Top 10 Animation Jobs & Career Pathways

For as long as you can remember, you’ve had a pencil and paper so you could spend every spare moment telling a story by creating interesting characters.  You decided to pursue the animation you love to as a major field of study in college, but what should you expect to do with it after you graduate?  What are some of the jobs in your field?  Here is a list of the top ten careers in animation in no particular order:

Animators are artists that create multiple images for a story or specific purpose.  The images may be characters or special effects.  Depending on the industry, these images may be created by hand or by using computer software.  Animators typically work in creating movies, video games, or advertising.

Modelers take the images created by the animators and make them into three dimensional creations to bring them to life.  Like animators, modelers generally work in the entertainment or advertising industries.

Painters add color to the finished black and white animation drawings.  They paint the background for each scene.  Painters are most typically employed in the process of creating movies.

Graphic designers combine their artistic talent and computer skills to create stories or convey information.  They often work in advertising or web design.  Work in web design has increased exponentially as online business and advertising has escalated.

Multimedia service managers are animators with significant experience that can oversee the production of entire projects.  They supervise a variety of contributors to create multimedia products for web animation and advertising.

Story board artists are interpreters.  They take the script for the project and illustrate it in short snippets to prepare for the rest of the animating process.  They usually work in the entertainment industry.

Layout artists create and draw the backgrounds for the animation.  Their work is usually done in pencil and it’s later painted by the painters.  This is another movie industry position. 

Inbetweeners are the artists that create the connecting pictures between the big scene drawings.  Their drawings are the glue that put all the scenes together to create the continuous action.  This is often times an entry level position in the movie industry.

Technical directors put the pieces of the puzzle together.  They oversee putting all of the different parts of an animated feature together to create the finished product.  This includes the artwork, sound and all the special effects.  This position could span any of the areas where animation is used.

Effects animators create the special effects.  They add aspects to the animated film to make them seem more real.  Depending on the script the effects may be natural or supernatural.  This position could likely be found in any industry where animated film is used.