Debotriya Chowdhury – Debotriya's Journal

22nd November 202523rd November 2025

Building a career in the animation industry: Where, What and How III

Part 3: How

Now we come to the hardest question of all, how do we get there?

Reality is that it is incredibly hard to land a first project, get your foot in the door so to say, but now in recent years the road ahead from there also seems quite challenging.

In the previous post, I mentioned I spoke to two professionals specifically about their roles and how to make it in the industry, Gaurav Wakankar and Bianca Ansems. Bianca mentioned how it is hard for even seniors to find work right now with less opportunities overall in storyboarding. In my recent visit to Inmotion, I had met and spoken with several graduates who were trying to find jobs in animation, and most of them had day jobs in unrelated industries, some moving to digital marketing or software coding entirely. Since animation jobs have become elusive and take so much time to come by, our alumni and us, we are all competing for the exact same jobs and entry level opportunities. If global recession was not bad enough, really powerful AI tools are now also competing in the same race. Not to be dramatic, but things seem really hopeless.

So what can we do now?

The answer seems to be trying anyway.

Both Gaurav and Bianca advised that there is no linear path and if you keep working and developing your skills, opportunities come from unpredictable places. I had the opportunity to speak to Wesley Louis from The Line at their showcase recently and he also happened to iterate how unexpected the journey can be. He also mentioned things are harder now, but we have to keep trying and keep making things simply because we are here because we are passionate about animation. So I will have to simply keep drawing, keep watching movies, making things to build my skills, and keep approaching people in the industry to connect and share work with.

As I had mentioned in a previous post, I am here on a visa, the choices I make have to be very much rooted in the reality that I will need to make a certain income to continue to stay and build connections in this country. I have been keeping an eye on motion design roles as well, with some previous experience in the line, as a backup line which is related to animation and would allow me to still hone my skills and meet animators and producers. I am also expanding my search outside the UK.

In the last two years, I have been learning Maya and Blender alongside 2D to expand my toolset and be able to work in mixed-media projects as well. A few years earlier, 3D and 2D character animators were distinctly different roles, however motion design and gaming studios now also look for 2D/3D animators since they now extensively mix the mediums in their work. I am also looking at learning popularly asked softwares from recruiters like Toon Boom Harmony or Storyboard Pro.

Following animation producers and recruiters online, along with signing up for social events, newsletters and keeping an eye out for opportunities and mentorships.

I intend to keep developing my own skills, sensibilities and gain more clarity on what kind of stories I would like to tell, as a personal practice alongside professional projects. An animator who has achieved this remarkably is Louie Zong who is a storyboard artist for Cartoon Network, and has his parallel set of short film productions, 3D illustrations and even several funktronica albums!

As you might have guessed in these posts, I have quite a lot of anxiety and uncertainty about my path ahead. In all this uncertainty, the only thing I can count on is to practice, make more work and not let my passion die out. At the end of the day, I am here for my love of animation and I have come far from where I started. I am constantly learning new skills and if resilience is another skill needed to be an animator today, I will have to learn it too.

22nd November 202522nd November 2025

Building a career in the animation industry: Where, What and How II

Part 2: What

Now that I have wrangled with the ‘where’ of the kind of work I wan to do, the next question is what roles in can I work in?

The part of animation that I had fallen in love with in the first place was preproduction. I would pore over behind-the-scenes videos from Lion King, The Incredibles and Tangled, to see how they came up with the characters, how they designed the world, how they developed the story. I would see footage of the story and concept artists put together sketches and thumbnails in meeting rooms, piecing together and arriving at the films I had come to love so much.

I have identified my interests and abilities in two possible roles— storyboard artist or character animator.

As an animator I could work in film, television or video games and as a storyboard artist I would also have the opportunity to board live-action projects alongside animation. Starting out I would prefer to compile portfolios for both kind of roles given the uncertainty of actually landing roles in the industry currently.

Looking at storyboard portfolios and how artists present their work

I reached out to animators and storyboard artists online, and though I didn’t receive a lot of responses, I had the chance to speak to animator Gaurav Wakankar, and story artist Bianca Ansems. I had asked them about how they arrived at their roles, skills they had that helped them in their practice and advice on how to get work in the industry. They were kind enough to give very thoughtful answers and helped me ground my conjecture in reality.

