5 Basic Steps for Making a Name for Yourself as an Animator
Growing your professional career as an Animator (or any artistic profession) is a difficult struggle. You don’t often see someone look at animators and go “that makes good money, I think I’ll pick up animation.” We pick it up because it looks so neat. Often with these professions we enjoy working in them and want to reach that point where we can get paid to do what we love. So how do you do it?
One of the most important steps is making a name for yourself, so you can attract attention from potential clients or employers, and also build up a good public portfolio. Here are five basic steps for making a name for yourself as an Animator.
1. Define Your Audience
You have to consider what your audience will be for your animations and personal branding before you start making content to spread around. If you don’t take care to consider an audience, you’ll have a harder time finding places to post your content or social media links and the like.
Your audience might be different depending on certain content you make, but it’s probably a good idea to keep your content focused and not spread yourself thin. Let’s say you enjoy making older Disney-style hand-drawn animations, but you’re also dabbling in some 3D Blender animations. The audience for these might be somewhat split, and it could be confusing for someone to see a hand-drawn animation by you that they like, but when they visit your Twitter page they see a bunch of 3D Blender animations.
You’ll also possibly exhaust yourself by trying to build up in various different internet niches instead of a couple related ones, so it’s best to hone-in on your audience and find a specific style to stick to.
2. Refine Your Skill
This one shouldn’t come as a surprise, but you aren’t going to get anywhere if your skills are lacking. This doesn’t mean you have to be able to make outstanding animations, but if you want your work to spread around it has to look good enough for people to have at least some interest in it.
Some ways you can improve your skills are by entering online courses, watching videos, reading books, or observing and analyzing other people’s animations. Take note of that last method, because there’s nothing like taking time to look at inspiring animations and breaking them down so you can try to mimic them.
After you reach a skill level that you are okay with, then you can of course continue to refine your skills as you grow your branding.
3. Put Yourself Out There
The next step is to make a central place to show yourself on the internet (catered to your audience!). This is best done with social media websites where you can make your own page, like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or wherever else you want. It’s also not a bad idea to have multiple social media accounts connected to each other so you can show your stuff in multiple places.
I use Akash Thakkar’s Twitter page (even though he isn’t an animator)as an example here because he calls himself by his own real name, which is nice to establish trustworthiness, while still maintaining some style and branding (we’ll go over branding in the next step). You can of course still use an online alias to identify yourself, but consider how you’ll manage this if employment opportunities come along or things like that. If you have a presence online showing yourself as a person, it allows people to connect your physical self with your work, instead of just your online brand. (Think about how Tony Hawk is hardly recognized by many people, even though his name is pretty famous.)
4. Establish Your Professional Branding
I know I just said to consider putting your physical self out there for people, but you don’t have to do that everywhere. In fact, it’s probably a good idea to have a place where you serve content to people that is branded to be distinguishable from everyone else. If you’re just some guy on the internet who says “I make animations!” you aren’t very eye-catching. Also, if you want to treat yourself as a business/entrepreneur (which you probably should), it is easier to conduct business when you have good branding.
Developing a distinguished brand involves coming up with a unique name, a purpose, an audience (which you already did in step 1), and unique visuals. I can’t really tell you how to come up with a name, but as for your purpose, this is simply what you intend to do with your brand, such as doing commissions for people, teaching people animation, etc. As for your visuals, try to come up with a logo that identifies your brand, and make some other imagery to place on your page, such as a banner.
5. Display Your Animations
The final step is to start posting your work! Upload your animations, whether in-progress or finalized, to your brand pages or social media. Consider also sharing your work around other places, like online communities such as Reddit.
Since you have an audience considered, you can target places where your audience exists and start posting your stuff.
And that’s it! I hope you find this list of advice helpful, and find yourself a great Animation career!
