Animation Corner: 3 Tips for Tackling Animation Tests

so let's talk about the animation test. So  what this is is when you are interviewing with a studio, they may give you a test scene,  in order to gauge your animation skills. It can range from something as simple as a walk  cycle to something as complicated as a full scene with dialogue and a couple characters. For  example, in every studio that I applied to, I've had to do an animation test first. So they are  a very important part of the interview process, but in my opinion, they are very very

difficult  to do well. Because you are not used to the rigs, you are not used to the scene, you are not  used to the style of animation on the show. and you don't get any revisions, it's a one-shot  and done. So I just wanted to share a couple quick tips in my opinion that has helped me perform best  during these animation tests. Before I even think about animating, I like to get as comfortable  as I can using the rig. Exploring the rig, how many deformers does it have? How many master  control

lers? how many views of the character are there? How many mouth shapes? Hand shapes? things  like that. All this is going to help me when I get to posing and animating. Depending on how long  I have for the test, sometimes an hour sometimes a whole day, I'll take that time to kind of pose  that character out on my own. How far can I push the expressions before the rig breaks. How far  can I push the poses? and just get comfortable posing and moving parts of the rig around. When it  comes to anim

ating, I have learned to keep things simple. I like to focus on 3 main things. Matching  the storyboards, have clear and strong poses, and finally having clear and readable expressions.  Because basically, all you need to show the studio is that you understand acting, timing,  your hitting all the correct acting beats. and also that there is potential for you to  improve. So make sure you block out some time to get used to the rigs and keep your animation  simple. My last piece of advice is that

it's not the end of the world if you do badly on these  tests. I am constantly applying to studios, doing animation tests doing bad on animation tests,  and getting rejected. it's just part of the game. What works for me is just asking for feedback  on what you did wrong, what you can improve on, and taking that feedback and implementing it into  your animation. So don't think of it as closing the door with that studio. think of it more as  opening up a dialogue with them. Because once you get

that feedback, you can come back in a  couple months, say I worked on this this this and this maybe we can try the test again or  maybe do a test for a different show. so it's all networking and it's all gonna help you get a  job. So that's kind of my game plan when I do an animation test when I am interviewing at a studio.  and if you guys have any advice or insights on how you like to do your animation tests I would love  to hear it, leave a comment below. That's all the time we have for this

episode of animation  corner let me know what other topics you want me to talk about leave a comment below I  would love to hear what you guys have to say.