Transcripts
1. Introduction: The day in the life of
a professional animator can be very strange. One minute you can be shooting reference of making
silly faces and then the next minute you're having a very serious conversation with your lead about deadlines and feedback for your latest work, so it's definitely a whole gamut of things that are happening
to you and it's so much fun. Hi, my name is Madison Erwin. I am a self-taught
3D animator and in the past three years
inside Florida animation, you may have seen my work
on Across the Spider-Verse, a few TV shows, video
games, short films. In this class, we're
going to be talking about how to get the
career that you want. What kind of career do
you want in the industry? How are you going to navigate
landing your dream job? I'm so excited to
teach this class because I don't want
anyone to feel as overwhelmed and as stressed
as I was when I was making the transition from student to industry
professional. This is going to help give you some tips that I wish
I would have known and just some information
that is hard to find in a solid one place that I
could have referred back to. In this class, we're
going to be using journal prompts and I'm going to help you create a plan of how to be able to
find your career, how to deal with contracts, how to negotiate contracts, ways to navigate the
hierarchy within a studio, and then we're going to cover
how to handle feedback, and then we're also going
to deal with burnout. You should take this class
if you're self-taught, like I was on Blender or
any other 3D software, or maybe you've just started
animation and you're wondering what the
future is ahead for you, I'm here to show you
that even if you're self-taught in 3D animation, you too can get into the
industry. Let's get started.
2. Getting Started: Welcome to the class.
We are going to be going over and
giving you intel about different parts
of the industry and all things having to
do with 3D animation. Maybe you've landed your
first freelance job offer and you're trying
to figure out how do I negotiate contracts? Or maybe you've had a few
freelance gigs and now you're really wanting to land a staff job and have more security. But that's super different
than a freelance job. I'm here to give you
a roadmap of how to navigate all the challenges that might come up with
these different things. Before you even accept
your first job offer, you need to land on the
priorities of what? What is my priority for this job or for the next job? What do I really want to do? Do I want to make more money? Do I really want to be more
creative in my career? Do I want to just take this job because it was
the only offer I got? It depends, and that will change over time and fluctuate. Thinking about your priority when you're accepting your job, they can be broken down
into three main priorities, at least in my career
that I've noticed. The first one can be money. Is your career based
on money right now? Do you want to start
leveraging so you can make some more money compared to what you were previously making? Or maybe you want to take
a job that's higher paying but maybe less creative
freedom or fulfillment. Next thing which leads
into that is creative. Are you wanting to
take a job that maybe doesn't pay as well, but gives you a lot
more creative freedom, and the project sounds
a lot cooler and it sounds like something
that you'd be willing to take a pay cut for? Sometimes you are
going to pivot to that kind of job because
you are specifically, really craving to push
yourself creatively. Then the next one is networking. This can be important
in terms of maybe there's someone
that you know that works at a studio that's given you an offer
letter that you really admire their work
and maybe you just want to watch them
and pick their brain. I know from some
jobs that I've had, I've really been able
to learn so much by animators that I
truly admire and that I've followed for years and
followed when I was still a student and I've
been able to see their work and really
learn from it. All three of these points
have all been priorities for me at different times in my life and continue to change, usually month to month,
depending on what I'm really interested in and what I feel
a pull towards creatively. The first thing
that we need to do, if you've seen my past class, I talk a lot about
you need to know why of why you want to
get into animation. But for this class, I really
want you to know the what. What's the what of
your animation? What do you want to do? What kind of career
do you want to have? Do I want to work for Disney or do I want
to work for Blizzard? Do I want to work for just games or maybe I want to
work for everything? Do you have a specific
goal in mind? A lot of times
students when they're going from student
to professional, they have a very
specific goal in mind. You need a what in
your career journey, because you're
never going to get somewhere without a roadmap. The what is what gives
you a personalized goal, that you know that
you're going that way. It can give you a roadmap of how to navigate the industry, how to navigate your career, and really inform a lot of
decisions that you're making now in the early stages that
will help you later on. For you personally,
I want you to go into your journal and really do some meditative thoughts about what is your what, what
do you want to do? Is it I want to work at Disney? Is it I want to work
at a VFX studio. For my journal specifically,
I remember I was like, I want to work in VFX games. I also wanted to
do TV, short film. I wanted to do all these things, but then at the end of the
day I wanted to do feature. Feature animation
was my big what, but I had these side quests
in the goal of my what. I don't want you to
get super specific of I want to do this at this
date and at this time, I want to be here and
at this company and then at this studio. You
don't need to do that. Just make your gut
feeling overarching goal. It can be as simple as possible. It could be as simple as what
I wrote, feature animation. That was it. That was my
what for a long time. Or it could be a
specific studio. But what we're going to do in this class is we're going to give you some more
information and intel to narrow down how to get to your final what of what is
your career going to be. We're going to give
you the steps in the manageable way
that you can get to that point maybe in the
next lesson where I'm going to talk about how
to negotiate contracts.
