How To Create An Animation Resume

Resumes for jobs in the animation field can be a bit tricky, especially when the real demonstration of your skills and experience can be found in your demo reel and portfolio. You do still need a record of where you've worked and your roles there, though, so it's always good to have a standard resume on hand. Here's a few tips for putting together a good animation resume.

For a student or recent graduate, focus on internships and in-school achievements
If you don't have work experience, you'll be relying more heavily on your demo reel and portfolio to sell you as a viable job candidate - but don't neglect to use your resume to showcase other skills.
If you've had internships, make sure to list those and describe what you did there. If you won any awards in school or gained any other recognition for your work, list those as well. Make sure to list your education before your experience (only for students and new grads), though, and list your GPA if it's above 3.5.

For a more seasoned animator, focus on achievements and key projects
As a career animator, if you've worked on high-profile projects such as feature films or highly successful video games, be sure to discuss those and your role in those projects. It's usually a good idea, under each job heading, to have a short paragraph describing your general functions there, then a bullet list of the major projects you were involved in, supplemented by a list of achievements that detail any time when you made a significant difference in improving internal processes, bringing a project to success, or driving new innovation.

For contractors/freelancers, focus on your biggest projects and your biggest clients
Similar to a full-time animator, you'll want to create a bullet list discussing high-visibility projects and your role in them. You'll also, though, want to have one bullet that lists your high-profile clients, provided you aren't violating any confidentiality agreements.

Tip: To keep from overwhelming readers with individual job listings for every client you've worked for, instead create a single job listing covering your freelance experience, with a single job description that discusses the general services you offer to clients. For your bullet list of projects beneath that, pick and choose only the most important projects that showcase the diversity of your skills and the range of responsibility you've had.

Always include a website link
You can only fit so much information into your portfolio or demo reel, especially as you update both over the course of your career, and someone reading your resume might not have easy access to either. They might, however, be able to easily get to your web page, where you can unite all the distinct elements of your experience and skills into a single presentation piece. You can include your resume and add further details that didn't fit on the page; you can expand on your portfolio and online demo reel with additional images and videos beyond what was available in the sample pieces; you can also give them access to interactive works that may not have worked in demo reel format. It's a place to give a little more personal information about yourself, too, but without venturing into the unprofessional; you should keep the same taboos in mind with your website as you do with your demo reel.

Overall it should be well-designed, and should create a cohesive image of you as a highly qualified professional. If you have a strong presence on sites like LinkedIn, you may want to include that link on your resume as well.

Don't forget your list of skills
Depending on whether you're a traditional or computer animator, this may be a list of areas where you have expertise (cel painting, stop motion animation, keyframing, cleanup, etc.) or a list of technical skills and software, (Adobe Photoshop CS5, Adobe Flash, Maya, 3D Studio Max, bump mapping, inverse kinematics, etc.). Most animation jobs require very specific skill sets or software knowledge, and to keep from being passed over you need to be sure that your resume makes it clear that you have experience in these areas.

Use design elements and sample artwork sparingly
It's tempting to want to turn your resume into a graphic design piece.
While some people pull that off well with simple, elegant designs, for the most part this turns into a cluttered mess that detracts from the impact of your actual experience and looks highly unprofessional. This isn't the place to include sample pieces from projects discussed in the resume. That's what your sample sheet is for. And on that note...

Always include a sample sheet
Think of this as "print portfolio light." It's just a one-page piece with decently-sized snapshots of the very best works in your portfolio. You should caption them with the project they're related to, as optimally they should be references to projects discussed in the resume, so readers can see the end result of the work you discussed. The sample sheet should be the last page of the resume.

Never go over two pages
This doesn't include the sample sheet - that's your third page. Optimally a student resume should be one page; a career resume should be two pages. If you can't fit your experience in that space, you're giving too much detail or focusing on things that don't matter. Save something for the interview. If you pile on too much information, they won't read at all.

A showreel is must when applying for job in media & entertainment industry

A showreel is a must-have when applying for a job in the media & entertainment industry. Put your outstanding works together; keep your showreel short & up-to-date.

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24fps VS 30fps: The Final Showdown

Ah the age old question of frame rate! Frame rate used to be a non-question for a long time, it was set at 24 frames per second. Now that digital media has taken over though and we can set the frame rate to any crazy number we want to, what is the best frame rate to use? 24 frames per second or 30 frames per second?

First a tiny history lesson! 24 frames per second comes from when we were working with film and film projectors, it wasn't until digital media started to replace it that 30 frames per second became a standard.So now that we live in the digital world, why is 24 frames per second still popping up and confusing animators?
Animation purists will argue that 30 frames per second is "too smooth" for animation and removes a lot of the charm and esthetic of the work. Not to mention that 24 is a lot more easily divided than 30. We can go from 24 to 12 to 6 to 3 a lot easier than we can 30 to 15 to 7.5 to 3.75. How do you draw 3 quarters of a frame anyway? So 24 frames has persisted even into the digital world from people sticking to their guns on what animation "should look like."

