How to learn Animation and make a career out of it.

Due to the increasing competition, animation today is not just figuring that are shown as moving images anymore, it is more about how far can you take your creativity, how different your ideas are, how smooth your story functions.

To implement your ideas here are some tips that you should keep in mind.

1. Presentation – The quality of your animation, the music you choose, typography, graphic designs, analyzing skills, and most importantly authenticity. All these elements should be seen in what you create. Editing can enhance your animation but cannot cover bad presentation. So, you need to remove insignificant movements. The presentation serves the purpose of entertaining the audience when presented correctly.
2. Acting skills – Animations require a storyline, a script. The characters that you build should be in sink with the dialogues you write. Acting skills are highly essential as they will add life to your animation. These days people tend to get attracted to animated characters because the way they act is intriguing. An animator is no less than a director, the only difference is that real-life actors may not always listen to the director but the animated ones will do as you please.
3. Observation skills – Animation requires an eye for the small details. Observe every movement of your character. Nothing should look unreal. From their reaction to certain things to the way they talk, everything has to seem realistic. Understand the acting and body language. This character is no one but you and everything you feel, you can present it through this character.

Things to keep in mind while building a character are –

A) Stability – practice the art of stability. The frame that your character is coming in has to be stable and stability comes with time though, so keep practicing it.

B) Smooth action – when a viewer is watching your animation, every movement should be clear to their naked eye. Keep testing your animation unless it appears as smooth as real-life movies. Connect the visual character to a human being, Incorporate the five senses, expressions, blinking, and hand movements.

4. Visualization skills – Before going after visualization, understand the quality you need to present before your audience. This will include the angle of the camera, graphics, text, and images. The visual representation will shape your animation. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information Book by Edward Tufte can help you with understanding data visualization in brief.

5. Imagination – one of the most important skills required to be a part of animation society is imagination. As you are creating the same world you imagined. The depth in your imagination, your ability to use it properly will help you in building your animation. If you are choosing this field, creativity and imagination are something that will keep expanding with time.

Some Basic Principles of animation like squash and stretch, the blade of grass or wave principle, Squash and Stretch, Anticipation, Staging, Straight Ahead Action and Pose-to-Pose, Follow Through and Overlapping Action, Ease In, Ease Out, Arcs Secondary Action, Timing, Exaggeration, Solid Drawing, Appeal.

Keep these principles in mind and soon you will be able to follow through with each of them after building your skills to start your career as an animator.

Below are some online courses that you can do to learn animation –