3. Negotiating Contracts: Now we're going to talk
about contract negotiations. I remember when I got my
first contract sent to me, I had an offer letter, I went back and forth
talking to the recruiter, and when I saw and I opened up that first contract
PDF, I cried. I legitimately cried because I had no idea what I was doing. I was so overwhelmed with
just I'm not ready for this. I didn't expect to have to deal with all this legalese
and all this different stuff. I wish I would have had someone that could walk me
through and say, it's going to be
okay, you'll be fine. It's not as serious
as it sounds, but just make sure that all
your ducks are in a row. One of the most common
misconceptions as an animator that I've gotten
from family, friends, people that don't
know much about the career in general and
in the world in general of this whole 3D animation
industry is very gig-based. What I mean by that is a lot of contracts are going to
have an end date in them. My first contract that I
ever signed, it was, hey, you're going to animate
with us from April to June, that was it, and you had a
hard cut off at June 2nd. In terms of contract extension
dates and deadlines, there's not a huge
room for negotiation, but what's good to know is know what the project
actually the scope is. Are they saying,
hey, we only are going to have you for two
months and this contract is for two months because
the project's supposed to wrap and be completely done by the time that
your contract end, or is it going to be
something more like, hey, we want you for two months, but we don't know if
we're going to need more artists, but the
project's still going. That is a much higher chance
of getting extended than, oh, the project is wrapping
at the end of your contract. That's something that is
a good talk to have with the recruiter or whoever you're talking to in terms of hiring. That's something
that you're really going to want to look out for is contract length. Another really important
thing to know is gigs versus staff
are very different. Depending on the genre of
animation that you're in, you're going to
have a lot more of one and a lot less of the other. For example, working
in feature film, you're going to have
a lot more gigs. It's going to be
short contracts. I think some of my
feature film contracts have been two months and
then they kept extending, and then I was there for a year. It really just depends
on what you're doing. Video games now, it's a lot more likely to get a staff
position because they're always
having projects on the back burner and they're
constantly getting things. So they need a lot of artists on hand at all times and they don't like to batch higher like a lot of feature films like to. That's an important
thing to differentiate is what kind of studio
am I applying for? Is it a studio that
I know is probably going to give me a
short term contract. Am I okay with that?
Because it really depends. When I was transitioning from
student to professional, and I had already taken
a few freelance gigs, I was really focused on taking whatever sounded
interesting to me creatively and not
worrying so much about the contract
length because I was living with my parents, shout out mom and dad, and they kept me while I was
starting my career journey. That wasn't a big issue to me. Then when I moved
to LA, I was like, I should probably prioritize
money and contract links, and if it's staff versus gig is really important to me and I
really want a secure role. So I took a job that was going to be a more
staff position. That's something that's
really important. Figure out what you need
is staff versus gig. With your contracts,
getting into the legal bits and bobs of it, there's going to be
certain contracts that you retain use of your own
work and then most other contracts
you're going to owe all the work that
you've done under the name of the
studio to the studio. This is where NDAs get signed, non-disclosure agreements.
