Question:
I really want to learn how to animate. What steps should I take?

Answer:
I get asked this question a lot by e-mail and it really requires a big answer... read on...

First of all, you may be a person who is sitting at home thinking to yourself, “I’ve always loved animation, I wish I could do that.” I’m sure we’ve all started out with that very first thought and then it progresses into more than just a thought, it turn into a desire where you then say, “I really want to learn how to do that so I can make my own cartoons (or work at a studio some day).”

You might take some art classes in High School, which are generally, very broad in their scope: everything from pottery to watercolor and oil paints to collage and paper mache. There are a few “Arts High Schools” that have special courses in music, acting and maybe even some animation - usually computer based like Flash or I even know a couple that teach Maya and 3D Studio Max!!

You may even enroll in a few weekend specialty courses through the YMCA or maybe the local library if they offer something you like.

These are all good things and should be pursued if you can find them.

The next step, once you graduate from High School would be to possibly apply to a College or University that has a specialized program in animation. There are tons of them around. Back in 1967, Sheridan college started it off in Canada. Cal Arts had a program that was started by Disney way back that is still going today. Practically every College has now got an animation program of some sort.

The best way to get into the animation industry is to take a college level program. You will get a well rounded education in all the various aspects of production that will allow you to decide on a specific area that you would like to specialize in. Generally speaking, all programs will have the following courses: animation, character design, layout, and storyboarding. These are the core courses. They will also offer courses in life drawing, and maybe these as well: acting, script writing, computer arts (Photoshop, After Effects, Premier, Flash, ToonBoom, etc.), sculpting, puppet animation.

Some courses might blend in some computer animation programs like Maya or 3D Studio Max or have them as stand alone courses.

You just need to do some research and find out which school is best for you in terms of location, affordability, course selection, faculty, and reputation.

But all that said, that’s not really what I want to focus on in this answer. The real focus should be on “I really want to LEARN how to animate. What STEPS should I take?” The words “learn” and “steps” are the keys here.

Having taught many of the various courses in animation at Sheridan College (1988 - 2002) and Seneca College (2002 - present) as well as Humber College (2005 - present) I’ve seen a lot of students, about 2000 to date, and believe me when I say, I’ve seen just about every different type of student that there is (although about once every 2 years I get surprized with a new species).

I’ve come up with a pretty good idea about how people learn animation and reflecting back over the past 22 odd years here’s what I’ve come up with.

Step 1
You must want to learn.

There’s the old saying, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.”

How very true this is.

If you don’t want to learn something, no one can force you to learn it. I’ve taught courses where there are one or two students who are clearly driven to learn. They’re almost insatiable. They show up to every class, they’re focussed on what I’m saying, they’re engaged from the point of view that they ask questions for clarification, further explaination, even just to question “why?”. They take notes, after the lecture they’re right back at their desk either thinking about what was discussed or jumping right into the assignment. Then later, they show me their work in progress, ask for help where they’re having problems, jot notes on my feedback, then get right to work on doing revisions. If they have time, they’ll show it to me again for further feedback and then finally hand it in on time.

Based on the program and school acceptability levels I usually set my own standard of what is a bare passing assignment. This is based on the student’s level; either 1st, 2nd or 3rd year. You can’t expect the same quality level from a 1st year student that you would accept in a 3rd year student. I always offer to any student at the beginning of each year to shift my expectation level higher towards a professional level if they come and ask me to do it. This very rarely happens except for the one or two students that I mentioned above. I tell them it’s not to try and “suck up” to me and earn bonus points for the end of the year grading, but rather to get them to push themselves harder.

I love to teach students who fall into the category described above. That’s not to say that I don’t love to teach all the other students who don’t do that stuff, it’s just that it’s nice to be directly engaged with the student on a higher level because you know they want to do something with the information that I’m giving them.

Now I’m going to be very general here because the average student falls into a very broad range. I’m also not trying to be derogatory at all. Most students, about 85 - 90% fall into the category of “average”. They may want to learn the stuff, but they don’t seem “driven” most of the time. They start off strong but then loose steam towards the end of each year. They start staying up late to complete assignments that they’ve fallen behind on for any number of reasons. This leads to erratic sleep patterns and the tendancy to “time shift”. This means they stay up later and sleep in the next day which means they likely miss their morning class the next day. Assignments start coming in late or incomplete or poorly done.

