Archive for the ‘membership’ Category

Friday, November 10th, 2023

LAST CHANCE! Student Membership Drive: Join And Save!

DISCOUNT ENDS MONDAY!

Student Membership Drive

Fall is time to save when you join Animation Resources as a student member. For the next couple of weeks our Student Membership will be discounted to only $60/year! Best of all, you will continue to get that savings every year you renew as a student for up to three years. Yes, this applies to full time educators too. Why should you join? Each day we’ll be highlighting more reasons why you should be a member of Animation Resources. Bookmark us and check back every day.

$60Reference PacksSTUDENT MEMBERSHIP

Discount Ends Nov. 6th!
$70/year $60/year (recurring)

Animation Resources membership is offered at a discounted rate for full time students and educators. After sign-up you will be required to email a photo of your current student ID card or proof of educational employment to verify your status. Renewals at the student rate is limited to three years. Invest in yourself by becoming a member of Animation Resources.


JOIN NOW Before This Offer Ends!
https://animationresources.org/membership/levels/


FREE SAMPLES!

Not Convinced Yet? Check out this SAMPLE REFERENCE PACK! It will give you a taste of what Animation Resources members get to download every other month!
Sample RefPack

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Tuesday, November 7th, 2023

Animation Students: Do you know about THE BIG LIE?

STUDENT DISCOUNT EXTENDED: Ends Friday. See below for details.

The Big Lie

ANIMATION STUDENTS: Do You Know About The Big Lie?

You’ve chosen a good school to go to. You’re doing well in your classes… Once you graduate, you’ll get a job and be started on your career in animation. Can you spot the huge error in these simple statements? If you’re an animation professional, I bet you can! If you’re an animation student and you don’t see it, read on…

The biggest misconception most animation students have is that school is preparing them for a job. Nothing could be further from the truth. You can go to the best animation school in the world and graduate with honors and still not have what it takes to walk into an animation studio, sit down at a desk and go to work. It just isn’t possible in a school situation to teach students everything it takes to be a functioning professional in four short years.

Many students think of college the same way they thought about grade school. You sit at your desk and you do the assignments and your work is graded. But there’s a big difference between grade school and college. In grade school, if you are an A student, you can get into a good college. In college, grades are meaningless. A potential employer doesn’t care what grades you got on your assignments. Odds are the employer doesn’t even care if you graduated from college. All the employer cares about is whether can you do the job in a timely manner with quality results.

If an employer doesn’t care if you went to school or not, what is the point of going to school?

Now we’re getting to the heart of this issue… What is school for? School isn’t a place that spoon feeds you training to get a job. It’s a FORUM FOR LEARNING. A good animation school can do two things… It can put you in an environment where you are surrounded by educators who know their subject, and you’re part of a large group of students who all have similar goals. This is a very supportive environment to learn in. Secondly, school can provide you with resources that may be more difficult to get access to in the “real world”. University libraries are packed with books on important subjects. Colleges host uninstructed life drawing sessions, screenings and film festivals and lectures by top professionals. These extra curricular activities may not be accessible to you after you graduate. You need to take advantage of them while you can.

The Big Lie

Schools provide a rich environment for learning. But it’s up to you to GET AN EDUCATION.

There just isn’t time in four years to go over everything you need to know. There are skills that need nurturing and developing, and there is a level of experience and awareness you need to gain to widen your frame of reference and get your creative juices flowing. Animation schools expect you to do these things on your own time. Instructors may encourage their classes to study and work on their own skills outside of class time, but many of the students are still stuck in grade school thinking- if it isn’t being graded, it doesn’t count. The truth is the work you do outside of classes is MORE important than what you do in class.

A tradesman may learn how to use his tools and then be ready to work on a job, but being an artist requires disiplined thinking and creativity forever. Your current level of skills and experience may get you that first job, but if you want to move up to greater responsibility, you’ll need to work on developing the skills that are required to advance. You might be comfortable creating in a specific style, but if you want a job, you have to draw in the style of the show, not your own style. Even if you do get a job on a show that happens to match your particular artistic sensibilities, times change and styles change. Five or ten years down the road, the look of animation will be different and employers will be looking for something current. You have to be able to reinvent yourself creatively if you want to survive. Ask anyone who has worked in animation a decade or more if they have had to reinvent themselves in their career. They’ll tell you.

