Best Tips for a Successful Animation Portfolio
This blog post came about while reflecting on my many years of working with students to develop their animation portfolios. I felt it was time to make a list of features of students that are what I’ve noticed to be the biggest determiners of success.
The students that get accepted…
They show up. This is the first and most critical step. When there is a class session booked, or a deadline due, I always see their work arrive on time, or if not, they still engage with the feedback video or chat about their difficulties with me. Engagement can happen on many levels.
They make time. It is difficult for highschool students to fit in time for feedback sessions, but yet there are still many who will get up early to book a feedback session before their school or work, or at lunch, or during a spare. If you truly have no time slots available, maybe it is time to look at #3…
They prioritize their animation portfolio over other extracurricular activities that don’t help them get accepted. Being highly involved in various high school activities may help your chances with some scholarships or other university programs, but with competitive animation programs like Sheridan’s, they just want you to prioritize animation.
They started a long time ago. This is especially true with skills like life drawing. Many of the students that score perfect marks started taking their learning seriously for at least a year prior to submitting their portfolio. Students shouldn’t expect great results if they just decided to apply to animation less than 6 months ago.
They think less about “what kind of art do I like making?” and more about “what kind of artwork does an animated production need?”. Ideally, if the latter is successful, you will achieve the former as well. To be better informed about this, have a look at any of the “Art of…” books for various animated productions.
They’re hard workers. Even in the face of difficulty, they problem solve, troubleshoot, and engage with the feeling of difficulty to try to overcome it.
They do more than what’s required. In all of my 1 hour review sessions for my classes, there is almost always extra time after I review the class content for me to look at other work they’re working on, and I encourage them to bring additional artwork. Please bring me work beyond the course requirements, I’ve even made an entire web page of potential projects and prompts!
They have a general curiosity of how things work. They want to see how they can design new things that don’t exist, but could. See Alejandro Burdisio’s design for Love Death + Robots.
They seek inspiration from life itself, instead of repackaging existing animation content or ideas. While we are all fans of animation, it’s important to take inspiration from the original source in the same way the existing artists and storytellers working within animation do. Source from the world around you!
They care about idiosyncrasies, or small but defining details. They look for features that set people, places, and things apart from one another. What lines make a form feel like fluffy grass versus solid rock, what makes a building feel cared for? How can this shop exhibit the personality of its’ owner? Etc. These are critically important questions to ask yourself when creating artwork for animation.
They’re comfortable trying something strange and different. Concept art in particular always requires artists to be challenged with new prompts that they may not have ever drawn before, yet they’ll approach it with the same curiosity that allows them to create believable, descriptive artwork.
They contain their distractions within respectable limits. I think this one speaks for itself! This goes for you frequenters of the often-chatty Sheridan Hopefuls Discord!
They research how others have overcome similar challenges. Many successful animation portfolios are posted online, have you seen them? You will undoubtedly get ideas for your own if you do.
They repeat this steps 1 - 13 frequently!
Bonus one for my students in particular: They arrange their artwork into a single image file as I describe on my booking and homework submissions page! It saves a lot of time in each of your sessions if you do this in advance so that the entire feedback session is for your artwork alone, not arranging artwork files. If you’re not sure how to do this, I’ve made a video to describe how in Photoshop, but there are other guides for other software online. Also, submit your homework at least 1 hour prior to your session to ensure the Google Drive updates on time.
