Research: Assistant Animator

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First off, I like the idea of assisting an animator at their job. I think as a beginner in this industry, I’d like to start out this way. Although after researching, I realised that it is actually not an easy job. After research, I learned that these are the tasks of an assistant animator:

  • Clean up the rough key frames of the main animator
  • Draw the in-betweens
  • Sometimes, create the breakdown frames as well
  • Keeping characters on model and looking out for consistency

I learned that being an assistant animator sometimes mean that you must have better draftsmanship than the animator. It is as if the animator is creating messily and the assistant is there to clean it up, keep it consistent, and contained within the quality requirements.

An assistant animator is kind of like a clean up artist, I noticed that both have very similar tasks and job requirements.