OK, the bubble is burst. You now know about the Big Lie. You’re on your own to deal with it. Say you re going to animation school right now… It’s a lot better to be told all this BEFORE you graduate than to find it out the hard way afterwards.

What can you do in school to be as prepared as you can for a job in animation?

You need to LEARN TO LEARN- learn to set your own goals, determine a curriculum for yourself, buckle down and work to improve your skills, push the envelope of your creativity by exposing yourself to different ways of thinking about your art, learn to GROW. Look at what the college is offering you, talk to professionals and ask them what you should be learning, supplement your college work with SELF STUDY. Don’t just do what you want to do. Do what you NEED TO DO. It’s very hard and very time consuming to gather together the skills and frame of reference you need to be a professional. But it’s a lot easier to devote time to that while you’re in school. If you wait until you graduate, self study is going to have to compete with paying your bills and fulfilling your responsibilities as an adult. Your college years are a WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY to learn to learn. Don’t waste it!

But that’s not all… Learning doesn’t end when you graduate from college. It’s a life-long responsibility for artists. Get in the habit now of pushing yourself to better yourself. It will be the most important lesson you learn from college.

The Big Lie

Where do you look for resources to help you in your SELF STUDY PROGRAM?

Every one will need to create their own curriculum to open their mind creatively and build their skill set. Every student is different. Every school is different. There are a million online courses and books to study from. But even those aren’t enough. The world of creativity is wider than you can possibly imagine. Animation Resources has gone to successful animation professionals like Ralph Bakshi, Will Finn and Sherm Cohen and has asked them what resources have been useful to them in their work. Every other month, Animation Resources publishes a downloadable reference pack filled with the material these advisors recommend. This Reference Pack will help you with your self study program and open your mind to possibilities you didn’t know existed.

But you have to be a member of Animation Resources.

Animation Resources is helping students studying animation, cartooning and illustration by offering a discounted dues rate for student and educators. For $70 a year, students can receive full benefits of membership- the same benefits that professional members receive. $70 a year is just a little more than $5 a month. Of course you can afford it. Don’t expect your parents to pay your dues. Do it for yourself. You’re spending a great deal of money on tuition, books and supplies and student loans to get your degree. But now you know about THE BIG LIE and that knowledge is worth a lot more than just $70. The truth is that your degree is only HALF of your education. Don’t cheap out on the half that matters- the half that will be continuing for the rest of your life.

JOIN ANIMATION RESOURCES TODAY… https://animationresources.org/membership/levels/,

You’ll thank us for it on the first day of your new job in the animation business.

Student Membership Drive

Fall is time to save when you join Animation Resources as a student member. For the next couple of weeks our Student Membership will be discounted to only $60/year! Best of all, you will continue to get that savings every year you renew as a student for up to three years. Yes, this applies to full time educators too. Why should you join? Each day we’ll be highlighting more reasons why you should be a member of Animation Resources. Bookmark us and check back every day.

$60Reference PacksSTUDENT MEMBERSHIP

Discount Ends Nov. 6th!
$70/year $60/year (recurring)

FREE SAMPLES!

Not Convinced Yet? Check out this SAMPLE REFERENCE PACK! It will give you a taste of what Animation Resources members get to download every other month!

There’s no better way to feed your creativity than to be a member of Animation Resources. Every other month, we share a Reference Pack that is chock full of downloadable e-books and still framable videos designed to expand your horizons and blow your mind. It’s easy to join. Just click on this link and you can sign up right now online.

JOIN NOW Before This Offer Ends!
https://animationresources.org/membership/levels/

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Thursday, October 26th, 2023

We might be living through a potential Renaissance. Why aren’t you a part of it?

artistic renaissance

Art is a language. You have to be exposed to it, analyze it, break it down and understand it if you want to create it. The best way to become a better artist is to challenge yourself and surround yourself with good examples and creative people. It takes work and energy. It isn’t necessarily something that you are born with, and it’s not something you can come up with in a vacuum. You have to open your mind up and let the ideas in.

Think about what it was like for artists in the past… Johann Sebastian Bach had to travel two weeks by foot to attend school. The artistic treasures of the world belonged to royalty and the upper classes- the average person had no access to it. Education was something that was reserved for the special few who could afford it, or the ones who could find a rich patron to finance their education.

