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Duck Party posted:I know a guy in his late 40's that just started in the animation industry after a career in the marines. You aren't too old. He actually had an advantage when he started because his seemingly unrelated work experience made him easier to work with than some of these younguns who never had a real job before and have no idea how to act in a professional environment. My advice is to stay positive, do the art you want to get hired for making, and put yourself out there. I'm 31, and started in the VFX/Animation industry less than a year ago (I was 30 when I joined). While this stuff was a hobby of mine for a while, I'd taken a 5 or so year break and had only been expanding my skills for about 9 months before I got the gig. How I got the job was a confluence of fortuitous events; I was sure I was merely at hobbyist level, but I wanted to do way more community engagement than I did my last go-around. Since I love Pixar and Renderman was now free for non-commercial use, I started posting to their community, and taught myself some coding so I could contribute to their Blender plugin. After a couple months of writing tutorials, fixing small bugs, sharing my work and chatting with other artists, I got contacted out of the blue by the founder of the studio I'm at now. After a little confusion as to wtf, I discovered one of the artists I'd been chatting with had recommended me since the studio was looking for a texture artist. I nailed the test, got the job, and promptly discovered that the studio was doing Season 2 of Amazon/Ridley Scott's Man in the High Castle. That not being crazy enough, after about 2 months I guess I made an impression with my work ethic and willingness to dive in and teach myself if I didn't know something, so I was promoted to lead artist and given some enormous tasks (texturing the entirety of the Volkshalle interior - seen for like 5 minutes total over 2 episodes and used as part of the finale of the season, creating and texturing 30 unique civilian models that would be randomized into a crowd of 100k, lighting 90% of an exterior city night shot), along with managing a handful of artists, assigning tasks and reviewing their work. I'm 100% sure I would not have been able to handle this at 18-21; both the crazy hours (over ~3 months I had 4 days off total, and my hours averaged at around 12 and as much as 20, then once crunch was done I had no paid work for a couple months), the responsibility, and the fact that it's an entirely virtual studio so I work from home (can an 18yo even manage that freedom?). Having that extra decade of experience would've been nice, and switching careers at 30 was scary - there was no guarantee I'd find work, so when I left my job I figured I'd be spending a year building up a portfolio with the hopes of maybe getting a freelance gig or working for a tiny indie game studio, with my old career as a fallback. But making that call turned out to be one of the better decisions I've ever made.
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Apr 28, 2017 16:01
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 15:29 |
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Remote work is significantly easier than it used to be. Not as easy as living in a city with studios and going in-person for interviews, and finding that initial contract job can be tough - but once you've completed one job, you have evidence that you can pull it off, and it makes it easier to find the next, and so on. I'm not sure about all the websites that are aimed at connecting studios with freelancers, but my recommendation is to join groups/forums/discords that have a professional presence on top of searching for freelance work. Whenever we need additional artists, I'll reach out to people I've met online; thanks to the nature of people sharing their work, it makes it a lot easier to find people that have the skills for the job in question. And being able to interact in a non-professional setting first gives me a really good idea of personalities. As mentioned by JuniperCake, many industries need good artists of all stripes. In my 3d animation and VFX work, we need storyboard, previs, concept, social media, etc artwork, so we have a small stable of 2d artists we can reach out to.
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May 20, 2017 16:23
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