About my one year out(3)-being an ANIMATOR!

After finishing my internship as a toy designer, I submitted my CV to a very well established company in the games industry in China and was successfully offered a position as an animation trainee for a four-month internship.

To be honest, I was very unsure of myself until I got the call informing me that I had passed the interview. The company is very competitive, especially for art positions. So I was very surprised to find out that I would be working here and I believed I would gain a lot of experience and learn useful skills from it.

My job was to make promotional animation videos for the official flagship shop of one of the company’s big IPs, Onmyoji. I was responsible for a project where the animated characters originated from two very popular characters in the game. Each animated film varies from 10 seconds to 3 minutes and will be posted on the more popular social media platforms as part of the game’s promotion, and I learned that the project I was working on already had a large fan audience.

Here I learned about the process of how will an animation film get produced in a project team.
There are three teams in the whole department: the comics teams, the animation team and the special effects production team. We have a unified team leader and then each project team is divided into different groups to take care of different IP projects. Our animation team has three teams responsible for the animation of different games. Each team has a project supervisor who leads the other staff.
The project I joined uses Adobe Animate to create cute vector animations. I had never used AN for animation before and actually had tried to learn it on my own, but due to lack of motivation, I couldn’t catch up with those tutorials every time and finally gave up.

But this time, I needed it for work, so I quickly forced myself to memorize a lot of shortcuts. It’s true that practice is the best way to make progress.
The first animation clip I made here started with drawing a three-second animation animatic in an afternoon. Then I also took care of the clean up and colouring part for this clip afterwards.

For size limitation issue I’m not able to put all the films I joined to make.

Here are some links of the rest of them I joined.

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1yA4y1o7Cv/?spm_id_from=333.999.0.0 This one I spent one month to finish 45 seconds. Except the last two clips. I did other part from animatic to colouring.

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1vS4y1K78p/?spm_id_from=333.999.0.0 This one I did two clips from animatic to colouring, and also helped with some background designs and clean-up.

Before each animation production started, our colleagues in the writing and directing section would give us a script and some occasionally very scribbled storyboard instructions. Then we would draw the animatic according to the script and give it to the supervisor for review, after she approved it, it would be given to the corresponding marketing department for review (the marketing department is part of our party A, although we all belong to the same company), followed by the drawing of key frames, then clean-up and adding intermediate frames, and finally colouring, all the stages of moving forward would need to repeat the above review work. It’s very logical, but I actually find it really annoying in big companies too hahaha, because a lot of the time the staff in the marketing department don’t have an art background and are always giving changes that raise your blood pressure or always suggesting a bit outrageous changes in inappropriate sections lolll.

With half a month’s work, I have surprisingly been able to go from complete novice to animator who has basically mastered most of the AN functions. That’s quite a lot of output in that time. The last two of the videos I produced also had high ratings, which I was pleased with and a little proud of XD. And when I returned to the UK for my second year of study, I applied this skill to the production of short films for Unit2. It worked well!
Most importantly, I have gained a lot of confidence in this job. My supervisor and team leader told me that I am great in comparison of the pack of students who submitted CVs. They wanted me to be a bit more confident in myself. I am very grateful for the help they have given me during this time. Although the work was a bit intense, I had a great time during these four months because I met some really nice new friends.

BTW the food in company canteen was reallllllllly good. I gained pretty much weight during the time there lollllll. :’]