Flash forward to today. We live in an era that provides tremendous opportunities to artists. The internet brings the entirety of human culture to us with the click of a mouse. We can interact with creative people on social media and learn from them by following their progress and reading their posts. Our work can be instantly distributed to the whole world for free over YouTube or Instagram. Artists can communicate directly with their audience and the audience can feed back to the artist in real time.

We should be living through a golden age of creativity, right? Well, why aren’t we?

artistic renaissance

The problem with modern day artistic culture is that people take it for granted. We’re surrounded by images, music, film, performance, architecture, in dozens of different media- websites, YouTube, Spotify, Netflix, video games, television, cell phones, computers… the list goes on and on. People have become so immersed in art that they don’t value it. Imagine telling Bach that he could sit down at his desk and instantly access the greatest music from the past 400 years. What would that mean to him? Does it mean the same thing to you?

If you’re an animator, cartoonist or illustrator, the internet is awash in great reference material. How much time do you spend exposing yourself to new ways of expressing yourself? How often do you set aside time to break down reference to learn how it works? Which artists’ works have you studied carefully to try to understand and assimilate the things that made them great?

Be honest. How much do you use the internet to become a better artist, and how much do you use it to tweet pictures of your lunch or share kitten memes? The internet is the greatest thing to happen to culture in the whole history of mankind, but how much do we appreciate it and utilize it to move us and our art forward?

There are schools that teach animation and charge a hundred thousand dollars for a degree. There are archives that collect films and artwork, but they’re a thousand miles or more away from you. You might as well be back in the 1700s walking two weeks to school and not having access to art unless you are part of the upper classes.

artistic renaissance

What if you could become a part of a community of artists that is using the internet to create a new way of learning about art? Would you take advantage of that opportunity?

Every day of the week, Animation Resources gives you good, solid reference and inspiration. Every one of those things are reasons why you should be a member of our organization. We’ve told you about our podcasts, e-books and downloadable animated films. Obviously, there are a lot of great perks for being a member. But there’s an even better reason to join…

You should be a member because Animation Resources is the only organization that is using the power of the internet to create a culture of education, sharing and growth for artists involved in this field.

That should be enough, shouldn’t it? It’s just as important for working professionals as it is for students. When learning and growth stops, so does creativity. It’s not just about inventing. It’s also about reinventing yourself. If you stop doing that, don’t be surprised if the art form moves on and you’re left in the dust.

Animation Resources isn’t taking the potential of the internet for granted. And we aren’t charging you a hundred thousand dollars to take advantage of our knowledge base. We want to do a lot more. We want to bring our archive database to you. But we can’t do that unless artists pull together and all pitch in to support the organization that supports them. Lately, I’ve heard several artists say, “I’ll join your group when you have everything up on your site for downloading.” That totally misses the point of what Animation Resources is providing. We can go on tweeting our lunch and sharing kitten memes, or we can harness the power of the internet as a community. Self study and artistic growth is a process, not a destination.

Everyone talks about going back to the “golden age” of animation. Even though we share old animation with our members, Animation Resources doesn’t want to go backwards. We want to use the experience of the past and the technology of the present to create an future that surpasses everything that came before. Isn’t that what you want too? Then why aren’t you a member of our community?

It’s up to you. Don’t take it for granted.

Student Membership Drive

Fall is time to save when you join Animation Resources as a student member. For the next couple of weeks our Student Membership will be discounted to only $60/year! Best of all, you will continue to get that savings every year you renew as a student for up to three years. Yes, this applies to full time educators too. Why should you join? Each day we’ll be highlighting more reasons why you should be a member of Animation Resources. Bookmark us and check back every day.

$60Reference PacksSTUDENT MEMBERSHIP

Discount Ends Nov. 6th!
$70/year $60/year (recurring)

FREE SAMPLES!

Not Convinced Yet? Check out this SAMPLE REFERENCE PACK! It will give you a taste of what Animation Resources members get to download every other month!

There’s no better way to feed your creativity than to be a member of Animation Resources. Every other month, we share a Reference Pack that is chock full of downloadable e-books and still framable videos designed to expand your horizons and blow your mind. It’s easy to join. Just click on this link and you can sign up right now online.

JOIN NOW Before This Offer Ends!
https://animationresources.org/membership/levels/

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