There's lots of those. Those are usually
pretty standard, but it's always good to go over them with a fine tooth comb, make sure that there's nothing
weird that's sticking out. Their IP is their
IP, it's not yours. Just make sure you know that at the end of the day because there could be even
stipulations about hey, don't post anything online
about you working for us. I've had a few jobs like that
where it's very secretive, very NDA, because
they don't want anyone even knowing that
the project exists. Another thing to look out for is how do I use
the work that I've done for this job to secure
myself for future work? Different contracts might say,
hey, you can use our work, but you have to put it on a
password protected demo reel and it can't be
used for anything but securing another job. That's pretty standard,
especially when you're working for
bigger companies, something that has to
do with feature film, that's a lot of video
games will also have that. Sometimes that can be negotiated depending on who you talk to. You have to make your case to the person that you're
talking to to say, hey, I really do need this on my password-protected demo reel, I'll make sure nobody gets it, I'm only sending
it to employers. Sometimes you can
make a case and they'll give you the
okay green light. But it just depends from studio to studio if they're going to let that happen or not. That's another thing to
consider is demo reel use. Another thing to consider is there is a big
difference between staff/ full-time employee
versus freelancing. With freelancing, you
are your own boss, you are your own business, you're the one invoicing
the company and then working full time for a studio. That's when you might receive benefits like health
insurance, retirement. If that's a priority for you, you really want retirement, savings, home insurance,
stuff like that. You might want to
start looking for a lot more full-time
employment and staff gigs versus freelance
because freelance, you're not going to
be getting any of those benefits that
you might want. What I want you to do is think about all these things
that we just talked about. What's the contract length? What is staff versus gig? What's important about
my demo reel usage with the work that I
do with the studio? I want you to think about
all those things and prioritize what do you really want so when
you get that contract, you're going to
know exactly what you're looking for
and what you aren't, and you're not going to
be overwhelmed by it. Something else to
keep in mind is what's the main thing that you're going to
want to fight for? What are you going
to want to negotiate for and what are you not
going to settle for? Have a good rough number in
your head too, for rates, especially if you're working as a freelancer, know that hey, I'm going to work
for X amount of money and if they
offer me this much, I'm going to say no, and if they offer me this much more, I'm going to definitely say yes. Go do that in your journal and then come back and we're
going to talk about, in the next lesson, how to
navigate the studio hierarchy.
4. Navigating Studio Hierarchy: In this lesson, we
are going to talk about navigating
studio hierarchies. Knowing the hierarchy is really important because it's going to be imperative in how you
communicate with people. Communicating with your lead is going to be different
from communicating with your director versus
communicating with your production
coordinator. There's a lot of different ways that you need to know
where you're going to fit within that hierarchy
because you need to have effective communication
with all departments and you don't want to
waste anyone's time. The first top of the hierarchy
is going to be director. The director is going
to be the end all, be all of your animation of any project that
you're working on. Director from there,
this is where you can branch off to several
different things. Is usually you're going
to have animation supe. This is your supervisor and
a lot of times they are called supes, S-U-P-E-S. They're the ones that are
going to be the middleman talking directly to the director and being the mouthpiece for everyone that falls underneath
the animation department. Next is going to be leads. These are the people
that you're going to be talking to day in, day out. These are the people
that are making the calls on the battlefield. They're really the ones that
are talking directly to you, making sure all
the work's getting done in times, on deadlines. They're the ones making sure that you're the first line of defense before it gets to the director or the
animation supe. Then after that, it's going
to go to the animators. Junior animators are going to be people that don't have a lot of experience already in
the world of animation, but their skills are still
good enough to be there and be working on whatever
animation project that they're employed for. The next one's going to be mid, intermediate character animator. This is someone that can take on the task of any shot really
that's thrown at them. Any level of difficulty, any different challenges they should be expected
