Animation... The Passion

What is it like to be an animator? Is it a good and profitable profession, allow you
the time and money to enjoy life while basking in the glow of artistic admiration
from friends and strangers alike? Is it fun to get up and go to work
every morning, to feel hungry for lunch and find that it’s 3 o’clock in the
afternoon, and to regret having to call it a day while others are watching the
clock tick slowly toward five? Is it a possible career and not just some dream
job that one in a million people get to do?

Well, yes. It is all these things—sort of. As I write these words, after more
than 15 years in one small corner of the animation business, only two
things in that first paragraph need to be clarified. The first, and biggest, is
that you really have to want to be an animator for the job to be a good one.
You have to have a passion for the craft and a talent for the art. The second,
a minor point really, is the “time and money” part. You can certainly make
good money. Salaries for full-time, experienced animators can be excellent,
but you may not get the time to enjoy the money. Animation is a consuming
profession. As one Los Angeles veteran says, “It eats you up alive.”

The Passion.......

It gets easier and easier to get hooked on animation. The computer software
you’ll use to create the most sophisticated effects and character scenes gets
easier to learn and cheaper to buy. You might get a chance as early as high
school to play with a “lite” version of a program or even the real, full-blown
release. Or maybe you will get to visit an animation studio during some
vacation tour to Orlando or New York.

Someone may sit you down at a workstation and show you how to bring
a sphere or cube into existence. Simple. You know this stuff from geometry,
only it wasn’t so easy to understand. Then the mentor adds the dimension of
time by placing the object in one place at Frame 1 and another place at
Frame 30. For fun, the mentor asks you to make some change to the object
in Frame 30. Thinking, perhaps, that you can fool the system, you screw
around with the controls and the object ends up like Diana Ross, upside
down, and inside out.

Nonplussed, the mentor smiles and hits a button. In seconds, the computer
creates 28 frames between Frames 1 and 30, adding subtle, successive
changes to the original object in Frame 1. By Frame 28, the computer
has—miracle of miracles—perfectly imitated your outrageous precocity,
just one small increment shy of your Frame 30 results.With another button
press, the mentor shows you how the machine has animated the results of
your demented challenge. It is like nothing you’ve ever seen before.
Is the machine teasing you? Is it like those video games you know so
well, the ones that let you win just enough before causing you to lose so
embarrassingly that you have to keep shoving quarter after quarter into its
hungry maw so that you can rescue your dwindling self-esteem and prove
that brains are better than circuitry? Yes, it is like that, but better. It is free.
No quarters. Better yet, they say if you’re good enough, you can get paid to
do this.

“Once more,” you plead, taking the mouse in your hands, but the mentor
is pressed for time. You have to move on. The tour proceeds, and you are
hooked.

Maybe, if you are lucky, you have a chance to go beyond the first “free hit”
on the animation computer. Maybe you get the summer camp course or the
gifted and talented program elective, or you have a relative in the business
(we all should have one) who gives you some time on the system. There you
delve deeper into the mysteries of plastic space and time. If so, you learn
that you can find no release, no end to the joy of limitless creation. The
addiction is deeply rooted now. For you, no help can be offered, except perhaps
this book, which charts out the path to a successful, full-time, day-job
career. Hello, my name is George Avgerakis and I’m an animaholic.