30 frames per second however has taken over in the digital world and choosing to stay with 24 frames per second can not only cause you some headache, it can mess up a project completely.
Since 30 frames has become the norm, most video hosting sites like Youtube and Vimeo have their own codecs that they'll code your movies into when you upload them.

Those codecs are more designed for 30fps than they are for 24fps, even though they'll take 24. That might not make a huge difference, but it might double up frames here and there to stretch your film out to be the right frames per second and it can mess up any really exact timing you may have for cuts or lip sync.

It's never a great idea to change frame rates once you've started in one, everything will get shifted slightly and mess up a lot of your hard work.

The other draw back? Clients. I've never had a client ask for something in 24 frames per second. They are all working digitally, both in receiving your files and when they go to broadcast or distribute them. That means they'll want the files from you in the format that they won't have to do anything beyond turning around and putting it on their site or hitting the play button to broadcast it. That means 30 frames per second. Occasionally you can get away with 29.97 frames per second, but that in most regards is looked at in the same light as 30 frames per second.

It's not just that they will get grumpy, they won't accept it. I've worked on projects where someone will try to turn in a 24 frames per second clip for whatever reason and the client just refuse to take it until they make it 30 frames per second. A lot of clients also have their own upload service which will reject anything not in their correct codecs. It can be a big pain in the neck, not to mention cost you time, which costs you money, you know because time equals money blah blah blah.

So as far as I'm concerned, unless you're shooting your animation on film and plan on projecting it on film, you're better off doing 30 frames per second. Sure the purists will grump and complain but just because they're afraid of change shouldn't mean you having to be confused or make your work suffer.

Courtesy: www.thoughtco.com

How to Use Lights in After Effects

One of the biggest benefits of After Effects is its ability to create studio 3D animation. Along with that is the ability to create lights, similar to more fleshed out 3D programs like Maya or Cinema 4D. But how do lights work in After Effects and how do you use them? Let's dive in and check it out.

After Effect's 3D Is 2.5D
After Effects version of 3D is not really 3D as you might think of it in the terms of a Pixar movie or a video game. It's really 2.5D— made up of objects have height and width but not any depth although you can stack them on top of each other and create an illusion of depth.

It's much more like South Park's style (although South Park is created in Maya). It's as if you have pieces of paper that you can prop up and put in Z space; they themselves don't really have any depth to them but you can create a scene with depth in it. It can be a little tricky to wrap your head around but stick with it because once you understand how the 3D works in After Effects you can create some really neat animations and effects with the program.

Creating Your Composition
So pop open your After Effects program and let's make a new composition by selecting Composition > New Composition or by hitting the keyboard short cut Command N. That will bring up the New Comp window. Title it "Light Test" or something clever like that so we can try to reinforce good organizational habits when working in After Effects.

Make it 1920 by 1080 (which should always be your working standard). Set the Frame Rate to 23.97 and make it around 10 seconds long. Once we've done all that click OK.

Creating A Light
Now that we have our composition set up let's create a light. In your drop down menu at the top of the screen select Layer > New > Light.You can also right click in your timeline or work space and select New > Light there, or use the keyboard shortcut Shift Command Alt L.

Once we've done that you should see the Light Settings window pop up on your screen, here we can control what kind of light it is as well as what it's features are.We have a few options, Parallel, Spot, Point, and Ambient. The light options that I've seen used most often and that I use the most are Point and Spot, but let's see what each kind of light is like.

Parallel Light
A parallel light is something kind of light a light box. It creates a plane that projects out light from it, rather than it being an individual point. Parallel lights usually case a more evenly distributed amount of light in a wider area with a more gradual fall off out from the center.

Spot Light
A spot light in After Effects works just like a spot light in real life; it's a single point that you can aim around and point at things. They are usually smaller, more circular focused lights that you can control how wide or narrow it is as well as how sharp the fall off is. Spot lights are usually used to highlight a specific part of a frame; the rest is in black shadow with a fairly sharp fall off.

Point Light
A point light is as if you took a light bulb and suspended it from a wire and used that to light your frame. It's a point of light that you can move around, but without the added features of the spot light like the ability to adjust width. To control the point light's area, you control it's brightness, so the brighter the point light the more of the scene it's going to show, but it will also start to blow out anything that is directly around the point of that light.

Ambient Light
An ambient light will create a lighting for your entire scene, but without the ability to maneuver or place that light or control it's cone or falloff directly. An ambient light is most closely relatable to the sun; it will light your entire scene, but you don't have much control over it. An ambient light would be used most often if you want to affect the lighting of the entire frame.

Applying The Light To Your Scene
To learn how to use lights in After Effects, let's use the Spot Light option, because that will have the most options within it for us to play around with and learn from. The same techniques apply to all the other forms of lights, they'll just have a few less options than the spot light does but all the same principles apply to them as do the spotlight.

