How Long Did it Take for You to Feel Comfortable Showing Your Work to Others?

You have to learn to have a thick skin pretty fast when you’re an animator. Getting used to having your work looked at by others is a necessity. It’s so easy to lose sight of what’s working and what’s not working in your shot when you’ve been staring at it for a long time, and one way to help you get through that phase is to show it to other people to get their thoughts on it. So that’s something you should get used to immediately, if not sooner. I was doing that from the time I was in school, and it never was a problem. Mind you, I was a performing artist before I got into animation, so “putting it out there” for peer review was already something I was pretty used to.

And in the case of some studios where you’ll be attending meetings called “dailies” every day, you’ll be showing your shot to the director in front the ENTIRE DEPARTMENT. The first time I had to do that on the first feature I worked on, I was scared silly. I was working alongside some of the best animators in the world, and I felt like throwing up. But of course, it’s a situation you get used to, and you do start to get a sense of what the director is going to really like when they see it as you get to know their sensibilities, so dailies get easier to take as you go along. I’d say once I’d done it four or five times, I started to get in the groove and feel ok about it. It also gave me the opportunity to see the progress of other animators, and boy oh boy, did I ever pick up a TON of knowledge during that film.

Guest Blogger Dana Boadway