Animation
Posing Artist / Key Frame Animator
A Key Posing Artist, also known as Key Animators, creates all of the drawings that the animation team needs to make a character move. This allows the animator to focus on timing and performance.
The Posing Artist's job is necessary so that the animation looks natural and not like a marionette. Being a Posing Artist requires someone who has good all-around drawing and can draw the characters on model while maintaining strong poses with good silhouettes.
Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge
Layout Artist
A Layout Artist's job is to draw the backgrounds for animated television shows and movies. This requires the artist to prepare the stage for the characters by creating overlays and underlays and separating all the possible elements that might need to be animated. The Layout Artist places a size reference (an image of the character on stage) into the scene at various depths to ensure that the animator keeps the proper scale in each of their scenes.
One background could be used in many scenes, at many different scales. Because of this, Layout Artists also add field guides (a way of representing the television screen scale and proportions) to their artwork along with the corresponding scene numbers.
Layout Artists need to anticipate the needs of the animators and prepare their scenes accordingly.
Background Designer
A Background Designer's job is to create the initial concepts of what the backgrounds should look like. Most of the time this begins with only a vague idea of what the showrunners (Directors, Producers) want the show will look like.
This exploration is usually done in black and white. Colour roughs are usually only done on high-budget productions or when the concept ideas need to be pitched to clients. Every production is different, but most of the time colour concepts are explored by the paint department.
During the production phase, Background designers create new backgrounds with every new script and try to anticipate what might be needed to facilitate the story.
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Click to enlarge
Pre-Vis Artist
A Pre-Vis Artist is a newer concept in 2D and 3D animation. A Pre-Vis Artist's job is to take pre-existing 3D models and edit them to work for the shots they are given. and then add cameras to create everything needed for an animatic.
An animatic is basically a rough version of the television show or movie before the character animation, the finished layouts or rendered 3D models are added.
Pre-Vis Artists need to have a good working knowledge of layout, storyboarding, and composition. The images given here are rough 3D models of shots compared to the finished shots they eventually became.
Prop Designer
A Prop Designer does pretty much what the title implies, they create designs for props that are going to be held or interacted with by the characters in the television show or movie.
Unlike in live-action, every angle of the prop that is needed must be drawn ahead of time for the animators to use. The initial design is used by the storyboard artist as a reference. Later finished drawings are created based on the angles shown in the storyboards.
Eventually, size references are added to the drawings, along with the scene numbers to help animators know which props to use and when.
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Sizzle Reel
This sizzle reel contains animations I created to be used as internal presentations for stakeholders at the Royal Bank of Canada. Unlike the animation industry, I was the only one working on these animations. They were very fast turnarounds, in most cases, the production cycle was only about a week or two.
In that amount of time, I was tasked with storyboarding, animation, layout, editing, and sound design. Since I was always dealing with people who knew practically nothing about the animation industry, it was up to me to set the expectations.
Thankfully the clients were always pleased with the results.