These students usually are the ones who show up to class regularily, but they can be easily distracted during a lecture. They don’t take notes of any substance and rarely, if ever ask a question. They also often sit towards the back of the class. Some will sleep through a lecture. I get ticked off when I see students do this and early on in my teaching career would walk around and poke them to wake them up. These days, you’re not allowed to touch a student or do anything that would center them out for possible ridicule in a public venue... yeah, I know. So, I just let them sleep through and wake them up at the end if they’re still out. I figure it’s their problem if they miss any information.

I’ve also had students come in after a lecture and ask me to repeat all the information to them... from an hour long lecture. Sadly, I decline and say they really should have come to class on time. I get the odd response that makes me out to be the bad guy if I don’t repeat it all.

I’m not saying that they’re all bad and they all do all of these things. Some just do one or two of them. Most of this comes from just not being... wait for it... “mature enough”. There, I said it!

However, I do have to say that I have had some “mature students” (a student that is older than 25 years old) do some of the stuff above.

I recently went through a rather sad exercise of having a mature student file a human rights violation against me because I failed them in my animation class. They had failed the majority of the assignments with me throughout the 2nd semester of 2nd year. You might ask how they got into 2nd year if they were that bad, I actually failed them in 1st year but they retook the 2nd semester with another instructor who just edged them over to 2nd year. In 2nd year 1st semester, I gave them just a bare pass (he had actually mathematically failed by 5% but because of his grades in all the other courses, I moved the grade up to get them through to the next semester. We did place them on academic probation as a warning that they did have to improve their work through the next semester of face being failed. Unfortunately, to put it bluntly, this person simply could not animate. I kept giving them feedback sheets full of information on where they had gone wrong but it didn’t seem to help them. At the end of the year they had failed with a 44% grade (55 is a pass). They then filed the suit against the school, myself and the coordinator of the program.

In the end we were held blameless in the accusations but it still goes to show you how low some people can sink.

This then brings up the final category of student that makes up about 5% of the total. These are the students that just don’t get it at all. They may have some rudimentary drawing skills and somehow they managed to get into the program with a portfolio (which in hindsight may have been faked to a certain extent). We have found students who had gotten someone else to do the portfolio for them. This instituted a practice that I began at Seneca College after I first set up the program. After we had accepted all the portfolios for assessment we then called all the people who seemed to have the top grades and invited them to the school to do an on-site drawing test that involved drawing their own hand and then doing a perspective drawing based on a simple floor plan. Astoundingly, we did reject a fair number of applicants based on the extreme disparity of the drawing quality between the test and the portfolio.

However these students ended up getting in, they just can’t keep up to the level of acceptability. These students rarely make it through the first semester let alone the first year. Sadly, these students tend to take up the majority of the time from an instructor. Because they don’t get it, they ask more questions and ask for longer feedback periods when reviewing their work. As an instructor, you want to help them with the vain thought that, “maybe they’ll get it if I just explain it enough.” Unfortunately this isn’t true and the other student recognize that it’s a waste of time and get angry because I should have been spending more time helping them instead.

So now, after this lengthy dissertation on student behaviors, let’s get back to the main topic: What are the other steps to learning??

So, Step 1 is: You have to want to learn. Fine.

Step 2:
Answer the question: "Which way do you learn best?"

Different people learn in different ways. I’m not trying to aviod step 2, just bear with me.

How can we learn? We use our senses.

We see,
We touch and feel, or we do, and
We hear.

Smell and taste don’t actually apply to us in animation, so we’ll skip over those two.

In a teaching environment we have two basic venues: the lecture class and the work class.

In a lecture class you can stand up at the front of the class and talk about the subject using descriptive words. This requires that the student listen and follow along with the narrative of our speaking and try to comprehend the meaning of what we’ve said and then remember it for later as they apply the information to their assignment.

Listening
I like to think of myself as a fairly entertaining speaker. I like to get up in front of a crowd and have them hanging on my every word. I try to throw in some jokes here and there or a funny story about working on a particular production or with a certain person as it applys to the topic at hand. However, unfortunately, animation can get kinda technical at certain points dealing with numbers and timing charts, and echhh, exposure sheets. Try to keep everyone awake during a lecture on filling out exposure sheets is almost impossible - believe me!

