Case Study - Animator

Name: Conor Ryan
Job: Animator (www.twofacedanimation.com)

Originally I worked as a muralist, and just didn’t like it; it dawned on me after a few years that I didn’t want to stay with it. I’m a big film fan and I love animation, and I could draw, and so it came to me to pursue it as a career. My brother had done animation in college for a couple of years so I’d seen the work that’s involved. So I decided to go back to college and study animation.

I went to IADT (Institute of Art, Design and Technology). It was a good course, very broad and it covered all the different types of animation: 3D, pencil, computer generated, stop-motion, it touches on all of them before allowing you to specialise in a particular method. It was quite loose creatively in that they encourage you to make your own film. It was a three-year diploma, but it’s now a four-year degree course, but it’s pretty much the same course. At the time it was four years work squeezed into three years, so it was pretty intensive. I specialised with the pencil drawing in college because I didn’t have a computer at home. Since then I’ve taught myself the software properly and now I’m doing 3D and 2D.

I have worked on a lot of ads, and on an Oasis video (The Masterplan) that we made in 2006. It was for the band’s Best Of album that came out that year. That was a good and interesting project, which we had a lot of artistic licence with. 

The benefits of the animation industry are that you’re working in a creative industry and you work with really talented people. It enables you to retire having completed some work that you can be proud of, and that people like. That’s what I’m about; I like to make my own films and series. It can be a lucrative industry too as it’s quite specialised work. Animators can be highly paid or they can make quite a lot of money creating their own stuff on a freelance basis.

It takes a lot of patience; animation can be painstaking work. But if you’re into it, like I am, I don’t find it painstaking or frustrating at all. It takes a certain kind of person to be an animator. You have to be patient and completely practical; a good degree on its own won’t get you anywhere, a good show reel of your material, that’s what gets you the work.