6d (edited) • ❓ Questions
Sharing thoughts, questions and worries from the past week or so
Hey everyone, I hope you are all well and good
This past week for me have been full of ideas, excitement, but also questions, reconsiderations and reflections on my current situation and what time will it take for me to get my first "accomplishment" ( like a first client, first paid invoice, something that says " this is the first success, let's take it further").
Small recap of where I am in my professional situation:
- I have 2 months (including the current one) left of unempmoyement money. From July I'm on my own and with my savings.
- Because my financial situation is in a bad spot, have been applying to jobs, both in animation studios and in my area, looking for part time jobs so I can have time to devellop my business. So far, I did not get a single interview, whether in a studio or in a local shop, bar, etc... where I applied. So quite unlucky so far, and I have been applying to studios months, and local businesses for weeks. Of course it does not mean I'm giving up freelancing. Quite the opposite. But I do need an income.
On what I'm doing/working on at the moment. This is where things get a bit more chaotic
- I'm nearing the end of the year long animation mentorship I enrolled in, it coincidently will end at the same time my unemployement money runs out. I'm working on a shot that I need to finish before July 4th, because at this date my Maya Indie license will end and I can't afford to renew it unless maybe if find a job by that time. So this shot is quite a big focus currently, and I want it in my demoreel.
- Passive Income: I've been building my own character rigging system for quite a while now, using a Blender node based rigging addon called Mantis. When it will be finished, I'll be able to quickly rig whole characters with my own rig quite fast. Until last Thursday, this was a side project that I was working on and off, I didn't have any commercial plans with it. But then I tried to use Claude to find potential passive incomes using my skills. And I found one, on which my rig system play a key role. I'll collaborate with a 3d artist friend on that. This is what got me really excited. I've been thinking non stop about it, and how can we take it further if it works and gathers a community. But this is the passive income plan. Not the main income/clients plan ( tho maybe it could turn into this in the future if we establish ourselves steadily in that market)
- Motion Design: The original main income/client plan in Blender. Now this is the part where I'm still trying to find my footing. I've been looking at artists who already use Blender for motion design, mainly to see how they used the software for this purpose, as K neved did before. There is not a huge amount, but the one who exists are doing really cool things. So I now have an idea on how to do basic things. I've been going back to Geometry Nodes as well (back because a few years ago I used it a bit). It's Blender's procedural modeling/creation tool. It's REALLY powerful, and I suspected it could be verrrry useful for motion design, so I'm relearning it properly because I'm convinced it will be very useful. It's also used for 3D motion graphics and that's how I learning it ( Ducky3D on Youtube. He is one of the best to teach this kind of things). I have a small ghost/personnal project in the works, with help from my best friend for a few non animation aspects. Waiting for him to get back to me on the script first draft ( I never wrote scripts before but he did)
- Also, I recently been wondering about product animation. I know this is a potentially quite profitable alley as well.
- And there is the gym explainer videos project. I looked for free gym machines/equipment 3D models to use in the MVP, had a specific one in mind. Finding goos free models in that category turned out to be harder than expected, but I found one that could fit. Need to tweak it if needed and rig it. My coach suggested what would be good to showcase for a demo, and I'll go with that.
So, on the Blender motion design/graphics & product animation side of things, this is tricky because while I know the animation tools quite well, I lack knowledge in a few important other tools( lighting, shaders, rendering and maybe modeling but less so than the others). Still I know way more of Blender than I do of Cavalry or After Effect.
There is a lot that could be done. Ideally finding a way to specialise in character animation, even with 2D puppet rigs, would be the obvious and best use of my skillset. But I don't know how realistic this is.
As I said at the beginning, I don't know how long realistically a first success could take to happen, and I'm not sure which project I should focus on to make that happen as fast as I can. Right now, it's all over the place, I'm doing a bit of everything. The passive income project is the easiest I think. My rig system is not finished yet, but more than 50% done already. I just need the models from my friend, then we upload it, advertise it, and build upon it ( it's a long term project, ideally). But is it the safest and most profitable ? I'm not sure.
What I know is that my ongoing animation shot for the mentorship needs to be finished and exported out of Maya before July 4th. Then I can take my time for the Unreal render.
Last note, I won't be able to join the office hours call for this week and next week. That's also why I'm sharing such a lot of things today
Thank you for reading if you got through it all !
I wish you all a great rest of your day
-- Pierre
1
3 comments
Sharing thoughts, questions and worries from the past week or so
powered by
skool.com/freelancing-for-animators-6042
I help animators starting an animation freelance business and stop waiting for studios to call back.
Suggested communities
Powered by