Seeing
So, I try to spice things up in my lectures by getting visual with them as well. “Let them see the stuff”, I say. I have an animation desk in my lecture room and I’ll set up a video camera over my shoulder and have it projected up onto a big screen at the front of the class so they can see me animating. Exciting, huh? It’s o.k at the beginning on the simple stuff like ball bounces & seaweed when it only takes 10 - 20 minutes to animate it. Once you go past this point, it’s like watching molasses run!

Doing
So, I get the students to bring in their animation disks with them and have them follow along. This works to a certain extent, until they start to fall behind. Then the pencils go down and the arms cross and the eyes get heavy... klunk! zzzzzzzzzzzzzz Uh-oh, lost another one.

So, I get up every so often and dance around at the front acting out a particular action and breaking it down for them, then I get them to stand up and act it out with me... hey! wake up and do this with us man! O.k. everyone sit down, and you can go back to sleep.

It’s tough when you need to talk about something for an hour and 15 minutes! I don’t blame you for getting tired. I’m awake because I’m doing all the talking and dancing up here. So, I ask questions to get them involved a bit more. I ask lots of “Why?” and “How?” questions. “Why would it do that and not that?” “What if it could? Why not?” or “How would you do it?”

If I had my dream come true for teaching in a lecture, it would be for five 15 minute stretches with little breaks of 5 minutes inbetween to stretch and have a drink (non-alcoholic of course).

So that covers all the areas I mentioned above. They still need to actually do the assignment. They need to go through the experience of doing it.

This is where the work class room comes into play.

Each student has their own desk to work at. Usually there are lots of other desks around as well. This creates a community environment which can easily turn into a social environment with students chatting about common interests and activities and experiences outside the focus of the assignments. This tends to take place immediately after a lecture class and I always suggest the students take a 15 minute break to get a dring or quick bite to eat or have a bathroom break. Where things tend to fall apart is when the break turns into 20, 30 40 minutes or even more!

I’m sitting in class with 5 or 6 students saying, “Hey, where did everyone go??”

My class periods are 3 1/2 hours long. The lecture is between 45 min and 1 1/2 hours which after the break leaves 1 hour 15 min to 2 1/2 hours to spend one-on-one with any students who need individual help.

It’s usually anticipated that once the student gets back, they’ll start asking for help or for me to look at their assignment to give them some suggestions. If I have 22 students in a class, that would work out to about 4 - 7 minutes per student which is, generally speaking, more than enough time depending on how good... or bad the assignment is. The remaining period of the time should be spent actually working on the assignment.

There are two basic components to working on an assignment: 1) thinking about what you’re going to do, and 2) physically working on the assignment. If you’re dealing with animation, you really need to think the assignment through before you start drawing anything, Experience has told me that you can save yourself about half the amount of time it takes by thinking it through. This will help you to solidify the idea and do some mental visualization. If you just jump right in, you can waste a lot of time on bad ideas that don’t go anywhere. I find that if I can see the image clearly in my head first, it makes drawing it out so much easier. That’s not to say that you can’t change your mind about something and make some modifications or even scrap the idea totally and start from ground zero again.

How much time do you need to think it through? It depends on how focussed you are. I do a lot of thinking in the car as I drive to and from school or while I’m driving my kids to hockey. I let an idea roll around for a while and play it out. I look at the thought process like a tree. Start at the trunk of the tree where it comes out of the ground. One trunk - that’s the core idea. For the “Stairway assignment”, my core idea is: Mad Scientist workshop. As I move up the trunk, it begins to split into big branches, maybe two or three. Each branch is an extrension of the idea, like where is the workshop? Branch one is in a basement of a castle, branch two is in a small shed outsidee the castle and branch three is in a tower in the castle. Off each main branch there are smaller brances that lead to other smaller branches that then have lots of leaves on them. Each of these extensions is another different option. If I don’t like one of the options, I back up to the previous fork in the tree and simply take a differnt branch.

I sometimes like to write out my ideas and do little sketches of things that might pop into my head at that specific point in time. I might come back to this sheet and use some of the ideas later on or just completely ignore what I wrote. It’s an evolving process but it must be thought through, even at a bery basic level.