Gaurav mentioned how he enjoyed animation because focusing on the motion was the part that gave him the most joy, rather than researching and designing characters or painting backgrounds. He had directed a short film and realised that directing was not his preference, and he would rather pursue animation roles. He also spoke about how there is no one set path, and he had initially started a studio before changing direction and working as a freelance animator.

Bianca advised to apply to jobs of all kinds of roles to start with, even if I wanted to be a storyboard artist eventually. She spoke about how she had worked in a variety of positions which not only gave her a better understanding of the whole production process, but it helped her earn a living and brought her contacts. She kindly gave me a list of skills and resources that would help if I want to be a storyboard artist.

Compilations from storyboard artist job listings on LinkedIn, Indeed, animated jobs and Glassdoor

Compilations from character animator job listings on LinkedIn, Indeed, animated jobs and Glassdoor

Before this course, I have worked for a year at an animation studio, on a number of roles including visual development, character design, storyboarding and 2D animation. Following Gaurav’s approach, I think I enjoy the processes where I can draw the characters in action and see the story unfolding. I also understand that standing here, I only have an idea of what I can do based on my existing experiences and I still have several specific skills I will need to learn to be better suited to the roles I want to have. While I am aware the chances of me getting to work in my preferred role from my first job after this course are not likely, it is important to identify which way to veer to.

22nd November 202522nd November 2025

Building a career in the animation industry: Where, What and How

Part 1: Where

I will have to honest on this subject, my ambitions and plans will be coloured by the fact that I am an international student on an education loan, in a time when the political climate in the country is not in my favour.

I had moved to the UK because of its prominent animation industry, where they actively promote the industry and nurture the growth of new artists, and where so many talented animators and agencies are based, which I didn’t see back home.

Turns out there really are tons of talented people in animation here, even just in London. And they are all looking for jobs at the same time and at the same places.

So many animators and artists I have met in the past year have to juggle day jobs to still be able to earn a livelihood alongside their practice.

As you may imagine, this is more discouraging news and also a reality marker for me. My abilities are not suited for independent film-making, and while I would like to become a director in the future, I don’t think I am there yet. Ideally I would want to get recruited at a studio here and work with them full-time, however that seems almost impossible today. My current goal is to be able to get freelance work with animation studios and keep improving my skills, hoping that I can get consistent projects and get to meet and work with more and more interesting and talented people.

Attending the National Film and Television School Graduate Showcase in March, at BFI Southbank and seeing the wonderful films and the teams behind them

I first looked at opportunities in film and television animation. From online interviews with the artists onboard, the format seems completely contract based, where you’re with the studio or the production house only for the duration of the process, and then move on to the next project. While I will be applying and aiming for these opportunities, there is again an incredible lot of competition, and consistently getting signed for projects enough to earn a living is difficult.

Attending The Line’s Director Showcase in October

Coming to commercial studios, I have been a fan of The Line Animation for many years, and I find their positioning in the industry very exciting. I think it would be vey interesting to work with studios who make commercial films, music videos as well as develop original IP. I am also aiming for studios like Golden Wolf, Blink Ink, Passion who make a mix of diverse projects across subjects and mediums.

Golden Wolf’s Mixer event at Cafe FM in July

I have also been looking at how international projects work and how animators get signed by big names like Titmouse, Netflix, Passion Pictures, Sony Animation and the like on contract basis for projects remotely. Applying for and getting work visas in foreign countries is becoming increasingly expensive and harder, so being able to work in this format would mean access to a larger pool of opportunities. A lot of production work also gets outsourced to smaller studios, which would also be a way to gain experience of working on larger scale projects.

I have also been looking at game industry roles as well, and the work portfolio requirement are different. Given the softwares and formats are different I would try and give it a shot, but it will be harder competing with animators who have tailored their practice toward gaming.

I have really enjoyed the privilege of being in the thick of things here in London, being able to attend animation events, attend screenings, visiting studios and meeting people in person, after being an admirer from afar for so long. As dreary as the odds are, I still want to be based in a place that is a hub of film and animation. In the long term, I would like to feel in the thick of things without moving a continent away from home, but till then I am open to relocating to cities as long as I can adequately sustain myself.

4th March 20255th March 2025

Adventures in Lip Syncing

Among all the animation exercises I wanted to try and experiment with at least one of them and it ended up being the Lip Sync exercise. Looking at last year’s compilation, I was struck by how each entry had a different style and treatment, and that motivated me to try and make this in Blender with grease pencil.

