Introduction to the Animation Industry [The Animation Industry: Preparing for a Career - Unit01]

Introduction to the Animation Industry

20/01/25 - 24/01/25

(Screen Skills, no date e)

Introduction

This blog post explores the core roles required to produce an animated film as well as a deeper dive into a few job roles that interest me. This provides a solid foundation for this module by understanding potential future career options in more depth. This will combine a combination of learnings from lectures as well as research to achieve this detailed understanding of job roles. 

Who Does What on an Animated Film?

The following list demonstrates the key roles required to produce an animated film, without these roles you are likely to sacrifice overall quality. Each role has key roles and responsibilities to bring the film to life through their individual specialism. (Williams, 2012)

• Storyboard Artist
• Narrative Designer / Writer
• Layout
• Creative Director / Art Director / Production Designer
• Technical Animator/Rigger
• Animator
• Concept Artist
• 3D Artist / Set Designer
• Prop Artist
• Vehicle Artist
• Character Artist
• Environment Artist
• Producer / Project Manager
• Executive Producer
• Creative Producer
• Line Produer
• Associate Producer
• VFX Artists (Compositors, Effects Creation.)
• Quality Assurance
• Technical Artists
• Talent / Voice Actors
• Sound Artists / Designers / Composer
• Editor
• Lead Editor
• Assistant Editor
• Sound Editor
• Lead/Senior management roles linked to the above.

A more in depth view of job roles relevant to modern animation productions can be found on the Screen Skills (no date) website.

Whilst there are a vast array of key roles I'm going to expand my knowledge on some of the most interesting ones and ones that link to my career aspirations. I'm going to focus on the roles of Animator, Technical Animator, and Layout Artist, exploring their key responsibilities, required skills, appealing aspects, and potential challenges.

Animator

Firstly, looking at the role of Animator is arguably one of the most popular roles but needed in abundance to bring a film to life. All of the roles listed above are likely to have their education or training rooted in core animation skills before specialising into a more bespoke aspect of animation film production. This role appeals to me because it is highly creative and the rewards are tremendous in your outcomes. I love creating something from scratch that I can share with others. So far on this course my core animation skills have significantly developed and I'm super proud of my outcomes. I'd love to take these refined skills into a traditional animation studio to produce animated films or T.V. series by bringing characters to life.

The core role and responsibility is to bring the characters to life in order to help convey the story Screen Skills (no date b). They are equivalent to the actors in an animated, although the process of bringing character to life is very different! An animator will follow the direction of storyboarding artists to bring the animation to life visually. Hooks (2009) explores the role of acting in animation and how understanding acting concepts allows the animator to achieve stronger animation by implementing these concepts into an animated character. However, one of the interesting aspect of this book is how Hooks (2009) initially struggled to convey traditional acting concepts to animators but also how he adapted his teaching to better align with animation. 

Animators tend to specialise depending on the medium used, however, all animators will use traditional animation theory such as the 12 Principles of Animation to bring their characters to life (Thomas and Johnston, 1997). Whilst there are many facets, animation medium can be grouped into 3 key areas: 2D animation, 3D Animation and Stop Motion Animation. Within these areas there will be further specialisation such as rotoscoping, motion capture animation, pixel art animation and many more. I'm particularly interested in 3D animation because it is one of the most dominant forms of animation in the industry at present with skills applicable to the Games, Film and T.V. industries. Furthermore, it is the medium I have the most skills and experience with.

The above video (Marion Strunck, Junior Animator at Framestore, 2015) explores the role of Junior animator Marion Strunck at Framestore studios. From their experience the key aspects that they highlight are:

• Crafting movements for characters in films
• Assigned scenes to bring the characters to life.
• Given a rigged character with lots of controllers on the character rig to bring the character to life.
• Preproduction explores core motions to understand how the character will move to inform the rig so that when it is animated it feels realistic and believable.
• Use of live action reference, primary and secondary.
• Lip sync
• Knowing the personality of the character to understand how they would respond in different scenarios. 
• Each animator will have their own style to help make every character feel unique.

