Overwhelmingly students opt to make animation as their career without knowing their hold in it. This statement is not to bring down your confidence but to apprise you to get assured before going for any career about your skills that will support you while you are walking that career route else you might end up in disaster. Do not consider animation as easy job to be taken up as it demands lots of patience and hardwork from you. It is not that easy as remembering your favorite cartoon character. Animation originates from the creativity of intelligent people, so, it expects your creativity and intelligence. The fields of animation is not meant for everyone but only for the creative and innovative people and if you are not close to what is demanded by this career, then reconsider, otherwise end results will be more bitter than this. You should be a skilled artist with good drawing abilities but if you are going for computer animation then also creativity is supreme with repository of computer skills. People with artistic bent of mind and those who are passionate, dedicated and possess good imagination power which means that they can visualize the end product what it will look like are considered to do well in this course. Along with artistic skills you should have lot of imagination coupled with high degree of passion and enthusiasm. You need knowledge in computers, co-ordinate mathematics, motion and light physics for technical aspects of animation. Patience, discipline and dedication to work is a vital ability as this field involves lot of hard work and long hours of thorough planning. He/ She should have a sound understanding of anatomy of humans, animals or birds and body movements and lighting effects. Good communication skill is also needed as most of the time it will be teamwork. One good animator should be one good actor also. So that only he could express the character well through his animation. An animator should have a good sense of color, proportion, size, design, visualizations, knowledge of background art and layout. They must have expertise in computer design software. Knowledge of programming languages (C++, Java) will be an added benefit. It is advantageous to understand photography, lighting and movement for those planning to work in computer animation. They must be able to visualize how an object will look in three dimensions and have the know-how to make an animated object look real. Animators are the talented artists who create characters for a variety of projects like movies, television, advertisements and so on. An animator’s task is to read the script carefully, study the storyboard and try to get into the character. In other words he needs to know and understand the character.

The nature of work that an animator has face is:

Creating an animation consists of idea development, pre-production, production and post-production. The characters are created in idea development. In pre-production, the ideas are converted into layouts. Scriptwriting, storyboarding, character development, backgrounds, layout designing, animatics and voice come under per-production. The actual result of the story can be visualized in the production stage which is a blend of animation, in-betweening or tweening (i.e. the creation of intermediate frames between two main images to give the appearance that the first image flows smoothly into the second one), scanning, compositing (i.e. combining images from different sources to create a finished frame of animation), background preparation and coloring. Final sound recordings, color editing, testing and special sound effects are all added at the post-production stage. Post production stage activities include editing, special effects (SFX), color correction, compositing, voice and music editing and rendering. Rendering is the final touches to an animation scene, in which the data is converted to the raster image or animation.

If you feel that you will be able to fit yourself in this kind of work then certainly go for it. Try to assess your instincts deeply to be able to present yourself a brighter future. Best Of Luck!