The future of Animation/Motion design/VFX

[Richard Garabedain]

its true that there are a lot of premade templates to make the process more streamlined…if you want exactly whats shown. But if you want to edit it or make your own…then what would you do?

I actually do see this a lot. Even on this board we get noobs trying to make money by using such templates…until they run into a problem, which is often.

And yet despite all of this Im not sure if its easy enough for a child to use. OR if it is then blame society for making kids computer suave by the age of 2.

Blender is not easy to use either. But it seems easier now then it was 10 years ago. New programs will always be coming up with new ways to produce effects and edit.

I personally see VR as the future of editing.

[Tim Wilson]

[Richard Garabedain] “its true that there are a lot of premade templates to make the process more streamlined…if you want exactly whats shown. But if you want to edit it or make your own…then what would you do?”

Exactly. Creative COW will always be around to help, but in the end, being someone who knows how to solve problems, and how to make good things even better, will always be in demand.

It’s easy to forget, but templates have been around for a very long time. To use just one example, Digital Juice was founded in 1992 — the year before CoSA released the first version of After Effects! Behance and Envato were founded as (among other things) marketplaces for templates and elements in 2005 and 2006 (respectively). Fifteen years! There are hundreds of companies in the now nearly 30 years of desktop motion graphics (!!!) that have made things easier, verging on instant, and yet here we are, with the demand for motion graphics and visual effects stronger than ever.

The question is, where in the economic and creative chain do you want to park yourself? I think of it as not unlike cooking. Ready cooked meals are made for people who don’t want to cook, or are unable to, or who need something fast now and again. I’m old enough to have been around for the dawn of frozen food as a mass market phenomenon, and remember when it used to take an hour to make a TV dinner. The novelty was just that it was possible at all. They tasted every bit as unhealthy as they were, too. LOL Today, frozen food can be pretty terrific, and maybe almost healthy. Certainly convenient and tasty enough to use regularly.

But the only people making money from pre-cooked meals are people who make pre-cooked meals for a living, and people who sell them. That’s a very narrow slice of the entire universe of food. As difficult as things are for restaurants here in the spring of 2020, though, I think you’ll agree that no amount of really good frozen food has put even a single restaurant out of business. No amount of fast food has displaced any meaningful number of food trucks, and the food truck explosion in recent years hasn’t done anything to diminish the viability of anything from a mom-and-pop diner to a white tablecloth bistro.

In fact, what’s been going on is the diversification of food. Eating (is) (has been) better than ever. More kinds of ethnic food in more places. More kinds of fresh food in more markets. Fresh fruit year round. Good food is driving the demand for more good food, and BETTER food. There are now multiple TV networks ONLY talking about making and eating food, and some of the most popular competition shows around are devoted to food, from the Iron Chef to The Great British Bakeoff.

I really do think that motion graphics is the same. Sure, you could maybe find a way to do something that’s just in the world of templates. And people who don’t WANT to do mograph for a living, who maybe have to do one mograph-related task for one project, as part of a job for which video or graphics is maybe a tiny part, folks like that are going to need all the template options that they can get their hands on.

In the same way that if you want to cook, there are more ways you can do your own thing than ever before, if you want to do motion graphics, there are more places to do it than ever before. Maybe they’re different than they used to be, because they’re not necessarily done in post houses, boutiques, or agencies. A lot of it is being done in-house at companies of every description, government agencies, you name it. A bunch of it is “only” being seen online, which used to be considered a niche, and maybe still is, even if it’s bigger than every mainstream traditional outlet combined.

VFX is really a completely different consideration, but somewhat related, in that almost no visual effects are canned. They’re all custom. That’s not to say that big movies aren’t using After Effects — we all know that they are, as part of a toolkit that tends to contain a bunch of other things (Nuke, 3D software, custom renderers, etc etc). And they’re using plug-ins that you know and also use, from companies like Boris FX and Red Giant. What’s not often talked about is that a lot of those packages are used for fast pre-viz, and final versions are still largely hand-tuned in more complex creative environments, but hey, there are a lot of jobs in pre-viz! (I used to be a product manager at Boris FX, and I worked with a LOT of pre-viz artists!) And those names at the end of the movie don’t even come close to reflecting everyone who works on a project.

Today in the spring of 2020 isn’t necessarily the best time to be looking for a job in the production business, but speaking generally about trends, what the explosion of options tells us is that there’s an explosion in demand. If you find yourself being displaced by templates, you may need to template-proof yourself by adding skills that go beyond the four walls of After Effects — adding things like 3D, music skills (ie, using music in mograph, including driving mograph) — as well as skills related to tasks that don’t suit themselves to out-of-the-box approaches.

One example I’m thinking of here is explainer animations. There are definitely resources for automating these, or at least parts of them, but the more specific the thing you’re helping someone explain, the less amenable it is to prefab approaches. But I’m also thinking of things like expressions, Python scripting, and other toolsets that expand the limits of After Effects beyond the features that are in the box, all the way to the limits of your own imagination. Or that of your clients. ☺

This is starting to get into the weeds of career advice that may or may not apply to you, but the larger point is the same. Rather than viewing templates and other shortcuts as a potential threat, use them as proof that the demand for good mograph is growing. More opportunities doesn’t necessarily mean that you have the specific skills to take advantage of any specific one of them yet, so keep learning. Look at job listings at the kinds of places you’d like to work, and see what kinds of specifics they’re looking for that aren’t part of your skills today, and start building those up too.

I’ll end with an observation that’s worth exactly what you paid for it LOL but I’ve been in one aspect of this business or another since the late 70s, and the one thing I’ve come to feel more strongly about in recent years than ever is that the one group of folks who’s most employable in the widest swath of possible jobs in this industry is After Effects ninjas. And the most employable AE ninjas are the ones who can tie their AE skills into the rest of the production pipeline, either with their own skills, or their understanding of how teams work and what they need from their AE teammates.

[Walter Soyka]

[Ido steven] “But, with time, i found myself systematically running into programs, shortcuts, templates, presets and scripts that make this industry so accessible and simple, making this job so easy, that child will have the ability to do it in no time, thus, make me irrelevant the future .”

Designers are worth more than operators.

Your value comes from being able to solve problems, to communicate with visuals, and to evoke feelings or inspire action in your audience. Your value does not come from knowing which buttons to push.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Ido Steven]

Im saluting you for this detailed and expand answer, i`v learnt a lot from the information you gave, and filled me with hopes and belief of myself,
thanks you very much!