The challenges for this job roles are undoubtedly reaching the quality bar required to create work for animated films and games that audiences expect. Particularly with traditional keyframe animation, because it is hand crafted from scratch it is very difficult and time consuming to craft believable and engaging animations. Once you establish strong skills you face creative challenges to breathe personality and life into each character so that they feel individual. 

My current skills an experience linked to this job role are good and have developed significantly, in terms of visual quality, from exploring this course. I studied my undergraduate BA (Hons) Animation degree, worked as an animator for Eutechnyx for 3 years, worked in games, animation and VFX animation for 10 years and worked as a 2D animator on an independent game 'Squishy Sports'. This means I have worked on game products such as Warhammer: Storm of Vengeance and Nascar the Game: Inside Line gaining experience working in a games studio on a live production. This masters degree has really pushed the quality of my keyframe animation building on the skills and experience to produce a higher quality demo reel that could be used in applications for a job role.

Technical Animator / Rigger / Technical Director

The technical animator or rigger is a specialist animation role that focus on developing skeletons and control rig set ups for bespoke characters. Riggers receive a static mesh from the 3d art department and essentially their role is to create easy to use and access controls that animators can use to bring the characters to life (Screen Skills, no date c). This is a complex role that requires a deep understanding of anatomy to build digital skeletons that allow the mesh to be deformed in a way that is realistic. It also requires a deep understanding of animation so that rigs are created logically and expose the relevant elements that an animator would need to animate. Advanced riggers will program scripts and create a network of nodes to achieve complex rigs that enable this advanced deformation and movement. 

This video shows Aton Lerin, Rigger at Framestore (2015) discussing the role of rigger. One of the key things highlighted is the trial and error of crafting the best rig over time by making continuous improvements. This is achieved by developing the rig and then sharing with the animators for testing and feedback so that the rigger can understand what the animator needs and what problems they might face when working with the rig long term. This shows that you will need resilience and ability to receive feedback in the best interest of the end user. It also demonstrates the need to problem solve and find solution to the feedback you receive to make the rig better. They also stressed the importance of communication to be able to articulate ideas to your team in the interest of solving problems and organisation to keep things tidy and easy to access.

The role does vary between film and games, primarily due to game engine integration. Lake (2024) has created an in-depth study of the role of a rigger in the video games industry. He reiterates a lot of the concepts covered already but expands the responsibilities to include: " ..game engine integration, state machines, animation, development of tools and pipelines, motion capture support, run-time and offline simulations such as cloth and ragdoll, or even more artist-oriented tasks such as materials and shader work." (Lake, 2024, p.2). The core reason for this is that films are rendered and games run in real-time, therefore support with integrating animation at run-time in engine is needed.

This role interests me because I like problem solving and I love building complex systems that achieve a simple outcome. I've built rigs in the past for an array of characters, vehicles and other assets, however, I've predominantly worked with the inbuilt tools in Maya. I'm keen to expand my technical knowledge and build more advanced rigs with programming. I'm also keen to further understand game engine tools and integration of rigging systems in engines - particularly Unreal Engine. I'm also highly organised in my workflow and I feel this attention to detail would be a strong skill for this job role. The challenges I would face would be building my technical understanding with programming, however, I am adaptable and find learning new skills easy.

Layout Artist

The layout artist is the last job role I will be exploring in this blog post. This is a job role I am familiar with, however, know less about compared to the previous too. This is a job role that is not typically found in game development studios and more commonly associated with animation and VFX studios. This is likely why I am less familiar with it and is exactly the reason why I am researching it! 

Screen Skills (no date d) explains that a layout artist is focussed on designing the composition for the shot. They interpret the frames from the storyboard artist and consider how the final frames will be composed. 2D layout artists will be controlling the size of different visual elements in the foreground and background whereas a 3D layout artist operates in a similar way to a director of photography on a live action film to determine the placement of objects and characters within the frame using a digital camera. Rather than camera's simply serving as a spectator the layout artist's role is to place them in away that support storytelling concepts to enhance the film.