to face alone, not needing a lot
of hand holding. Then the next one in the
hierarchy is a senior animator, a person, an animator, an artist that can really
handle whatever is thrown at them and take on extra responsibility
too sometimes. Usually in a studio environment, this is going to be
pretty standard. The only thing that might be changed is leads
versus supervisors. Sometimes that term can
be used interchangeably, which can be a little confusing. Some studios just have said
it like that for years. But I say this is
the more common way that you're going
to have director, supervisor, lead, animator,
senior, mid, junior. Directors are the end all, be all for your creative work. This can be definitely something a little
different when you're going from a student to getting your first gig working freelance and then working for a studio. Directors will tell you,
hey, your shot's cut. I had that happen to me on a
project recently where I did about 25 minutes worth of video reference for
this whole sequence, and we were all figuring it out. Then the director decided
that that sequence was cut. I was like, cool. All
that work just goes away. You have to be very used to whatever the director says goes. Now, that doesn't
mean that you have no creative freedom and you
are a drone in the machine. You can actually
have a creative say. You can always have a discussion
with the director and ask for clarification while you're in meetings and say hey, why is this being done? In a non confrontational way, obviously just getting
more insight and clarity. Something that's a little
bit specific to studio jobs is the hierarchy is definitely difficult to
break into sometimes. A lot of times the way
that people move up within this social ladder in the hierarchy of animation is
they go to different jobs. You might work as a junior for a long time at one
studio and then you take another job
because your skills have gotten better as you've
worked for the studio. You might take another
job as a mid animator because now you have
that experience. It's a little more difficult
to be in a studio and be in a studio for a long
enough amount of time to be able to
move up the ladder. My best advice for wanting
to climb the ladder, wanting to get into
higher up positions, become best friends with
whoever your higher up is. Always, just be nice. Be the best person to work with. If you are effective
communicator and you are a pleasure to
have on any project, that is the highest
compliment you can get. That is one of the big
differences between a lead animator versus
a senior or mid, is, are you effective
to work with? Are you effective communicator? Are you a pleasure to work with? Am I happy to have you
on my team or are you that artist that I
have to pull teeth in order to try to talk to you because you're very
reclusive and you don't really talk and you're not
really one to take initiative? If you're taking an
initiative too, saying, hey, I have free time on my hands,
what do you need help with? That's an incredible sign to someone that
would easily say, hey, this person's a great
person to work with. I would recommend them
for a leadership position or a higher up position, or maybe they should take
more serious shots now, or more complicated shots. Looking at this flow chart and thinking about
your career goals, what do you want
to end up doing? Do you want to be
a lead one day? Do you want to just
stay as an animator? That's also a completely
okay thing too, because maybe a leadership
does not interest you at all. Do you just want to
coast as an animator because you're
really interested in doing cool projects and you just want to be on that
team? Totally fine. Make sure that you know in your head what you're
aiming for always. A good thing to do is you're going to get
your journal out and you're going to write down what's your five year plan. It sounds cheesy, but it helps. Five year plan. Maybe for a five year plan, Year 0 through 2, maybe I'm going to
be junior to mid. Maybe in the next few
years I want to get into a mid character
animation position because maybe that's
where I want to get to because my end goal is lead. Let's say that's your end goal, let's say at Year 5. Maybe your zero through two
is you're starting animation. You've got your first
studio job and you're like, I'm going to try to
really focus hard on making sure that I'm getting
that wealth of knowledge. Then maybe Year 2 through 4, I want to be a senior
animator in this time. Maybe this is when you're,
I know what I'm doing now. I'm still leveling up
my animation skill, but how am I going to
communicate effectively? How am I going to be able
to talk with my team? How am I going to make good
connections with people? How am I going to
have people trust me when it comes to advice and feedback and being able to
be an effective teacher too? It's going to
change your mindset of what you're focusing on, what you're prioritizing
in your job. Take your journal, go write
out your five year plan. Think a little bit
about what you want to do and then come back. Meet me in the next lesson where we're going to talk about
how to handle feedback.