Once I have the idea in my head, I can then start the process of scheduling. Hey, what about the drawing part?? We’ll get to that, but first we need to plan out our time.

Scheduling
Time management- or scheduling, is one of the most neglected areas of the learning process... in my opinion.

In any learning environment, you are given a schedule of classes - a time-table that blocks out when your classes start and end each day of the week. There are three reasons for a timetable: 1) space availability, 2) faculty availability, and 3) student availability.

If you are using a facility that has multiple classrooms and multiple different courses, each course requires a classroom to deliver the information and/or workspace to do the work. These are blocked out by a scheduler so that the space is fully used throughout the day. Most companies must pay for the square footage that is being used. If a classroom is not being used but you are still paying for it, you’re losing money.

The faculty are being paid for their time that they are teaching a class. They need a regular schedule so they can plan out the semester’s worth of activities. They know how much time they have to deliver a lecture and interact with the students.

Students will have multiple courses within each week and they need to know where to go, how long they have to get the information and the time that they have to show their work to the instructor for feedback.

Outside of this time-table, the students are free to do whatever they want. They may have an hour between two classes during which they may have their lunch, go to the bathroom or library, or try to finish an assignment that is due the next class.

Before and after the classes, students have time to wake up, get dressed, have breakfast, commute to the school. Or afterwards, commute back home, get supper, relax, watch T.V. and sleep.

Of course, the main thing that’s missing here is any homework that needs to be completed. It would be wonderful to say that all work is completed during the class periods but that’s just not realistic. The amount of time outside the classroom that is required will vary greatly depending on the complexity of the assignment. It might be only a couple of hours or it could be 50 hours or more.

Most programs have between 22 and 24 hours of scheduled classroom time each week. That leaves 144 - 146 hours available. Subtract 56 hours (if you get 8 hours each night) and you now have 94 - 96 hours of waking time. Let’s round it down to 94 hours. If you total together all the personal grooming time you use for bathroom activities, getting dressed, showers, etc. it’s about an hour a day (at least). We’re down to 86 hours. Take away 2 1/2 hours a day for eating breakfast, lunch, dinner, and the bedtime snack, that’s 12 more hours gone. Down to 74 hours.

Commuting to and from school? For me, it’s 6 hours a week. That’s 68 hours left. What about any exercising? I try to do about an hour a day. - 7 hours... 61 left.

Have a part time job? When I was in College, I worked at Zellers 3 nights a week + Saturdays, that was 16 hours. 45 hours. In a relationship? No? Awww that’s too bad. What’s that? You don’t have any time... all too true.

So let’s stop here at 45 hours available. If you have other stuff feel free to subtract it to find your own number. 45 ÷ 7 = about 6 1/2 hours a day which is a lot of time! I’m guessing your weekends are pretty free which means you probably have about 12 hours a day there which means you probably have on average 4 hours a night during the week. How are you using that time. Watching T.V.? Playing video games? Hangin’ out with your buds?

I’m just saying all of this to get you to start thinking about how you actually use your time.

To effectively get your work done, you really need a minimum stretch of 3 hours. That’s focussed time with no distractions that will take you away from what you’re doing. I’m not saying that you can’t have the radio or T.V. on for background noise, just so long as it doesn’t interfere.

Which comes back around to scheduling.

You need to set aside the time so you can do the work you need to do.

“What if I’ve set aside some time to work on my project but I just can’t get into it?” “I can’t put my creativity on a schedule, man.” “I have to wait until I’m inspired to do it.”

If you’re working at McDonalds, flipping burgers, you can’t say any of those things. You just do it.

“Yeah, but flipping burgers is not artistic stuff.”

When you’re working in a studio getting paid a weekly salariy, you can’t go to your boss at the end of the week and say, “I can’t put my creativity on a schedule, man. I didn’t do anything this week but you still have to pay me.” I’ll guarantee that you won’t be coming into work the following week.

You want to work in a studio as a professional artist? You’d better start acting like a professional now. They have a schedule that they have to keep in order to get the production done on time and on budget.

Get that big calendar out with nice big squares for each day. The best ones are those with four months on a sheet and the squares are big enough to put a small Stickit Note© on. You can sit down and plan out an entire semester in an evening. If you have all your course outlines, they should have a listing of all the assignments through the semester and their start and due dates along with the grade value (which is only valuable to you if you happen to have two major assignments due the same week and for some unforseen reason you chose to wait until the last minute to start both of them, you can then prioritize as to which one holds more value and decide to focus on it instead - special note: don’t let this happen to you. If it does, don’t sweat it, you’re not exactly “prime hiring material” anyway.)

