Hey, fellow animators, I'm Miloš Černý.
In this video, I just wanted to give some general animation tips
to everyone who might be interested.
I am thinking that I might make a series out of this
and post a video like this from time to time, but we will see.
Anyway, the tips in this video will be quite general and maybe even obvious,
but that is kind of intentional, because I wanted to start with something for everybody.
So let's get to it.
Animation is a skill based activity.
This means that it requires practice.
A lot of pratice.
You have probably heard about Malcolm Gladwell's 10000 hours rule.
Which says that if you do any activity for 10000 hours you become world class in it.
Whether you believe in it or not doesn't really matter that much.
But it serves quite well for my point.
We can use invested hours as a unit of measurement.
Something like, 1 hour equals 1 skill point.
Everybody can learn to animate.
Same as everybody can learn to draw for example.
Forget about talent.
You don't need any talent to learn to animate.
You just have to do it and practice.
Talent in real life, doesn't have the meaning like it's usually used in society nowadays.
You can often hear people say, something like: "Man you are so talented, I could never do that."
But that's just not true.
I agree that talent exists, but what talent gives you, or someone else, is just an head start.
I think of it like this.
Let's talk about drawing skill for example, just to illustrate.
This is 15 year old you.
With completely zero talent for it.
And this is Jane and she is talented in drawing.
Let's say, you would have to invest 500 hours into drawing to even match with Jane
and to be able to draw what she does effortlessly.
But maybe she does draw only 4 hours a month, you 4 hours a week.
So eventually, you will of course just catch up.
But let's say that Frank is extremly talented and that gives him a 1500 hours head start.
He also develops his talent a lot and invests a lot of additional hours.
He will maybe find a job when he is 18 years old and you will never be able to catch him.
But that doesn't matter.
You can not catch someone who does your hobby as a full time job 8 hours a day,
but you can learn from people like him and they can be your inspiration.
You don't aim to be the greatest artist in the world.
Or if you do, then good for you.
But the point is, forget about talent.
It's just a head start for those people.
Practice!
You don't need specialized schools to learn animation.
The schools and courses are of course very useful and I am not saying they aren't.
But what you should realize is, that what they eventually do is, they force you to invest
the time into the animation and improving your skill.
But, as we talked about few seconds ago, investing time into the skill is extremly important.
So that's why the schools are useful, not only, but especially for people that are having
a hard time with procrastination for example.
Because the school will make you to give it time.
But don't think that any school or a course will make you an animator.
It's just making you to collect more skill hours and helps you to fill
that animation skill bar of yours.
The actual work is still on you.
Just to be clear though, I think schools have a lot of advantages as well.
Like making contacts for the future, getting to know people from the business,
unforeseen opportunities and so on.
Just don't think they are a necessity.
Try to find out what you enjoy.
For example me.
I found out pretty early, that I enjoy more mechanical or technical type of work than creative one.
I much more enjoy being told what I should animate, than being told a description of what
should kind of happen and think about how I want to do it myself.
Which is kind of unusual, because I feel like everybody likes the highly creative stuff,
but I don't enjoy it that much.
And that is completely fine.
Let me explain a bit more.
In game development where I work, things are usually pretty straight forward.
Characters need sets of animations which are defined quite well.
Turn left will always be a turn left and run will always be a cycled run movement.
So you often do the same animations but for completely different characters.
Which means I get my need for creativity fulfilled with figuring out how the character should do things.
But in the end it still needs to do predefined action.
Which is a perfect balance for me.
In film animation for example, it's much more about expressions, acting, appeal of the character,
and stuff like that.
Which is not exactly for me.
But it is very interesting to many people.
In fact to most people in animation, I feel like.
But that exactly says, that you don't have to like the most popular market in animation.
You may find out that you like motion graphics for example.
Which is awesome.
And it's great that you were able to figure that out.
Start with the simple things first.
I know that everybody wants to do a really cool animation of two characters fighting for example.
Or make your own animated movie.
But please, learn the basics first.
Start with practice rigs that focuses on specific parts.
Tail rig, two-legged rigs, a ball and stuff like that.
Don't immediately start with humanoids.
And while you do this, also post your works in progress on the internet
so you can get some feedback.
When you look at the same animation over and over it starts to feel ok for you even when it's not.
You need some fresh eyes to take a look at it and feedback you.
This is very important, because even one simple sentence from someone else can improve your
animation by a huge amount.
You just don't see it, because you are just a one person with one pair of eyes.
Be patient guys.
Learning a new skill or even something smaller like a new software is a very hard thing to do.
It takes a lot of time to even know your way around the specific software.
You will have to watch a lot of tutorials, google everything you don't know and invest
a lot of time into it.
But as I said, in my opinion everybody can learn to work in 3ds Max or other 3D softwares
and even animate.
But not everybody will have the willpower to invest the required time and push himself
into doing it.
Be patient guys.
It will come.
Ok, so that's about it for now.
This was a new type of video so let me know if you liked it.
This one took a huge amount of work and was in a making for some time.
I wanted to do it though, so I hope it was worth it.
Share the video if you liked it, subscribe and leave some comments.
Also join my Discord server if you want to join the community around this channel.
It has already over 70 people.
And as always thank you and thank you to all my Patreons.
I am Miloš Černý and Thank You for watching.
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