5. Handling Feedback: Now we're going to jump
into a new topic that's super important and it is
how to handle feedback. If you really want to become
a professional animator, you're going to have to
learn how to get feedback, how to handle it with grace, and how to view it as a gift. The first thing that you
need to keep in mind always is constructive criticism
is a good thing. Even in bad feedback that I've gotten that I know that is
objectively a bad note, I can always find
something good for it. That's the best thing
I've always said is show your work to
everyone that you can. Show it to your mom,
show it to your family, show it to your friends, show
it to your little brother. People are going to always have something to say about it, and even if they don't
know how to fix it, they're going to be
able to tell you, hey, that's not good because
I don't know why, but it looks really funny the way that they move
and you're like, okay, I know there's
something wrong. So even if you get notes from a director or a lead
that you're like, I don't agree with this note. At least you know
something is being seen and you need to
know how to fix that. That's something that
you can take and that is definitely a skill of knowing how to bad note
sometimes and taking that and turning it into constructive criticism
for your own work. Getting feedback is a skill. How to implement
feedback is also a skill because the worst
person to work with, we've all had horror stories, is someone that's like, hey, here's my work, look at
it and you're like, oh, that's great, here's this,
you should fix this. Here's this note. Then
they say, oh, no. But you don't
understand that note, I can't do that because
I did this before. No, you don't want to hear that. Sometimes there
are valid reasons to fight a note or to be like, hey, like that won't work
because of this constraint. Totally understandable.
But you do not want to be the person that's
constantly fighting feedback. That is constantly trying
to overt their position of, oh no, I did that
because of this. No, don't do that. I always
take feedback with grace because you never know what
might be useful about it. What might be something that you agree with, what you
don't agree with. It's always for the further
betterment of the work. Learning how to take
feedback with grace is a very important skill to
be able to hone in early. My number one advice is
all feedback is good, contrary to popular belief. Because all feedback is going to be something
that you're going to feed back into your work
of even if it's bad, even if it's good, you're
going to use it to further your skills and sharpen
your skills as an animator. One of my most important
people's skills when it comes to feedback
is knowing how to ask for feedback.
That is also an art. You don't want to just be shoving your work to
people and saying, look at it. Tell
me what you think? Occasionally, that can be good for very specific circumstances, which I won't even get
into because those are very specific and you'll
know when you hit them. But usually 9.9 times out of 10 you're going to want to show your
work to someone, have a set of questions, or have a idea in mind that you want the
person to give you feedback on. If someone comes to
me and just says, here's, here's my shot.
Can you give me notes? I could give you notes, but I might be giving you notes
on something that you don't want or maybe something
that you haven't worked out yet or maybe something that is a part of the shot that you're planning on cutting anyways, or something that you're
not interested in. So giving parameters to the person that
you're asking for feedback from is incredible. If someone ever comes
to me and says, hey, here's my shot I'm
still working on the end bit from
Frame 59 onwards, so don't worry about that, but I really need help on
facial expressions. I'm like, golden. I love you. Please let me
give you more feedback because that person really has an idea and a set
of directives in mind that is going to be
more receptive to feedback. That's how I would recommend. Asking for a feedback sandwich
is how I describe it. I had a mentor once tell me that when I was still
learning animation, he said ask for a
feedback sandwich. A feedback sandwich
is asking the person, what do you like about the shot? What is something that
you don't like about it? Then what's something I
can improve on later. It's good to know,
hey, what do I not need to fix? What do
you like about this? Because sometimes I've gotten notes before and
they didn't tell me, hey, this is good or this
is a great part here. I've inadvertently gotten
rid of the thing that was really good because
I just didn't know that that was standing
out is a good thing. It's a good way to
be able to ask. This is also a good way to give feedback too if you're
giving feedback, because that's a big
part of a studio job to your coworkers, your peers will ask
you for feedback on their work before they
even show it to someone else. That's an important thing
to give and get feedback. Feedback sandwich, I would
say that's the best thing. It's what's working. That's the first part.
That's the what's good, what's working about
my shot, my work. The second part is what's bad, lack of a better way to put it. Then the third thing is
what can be improved. Now that we've
talked about this, we've talked about
getting and giving feedback, I want
you to be brave. We have a great project gallery
here that you can post. You can post your
work, you can get feedback, you can give feedback. I want you to do both.
I want you to post it. Have someone comment
on your work, implement maybe some
of their notes. Then also I want you to go onto other people's post on
the project gallery, and I want you to find
something that interests you and I want you to give
that feedback sandwich. Don't just say looks great. I could have showed
it to my mom and she could have said, looks
great, that's awesome. But I want you to be able to
give a feedback sandwich. Say looks great because of
this, I don't like this. Or you could change this because I think this
would look better. Then I want you to say
at the end, like, hey, if you have time also, I
think this could be changed. Have fun giving your feedback. Give it, get it, and then come
back and we're going to go to the next lesson
where we're going to talk about how to
overcome burnout.
