Question is : How much do you wanna try ?

Hi, this text is a little though I had from some time. It's by no mean a text to discourage people who would like to get into the field of animation :-D but more a reflexion about what it mean in term of time and effort investment to reach a highly professional level.

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Inside the 11 Second Club competition forum there is a post call "Why you should keep trying". It's a pretty popular post, one of the sticky one that get read and read over because it's so important and inspiring. As the title says, it tell you that you should keep trying (here to draw), and that if you work hard and persevere you will get better. And really the guy in the post (Jonathan Hardesty) did get better in drawing, as I did (and do) get better in animation. So yes if we try, we will absolutely get getter.

But then the question is : How much do you want to try ?


As Shawn Kelly points out in one of his post, learning animation just takes a lot of time:

"I added all of that up, and it turns out that my animation education time before landing my dream job at ILM was 18,400 hours [...] but really we're just talking about 5 years of focused studying in order to have a reel that got me into ILM [Link]"

Animation just takes time

And because of this, as Pedro Blumenbaum points out in Animation Insider (p.87), you better love what you do :

"I have come to understand that developing your skill takes huge amounts of time and effort. So it's better to be patient, to be constant in managing the energy, and most important of all, to love what you do, because if you don't, the price of being a good animator is too high."

Love it or don't love it, that's the question

Now take someone who don't know anything about animation, who don't know what makes a good pose and can't draw and who have never touch a 3D package. Then that person will certainly have a long way to go to learn animation at a professional level, as oppose to someone who have a formation in life drawing or dance for instance (or anything helpful in the field). But in any case, learning animation is hard, it just takes time and an appreciable level of "love what you are doing" feeling.