A layout artist will create a simple blockout of the environment and key character poses to gain a feeling for the space and then place and animate different cameras to flesh out the core of a scene (Jimenez, 2018). This blockout helps visualise the scene and bring the storyboards to life so that 3D artists can build the final set and then animators can bring the full character animation to life. Therefore as a layout artist you will need strong skills in animation as well as deep knowledge of cinematography. You play an important role in locking in the camera angles that the character animators will be using to make sure their animation looks great from those angles.

Based on this knowledge the closest job role to this in games is likely to be a cinematics/cutscene animator. This is because cutscenes typically play out with no input from the player, similar to animated films, therefore the skills required to produce high quality cinematography in cutscenes is needed. However, from my experience, there typically isn't a dedicated layout artist and instead the cinematics/cutscene animator would perform the layout pass as part of their animation production pipeline.

Conclusion

In conclusion, there are a vast array of different job roles and nuances that all contribute to building a high quality animated outcomes. There are key differences between the roles and responsibilities between games, animation and VFX industries for this role due to type of media. Animation and Rigging are where my main interests lie, however, the skills and knowledge of a layout artist will enhance my ability to present my animated sequences stronger and use the camera to support story telling concepts through cinematography knowledge. This blog post has also looked at the broad range of job roles available to holistically understand the key roles required for a animated production.

Learning Outcomes:

1. Understand the main stages of creating an animated project and the roles involved.
2. Identify key positions within the animation industry and their responsibilities.
3. Reflect on your skills and interests in relation to industry roles.

Reference List

1. Aton Lerin, Rigger at Framestore (2015) YouTube video, added by ScreenSkills [Online]. Available at https://www.screenskills.com/job-profiles/browse/animation/production/rigger/ (Accessed: 21st January 2024).
2. Hooks, E. (2009) Acting for animators: A Complete Guide to Performance Animation; multimedia CD-ROM included. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. 
3. Jimenez, M. (2018) Meet Layout Artist Marta Jimenez! #Interview. Available at: https://www.brownbagfilms.com/labs/entry/meet-layout-artist-marta-jimenez-interview (Accessed: 24th January 2024).
4. Lake, M. (2024) Technical animation in video games. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. 
5. Marion Strunck, Junior Animator at Framestore (2015) YouTube video, added by ScreenSkills [Online]. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UNPinITv1Q (Accessed: 20th January 2024).
6. Screen Skills (no date a) Job Profiles > Animation. Available at: https://www.screenskills.com/job-profiles/browse/animation/ (Accessed: 20th January 2024).
7. Screen Skills (no date b) Job Profiles > Animation > Animator (Animation). Available at: https://www.screenskills.com/job-profiles/browse/animation/production/animator-animation/ (Accessed: 20th January 2024).
8. Screen Skills (no date c) Job Profiles > Animation > Rigger (Animation). Available at: https://www.screenskills.com/job-profiles/browse/animation/production/rigger/ (Accessed: 21st January 2024).
9. Screen Skills (no date d) Job Profiles > Animation > Layout Artist (Animation). Available at: https://www.screenskills.com/job-profiles/browse/animation/production/layout-artist-animation/ (Accessed: 24th January 2024).
10. Screen Skills (no date e) Job Profiles > Animation. Available at: https://www.screenskills.com/job-profiles/browse/animation/ (Accessed: 24th January 2024).
11. Thomas, B.F. and Johnston, O. (1997) Illusion of life: Disney Animation. Hyperion,U.S. 
12. Williams, A. (2012) 'Who Does What on an Animated Film?' [Video Lecture], 7WCT2011-0105-2024: The Animation Industry: Preparing for a Career. University of Hertfordshire. 26th August.