Once you have all the assignment dates written in, you can then start to delegate the amount of time that you estimate that it will take you to complete. You know the old formula: ___ # of hours x 2, because whatever number of hours you come up with it will take you double that... just in case.

Going into 2nd semester, you should, by now, have a fairly good sense of how long it takes you to do certain things. Generally speaking, second semesters are usually harder than the first semester. While the first semester deals with the introduction of basic principles, second semester usually deals with the practical application of these principles. This means that the assignments are bigger and much more involved and will require a considerable amount of time to get it done right.

Now when I say, “right”, I’m using a very broad term. “Right” can also translate into “adequate”, “O.k.”, “just passable”, etc. What you really want to do is excel at the assignment - go beyond what you thought you could do. So now, we cycle back through all the stuff I just said again.

Step 1 - You have got to want to do this.

Step 2 - When you come to classes:
a) Look
b) Listen
c) Take notes
d) Think about it
e) Do it
f) Show it for feedback
g) Revise to make it better

This last part is really important.

Revisions
When your instructor goes over your assignments with you, let them look it over and pick out the things that they think need fixing up. Then listen to them. Take notes. Ask for clarification. Make sure you know exactly what it is that they want to see in the next version. They’re the one who will be grading it. Ask them, “What can I do to make this a 100% assignment?” It’s a tough question. There may be too many things wrong with it for you to fix up within the time you have left. They may skirt the question by saying , “Well if you do this and this and this, that will make it better.” Then later you get a “C” grade for it and you scratch your head wondering why it got such a low grade. Go back and ask for clarification.

The better you understand what the instructor is looking for the better you’ll be able to give it to them when you do the assignment.

Make sure you know what things you’re going to be graded on specifically.

I have lots of students who fail an assignment because they didn’t do all the things they were required to do. A simple example of this would be, if I asked you to draw 3 circles on a sheet of paper. Each circle is worth 25% of the overall grade, so all 4 add up to 100%.

If you hand in the assignment and there is only one circle on the page, the best grade you could possibly hope for is 25% - which is a failing grade.

Amazingly enough I get students who do this very same thing on larger assignments - they just leave things out - even though I specifically asked for them. It’s really weird. It all comes down to scheduling. If you leave something until the last minute, it’s gonna turn out bad. You sinmply won’t have the time to do it the best way you can - especially if you don’t get any feedback part-way through the assignment.

One of the “big picture” things that most students just don’t get is that, this is all a competition to see who can get the job at the end of the program. There are roughly 20 - 30 students in a class. Some programs will have 2 - 5 classes in a year. Some programs run between 2 and 4 years. That’s between 40 and 150 students graduating in any given year from just one school. In North America, there are just over 100 schools at college level that are offering these types of programs. That’s anywhere between 4000 and 15,000 students graduating in a year. Let’s just say that there are only the top 1% that are amazingly good enough to get a job - that’s 40 - 150 people that are pretty much guaranteed to get those jobs. Are you one of those top 150 out of 15,000 students? What makes you think you’re actually that good?

Are you aceing all the assignments? Do the instructor’s compliment you and say, “There’s nothing more you can do to this to make it any better... it’s amazing the way it is.” or “Why are you still in this program? Just go out and get a job.” In the 23 years that I’ve been teaching I’ve only seen about 6 of these students in my classes. Very rare.

I’ve had lots of students who have gone on to do some really neat stuff in the studios and make names for themselves. They didn’t necessarily show me this ability when they were in my classes. It may have happened the following year with another instructor or even after they had gotten their first job. The shocking realization of what is actually required when you start working in a studio can really snap you to attention pretty quickly. I was one of those people who found out within the first week of working, if I didn’t smarten up and start acting professionally I’d be out of a job. The guy I got hired with was fired after one week of goofing around. My attitude changed immediately after I heard about this. For me, it was almost too late. It shouldn’t happen to you. You’ve heard all the warnings.

It’s up to you to decide what you’ll do with this information.

The next thing we'll tackle is: How Does Stuff Get Done??