Though I had a few troubles with figuring out the method to achieve what I was going for, the primary hurdle seemed to be deciding what I wanted to do with the prompt in the first place. I admit I was trying really hard for it to be funny and spent a lot of time overthinking my line and my storyboard over and over again. For the prompt, ‘lost in translation’ I was talking about how my perceived personality changes when I switch languages, and had a moment when the character literally flips a switch and we see them change. It was all in English, but I received feedback that it would make more sense to actually change languages. My concern, I suppose, was that Bangla is structured very different from English and the line wouldn’t make any sense, and the joke might very literally be lost in translation.

Ideating with the visualisation of the dialogue

Eventually the deadline meant I had to get out of my own head and just make it, tweak it later.

I had hit a similar bump with the Silent Movie acting exercise where I felt like I had spent too much time just overthinking what my idea was, being generally very indecisive and unsatisfied with whatever I could come up with. In one our lectures where Sue Tong was here, she mentioned being stressed about whether an idea is good enough and the best thing to do in the scenario is to just take a call, even if ends up being the wrong call eventually. Things can be fixed later, and it would be far more productive to have something than nothing at all.

Once I started, I sketched out a simple character who obviously looks one way, making it funny when she switched behaviour. I realised I am far more comfortable in Maya than Blender (the shortcuts and formatting difference really gets frustrating), so now I had to find a way to model and rig a character in Maya but then bring it into Blender to use Blender’s grease pencil feature. After a failed attempt and consulting Pat Robinson, I realised Maya and Blender have different logics for constraints, and so rigs are not easily transferable. So I have to animate the body language for the character in Maya, bake the animation to the joints and then carry it into Blender just for the texturing, grease pencil and render part.

Adding expressions and mouth shapes in Blender grease pencil

While this method meant I got to try out a style I had wanted to try for a long time but did not have someone to troubleshoot with, it did mean I had lesser time left for the expressions and lip sync part of the exercise. I made a chart and drew out mouth shapes for the whole line word by word in my notebook, which made my life much easier.

There are still things to tweak and things I would like to do differently when I make something like this again, but I’m still glad I simply went ahead and made it, failed and tried again instead of being paralysed.

4th March 20254th March 2025

Work Experience in Character Posing

For a few days in this term, we got a sneak peak into the process of helping someone else realise their vision of their film. Magdalena and I were paired with Ashwitha de Mel to work on her film Rotten Work. The film tells the story of a relationship, how it began sweet, but slowly started to decay from the inside, with an unnerving yet very tangible parallel of teeth rotting.

We sat with Ashwitha and divided our roles, I was tasked with the character sheet and exploring the main character’s poses from her initial sketches and the animatic, while Magdalena looked at the environment and layouts.

Unfortunately, soon after we started, I sustained a hand injury and my working timeline got compromised. However, Ashwitha was very accommodating and we co-ordinated online to see how much I could get done.

Ashwitha’s style and drawing skills were much different from my own, and tasked with adapting her character into different poses and angles, I had to spend a day of practice simply to study the character references and making rough sketches till I got a hang of the base shapes and the proportions looking similar. I used a rough turnaround (even though the final treatment is not locked in yet) just as a guide for myself.

Rough sketches trying to get a hang of the character’s proportions

I had only done character development for my own characters before, and my next challenge was to look at the animatic and try to gauge what kind of body language and expressions the protagonist girl was going to have. Picking off of the mood of the film, the drawings in the animatic and the reference images from the mood board, the main character seemed to have a gentle and graceful manner and in the story, she initially appears very at ease and domestic around her partner, though slowly we start to see frustration, anger and despair from her as well. However even her frustration needed to feel like the same gentle person losing patience, without being uncharacteristically loud or expressive.

I searched for reference images that would match the situations, sometimes going out of the animatic to see if there were more poses or expression that could show off her nature. I kept checking in and sharing my progress with Ashwitha and she seemed to really like the way the poses were going.