6. Overcoming Burnout: In this lesson, we're
going to be talking about how to deal with burnout. Burnout is very real, very inevitable but not unmanageable and
the biggest issue with three-D artists
in general that I've seen over a
course of lots of years is a lot of times we're
very passionate people. People are very excited
about what they do. Artists in general are known
for being very passionate about what they do and
we're also very technical, so we're very puzzled
people and we're like, I need to figure out this
thing and I need to do it. You get the worst of both
worlds when it comes to the inevitable recipe for
disaster in terms of burnout. Because you're excited
about what you do. You love what you do and
you're also a puzzle person, so you want to figure it
out until you got it right. A lot of times I see people that just go in. I did this too. Like my first studio gig, I was like going crazy and I was doing lots of overtime and I got pretty burned
out because I was just like, I'm so tired. Then what's so
difficult is you're trying to work while
you're still burnt out. My biggest advice for handling burnout when it
inevitably comes up, have a life outside
of animation, have a life outside of whatever creative career
you've ever had, ever do. What we're looking here is
longevity and sustainability. You don't want to
be the person that is sitting around trying to figure out how am I going to deal with the
next day of work. Because that is no
fun to try to have to get the gumption up to be creative when you're
just not feeling it. How are you going to maintain
our longevity with staying creative and being fulfilled in a career that requires
so much of us mentally, in terms of creativeness and
also our technical ability? One thing that I would say
is this is serious time. I do not want you to ghost. This is a big thing that
we talk about animation. That is a huge issue
that's not talked about enough, is you
can ghost hours. A lot of times people will
work more hours than they say they're working to
their employer, to their freelance gig. Just because they
personally have a creative kind
of teeth into it. If they're like, oh, this is my project, I really
want to make it good. If I don't build those
last three hours I worked on this tonight,
who's it going to matter? It matters a lot.
It actually causes a collective burnout for
everyone in your studio. Because what you don't
think about is, oh, well, it's okay if I just
ghost hours and I do some work that
I didn't tell him I did or maybe I worked
my 40-hour week, but I'll work a little
bit over the weekend. I'm working remote. No
one's going to know if I animate a little bit or I
model a little bit more. What happens is you do
that consecutively. Because now the whole
production is thinking, oh, it only took Madison 40 hours to do these 12 seconds of
animation last week. Now you've set this
precedent for yourself that's gonna burn you
out so quick because you're having to keep and
uphold that quality that you falsely set for
yourself early on. Another issue that
this brings up is if you ghost hours,
it has a domino effect. You're going to have to make sure that you're not ghosting
so many hours that you created an unrealistic
expectation for the person that's not ghosting and they're putting out the same
quality of work, putting out good work,
but if you're putting out more and saying that you're doing it in the same
amount of time, well then that person's
job becomes in jeopardy. Because production's
going to say, well, why can't you be like
Madison over here? She did 12 seconds of
animation in 40 hours. Look what you started to do to the entire production
department. Another thing that's
really important is prioritizing healthy
habits and this is just, again, longevity and
your daily routine, your daily routine
has a lot to do about if you're going
to be productive and burn out quick or if you're
going to have a long career ahead of you without crazy
and saying burn out, make sure that
you're prioritizing and implementing things
into your routine. That's like, hey, I'm
going to make sure that every three hours
that I'm at the computer, I'm going to go out for
30 minutes outside. Make sure that your routine
is helping you form healthy habits that are going to preemptively stop burnout
before it starts. Something that is really
difficult to navigate. When you are in a
studio environment or even just working freelance, you're working on
a project, you're in the depths of a project. Overtime crunch, these are really difficult times to know when you're burning
out and when you're not. A lot of times
burnout happens when you're in these really
difficult projects. Kind of like the end
phases of a project, you're trying to wrap things up. You're maybe working
70-hour weeks, you're doing some crazy
stuff and you're like, all of a sudden when
the project wraps or that period of crunch
and overtime's over, you're like, oh
no, I'm sober now. I don't want to
look at a computer in the next 6-10 years. I just want to sleep and not think about
animation that happens. Have a plan in place
