs.50000 to Rs.60000.So in just a few years one can draw a salary of six figures.