Select Spot from the Light Type menu and let's check out its other features. We have the color of our light, changing this will (obviously) change the color of your light. I find that using a white light with a little bit of a yellow tint to it creates the best, most real world feeling light. This is what people's eyes are most used to, so I find it nice to try to emulate that when you can.

Next we have intensity, a measure of how bright the light is. For now, let's keep it 100%; going lower than that will make it dimmer and going higher will make it brighter and blow out the very center of the spot light.

Next we have the Cone Angle and Cone Feather, the cone angle determines how wide the spot light is, so the higher the angle the bigger the circle will be and the smaller the angle the smaller it will be. Cone feather determines how sharp the edge of our light is, so a feather of 0% will be a hard line, and higher 100% will be a gradual fade out of the light rather than the sharp edge.

Falloff, Radius, and Falloff Distance are all similar to cone feather, only they apply more to the outside of the light rather than the edge of the light. A smooth falloff with a high radius and a large falloff distance will seem like a much bigger light that slowly becomes darkness rather than a sharp, focused spotlight.

Casting Shadows
This gets its own little section because it's an important element in making your lights. Odds are if you're making lights in After Effects, you'll want them to be casting shadows. To do that, we'll need to be sure that our Casts Shadows box is check marked here in our Light Settings window.

Once we check that Shadow Darkness and Shadow Diffusion will become available to change. Darkness is obviously how dark the shadow is, and diffusion is how soft or sharp it is. A high diffusion means it will have a fuzzy edge to it where as a low diffusion will create a crisp line at the edge of the shadow. For now, let's put diffusion at 10.Once we click ok you'll see your light appear in your composition.

Controlling Your Light
Once our light has appeared in the composition we can start to move and position it if that's part of the light options (remember ambient lights you can't position).With the spot light, you'll see that we have our standard red, green and blue arrows attached to it as if it were any other 3D object created in After Effects. These control the X, Y, and Z positions of the light. You can click and drag on each of these arrows to help move and position where you'd like your light to be.

You'll also notice with spotlight we have a line and a dot coming off of it. This controls where the spot light is pointing. That is the spot light's Point of Interest. We can animate and move both it's position and point of interest separately, so it's as if we have a real spot light and can slide it around on the floor as well as adjust its aim.

All the controls can be found within the light, and anything we're not happy with we can tweak even after we've created the light. The Transform option in our light's drop down menu within our timeline controls all of its positioning and rotation, and the Light Options drop down controls everything from the settings window we experienced earlier so we have plenty of ability to mess around with it until we get the effect we're after.

Having Lights Effect Your Objects
Since our scene is just a light right now, we'll want to create something for it to affect so let's create a new solid for it to light.Choose Layer > New > Solid or hit Command Y to bring up the Solid Settings window. We'll make it a full 1920 x 1080 so it fills our scene and make it whatever color you'd like then hit OK.

You'll notice when we create our solid it looks like a giant block of color, not being affected by the light at all. Even if we drag it below our light in the timeline it still isn't being affected.
That's because to get a layer to react to lighting it must be a 3D layer within After Effects. So in our timeline, we'll need to toggle this new solid layer to be a 3D layer by clicking the empty box underneath the logo of a 3D cube. That will put a cube into this empty box and turn our layer into a 3D layer and you should see it be lit by your light as soon as we toggle that on.

Creating Shadows Between Objects
Now let's take it one step further and create another object so we can see an After Effects shadow in action. Do the same technique of creating a solid (Command Y) and then we'll take that solid and slide it over a little bit to the left.Now, we need it to be a 3D layer so that it will accept the lighting, so toggle that same empty box beneath the icon of the 3D cube to switch that layer to a 3D one.

We'll need to pull it away from our original solid as well, to create some distance between the two so they're not stacked right on top of each other. Click and drag the blue arrow or go into the layer's transform options and slide the Z position, so that we pull this new solid closer towards our light and off of the other layer.

You'll notice right away that there doesn't seem to be any shadows happening. No matter where you positions or angle your light you won't see a shadow, that's because you need to turn on the ability for layers to cast shadows in After Effects.

Hit the arrow next to the layer's name to bring up the drop down menus, then do the same for Material Options. You'll see Casts Shadows is set to OFF by default, so toggle that to ON. You should see a shadow appear behind this layer and on top of your other one.Here we can also control many aspects of how our layer accepts lights as well as if it casts off any light similar to a reflective surface.

Conclusion
So there you have it, those are the basics of creating a light in After Effects. After you've done that it will simply be a lot of trial and error to figure out what settings you like set to what values to create a shadow or light that you think lights your scene the best. Remember, there's no right or wrong way to light something so go wild and try to create some really dynamic lighting!

Courtesy: www.thoughtco.com