already, so you know. Okay, when I go into crunch, I'm going to force myself to set a timer for every
two hours I need to look away from
the computer or just stuff like that will
help you a lot in terms of, hey, I know right after overtime
I'm done with overtime, I'm going to go call my parents or I'm going
to go talk to my friends. I'm going to go call my friends. Doing something to
get yourself out of animation mode and get your
brain into a relaxed state, making sure that
you're creating time for yourself to
rejuvenate and not just trying to push ahead
and trying to continue that stress state of your
brain when you're animating, especially like that
in times like that. So make sure that
you're recognizing those signs and
symptoms of okay, I know that this
is going to start triggering me being
burned out because I'm working a lot or the
shot or this task I got assigned is
really difficult and it's really challenging
me creatively. That's another
perfect sign of, hey, I'm probably going
to be burned out if I go too crazy doing this, recognizing those signs
are important because then you can fall back on your
burnout prevention plan. If I wake up, I know if I'm not feeling like
I want to go to work, If I'm like, okay, I'm gonna go to
work now I'm like, oh, I'm about to get burned out. Cause usually I'm very
excited to go to work. I'm super excited about my job and work doesn't
feel like work, but the minute that work
starts to feel like work, the moment my eyes open
in bed in the morning, I'm like, okay, I'm gonna
start getting burned out. That's my personal
tell. Another thing too is just like
if you're tired, if you're feeling run down. There was a time
where I was falling asleep at the desk
while I was working. Even though I was just working
normal eight-hour days. Because I was just so exhausted. Because the mental exhaustion that burnout takes
on you is huge. Another sign could
even just be you're getting sick a lot
because that happens when our bodies are stressed
and the stress state and also the biggest sign
is just feeling uninspired. You're not feeling
fulfilled by your work. You're feeling like
you're having to trudge along and
just do what you have to do and you're doing
the bare minimum just to get by in your day and that's
when you need to know, okay, if I'm feeling
these signs, that's when I need
to take action and make sure that
I'm not going to get too burnt out to the point where it's hard to
come back from. Now what I want you to do is go to your handy dandy journal and I want you to
write down what is your personal burnout
prevention plan. Have specific things
that you know you're going to do when
you're feeling burned out. Is it you're going to go take a class somewhere,
you're going to go on a walk? Are you going to watch your favorite
animated movie again? I know one of my
weird ones that you might not even think
about is I go back and I listen to a
specific playlist I made when I was teaching myself
animation for the first time. It's like, it brings me right
back to that moment of, oh, I remember feeling
so inspired about this, and to this day, while I'm working, I
put on that plate list and it always like gets me
out of a font immediately, you might have weird
things like that. Think about all the
different things in your life that you could use as your own personalized
burnout prevention plan. Write them all down, and
so that way you have a plan that you
can refer to when that burnout inevitably hits.
7. Final Thoughts: We have covered a
lot in this class. We've started out learning
how to negotiate contracts, how to navigate the
studio hierarchy, also, how to handle feedback. That's a big one that we
were able to discuss today, and then the big one at the end, how to deal with burnout
when it inevitably comes up. Hopefully, all these
things will give you a good plan of how to navigate your career when
you're first starting out. You now have this journal
that is filled with all kinds of plans and
preventative measures. A good resource and a reference
for you to be able to reflect back on and be able to refer back to
whenever you need it. Hopefully, you can
see this not only as a career plan of where
you're going going forward, but also a survival kit of how to deal with
all these things when they come up because these are issues and specific
issues with animation in the 3D sphere that
we're going to have to come up with and you're going to have to deal
with at some point. Now you have a career plan and you have a survival
kit blended into one. You have chosen such a fun and rewarding career
being an animation. However, it can become very unsustainable if
done incorrectly, so that's why it's so important that you make sure and implement all these healthy
habits early in your career so it can
be sustainable further. Thank you so much for
taking this class. I hope you enjoyed
it as much as I did. Please share all
of your journals in the Class Project gallery. I'm going to be teaching more classes here on Skillshare, so please take those, follow along, and I hope
to see you soon.
Madison Erwin, Animator