I was very surprised and glad to find I had managed to be on the same page as her, and I would credit that to the animatic and how well it captured the mood of the film, peaceful and uncomfortable at the same time. Ashwitha’s way of organising information on what she envisioned, yet giving us room to try out our interpretations felt very effective. It was a new challenge working on someone’s project while they are also still figuring out the details, but I would guess having someone else’s interpretations of your story would also help seeing how the film might be perceived eventually. This role was a good way to start seeing how our own workshop in character design helped me see characters in shape language, as well as how life drawing had prepared me to read gestures and body language more clearly. I would say, my drawing skills still felt limited, and I need much more practice to make rough sketches more solid and coherent.

9th February 202512th March 2025

Taking a look at 2D and 3D hybrid animation

A lot of the recent films and series I have been watching have been called ‘2.5D Animation’ or ‘Hybrid Animation’. As an admirer of the works, I have been researching how these were made, what techniques were used, and what exactly is this ‘2.5D animation’ that makes them look so interesting.

Hybrid animation seems to be a product of using a blend of 2D and 3D animation methods together, using one medium’s advantages to counter the challenges of the other. Initially seen in The Great Mouse Detective (1986) or Beauty and the Beast (1991), 3D models and cameras were used in an otherwise 2D animated film to be able to get more dynamic shots and realistic movement which would be very time consuming and expensive to do by hand.

The clockwork tower scene from The Great Mouse Detective

The famous ballroom from Beauty and the Beast

Game animation has had an impact on this development as well. With the rise of open world navigation games like the initial Maze Wars, Legend of Zelda and Tomb Raider, video games had started building their games in 3D instead of the previous 2D sprite method. With Luxo Jr. and Toy Story, Pixar had developed the possibility of photorealistic 3D rendering, which led a trend of studios producing 3D animated films trying to be as realistic as technology would allow them.

However in the year 2000, Japanese gaming company Sega released Jet Set Radio, the first project to have attempted a cel shaded ‘flat’ rendering on 3D models and environments. In 2002, Nintendo released Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, which also used a cel-shaded, simplified and hyper-styled look for the 3D game. Moving away from realism also meant a more efficient way to offer live rendering views in the extensive open worlds of these games.

More recently we have seen 2D techniques being used in 3D animation to make it look more hand-made and purposefully messy. Quoting an article on VFXApprentice,’What is 2.5D?’–

” The common thread between the case studies here, Spider-Verse and the new TMNT film, is that the source material began as comic books. Hand-drawn, hand-colored illustrations on physical paper lend themselves to a certain look and feel. What 2018’s Spider-Verse did was take that idea and translate it to the silver screen in a moving, breathing, art form that re-invented how animated movies can look and feel. “

Charles M.Schulz’s drawings of Charlie Brown, Vareity 2015

3D Render engines tend to use physically based simulations for calculating form, materials, lighting and movement, which are aimed to mimic physical reality. To bring more 2D feel into CGI, the software needed to also generate line art, painted stroke and effects, flat colour and even the imperfections and wonkiness of printed or hand-drawn art. Even the character modelling style evolved to can achieve more graphic looks and move away from realistic proportions.

Visualisation of the rendering style for Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse (2018), from Vox’ s video article

The goal of blending techniques vary depending on the styles. While projects like Arcane (2021) and Prince of Egypt (1998) aimed to make it look as seamless as possible, works like ‘The Amazing World of Gumball’ (2011) and ‘Smiling Friends’ (2022) intentionally make the styles contrast, not unlike a collage. It is using the visual difference in 2D drawn and 3D realistically rendered elements to create juxtaposition between two ideas or themes, sometimes even between the characters and their environments.

3D modelled horses and chariots in The Prince of Egypt

Poster from The Amazing World of Gumball

The rise of new ways of animating reminds very much of art movements like Impressionism and Expressionism creating a new place for painting after the introduction of photography competed with Realism painters. After a decade of CGI films trying to get closer and closer to simulating how reality looks, the new goal for technology seems to have shifted to experimenting and being expressive over achieving realism. The blending of mediums now allowed by technology now goes beyond drawn or realism into something coined as ‘enhanced realism’.

I have a further detailed study of the specific effects used in these films and which tools and techniques were used to achieve them. I am linking the extended technical research here.

Apart from big budget productions, I have also been admiring animators online, including Louie Zong and Andry Dédouze. A lot of initial conversations when I have been applying for animation schools as well as looking up job roles seem to ask, ‘what are you specialising in, 2D or 3D?’, like an exclusive divine path that needs to be decided. It is very interesting now to see the lines blurring and more scope for experimentation and diversifying as an animator.