Your first job proper job is always going to be intimidating. As someone who had never worked with animators outside of my university friends, and who had only made hand-drawn animations so far, I was a little terrified to start at Silver Lining.
This sense of fear didn’t last long, though. I was warmly welcomed by Ben and Ryan and got eased into my first project with rigged animation through some motion graphics tutorials. After, we moved on to actually animating characters. The process was different, but I quickly started to have fun with it. After Effects was unknown to me, but not too hard to figure out once you had a rough idea of how to work it. The same thing went for Photoshop (as I’d been almost exclusively using Procreate on my iPad before).
An unexpected hiccup ended up arising not from any lack of knowledge or skill, but simply from my location. I studied animation in the UK, but after graduation moved back to my home country of Germany. Because it was also the language my laptop was set to, all my programs were downloaded in German as well. The problems with this started with the fact that I simply didn’t know a lot of specific German animation or even art terms (I once got stuck trying to find the German term for “drop shadow” in the effects panel) and reached its peak when one rig completely broke when I opened it. Apparently, this happened because the code was referencing a slider – which my After Effects had translated into a “Schieberegler” on the UI, but not the code itself.
Aside from animation, I was also helping out with things like asset creation and backgrounds. In fact, one of the first proper tasks was to create a set for a scene. Like many other artists, I tend to not do backgrounds if I don’t absolutely have to, so I was a little apprehensive at first, but quickly found a way to go about it that worked and was fun for me. With a lot of it, I’ve had to remind myself that maybe it doesn’t look bad, maybe it’s just half-finished and I need to actually continue for it to look like something. Or maybe I’d just been staring at it for hours at a time and stopped seeing it as the full picture, but instead just as the elements that gave me trouble. Both happened frequently. With a lot of art, it’s about rhythm. You can’t question yourself too much and if it really starts to bother you, it’s often best to ask for feedback from others.
One of the advantages of starting out in a smaller studio is that you will get to do a bit of everything. I was treated as a proper part of the team, rather than just an intern. I felt like my contributions and my opinions were valued and listened to, to an extent that I didn’t expect when I first started looking for internships. Either Ben or Ryan was always available when I needed help with something, which I frequently made use of to get a second pair of eyes on what I’d been creating to make sure I was headed in the right direction.
I ended up having a lot of fun during my time at Silver Lining. Sometimes you need to just trust the process, even if the very idea seems terrifying at first. This way, I created a lot of things here that I am quite proud of. Animations and designs and yes, even that background that had intimidated me.
