INSIDE The Online ANIMATION GYM
We talk to co-founders Bader Badruddin and Tom Box about how Animdojo is helping budding animators to get industry ready
You have a great showreel on your hands, you’ve graduated from university with a decent grade, and yet you still can’t bag a job in the animation industry. It’s an all-too-common situation that continues to affect budding animators from all over the world, and Blue Zoo cofounder Tom Box and animation director Bader Badruddin decided it was time to do something about it. Thus, Animdojo was born. “The simplest way to explain Animdojo is that it’s an animation gym, there to complement someone’s education,” Box says. “We’re not saying don’t go to university and do Animdojo. We’re saying do that and then you can join our gym.”
Box is a regular industry panellist and says a recurring theme that stretches across almost every discussion is that recruiters often worried about how many applicants they were seeing were actually job ready. “Out of all the applicants who applied for animation positions, less than 10 per cent of them were employable even though they’d just been to university and finished a degree in animation,” he says. “We really thought about what we could do to try and help those people with the knowledge we have and how we approach animation.”
With that, Badruddin held a two-hour masterclass and during that class, most attendees said they felt they had learned more in those two hours than in their entire university course. Box thinks this is down to Badruddin actually animating in real time in front of the students. “Most animators are afraid of animating in front of an audience in case it goes wrong,” Badruddin explains. “For me, that is where I get to show my problem-solving skills and where animators will really learn what it’s like to be animating. It’s not always perfect. They watch me, I make mistakes, things go wrong. It not only shows them the practical way of doing something but that if something doesn’t work, how do I solve it?”
Practice Makes Perfect
After the success of this touring masterclass, Badruddin and Box wanted to come up with a way to open it up to even more people. So instead of holding a thousand more classes, they decided to merge their expertise into their self-described animation gym.
At the start, the pair asked everyone at Blue Zoo what they would do if they could create their own course. A lot of the feedback made its way onto Animdojo, with the main aspect focusing on completing short exercises rather than a six-month vanity project. “If you’re an artist, you don’t get good by painting an oil painting masterpiece on your first day. You get
good with 15-min speed paintings and life drawings, so we tried to run with that ethos,” Box says. “For Animdojo we’re very clear, you’re not going to make some big beautiful animation. You’re going to make lots of short little things that could make a beautiful showreel in itself, but you’re not going to have a big final piece. 90 per cent of the jobs out there are not in feature animation. The majority are in long-form TV series, adverts and online content. That requires a different workflow and mindset because you’re animating five to ten seconds a day rather than having three weeks for one shot. We’ve tried to cater for the real market rather than the idealistic job,”
In order to make Animdojo as successful as possible, Box and Badruddin utilised research in cognitive psychology to design a programme that fits with how the human brain learns. “The basics are if you read something ten times, you’ll remember it for 24 hours but after that it won’t store for long-term memory,” Box says. “The way the brain works is fetching stuff from memory, not restoring from memory. We thought we needed to design this around trying to fetch something.”
Animator’s checklist
After applying these evaluations to the tasks, Badruddin then created the Animdojo animator’s checklist. “All the exercises rely on students having watched videos,” he explains. “The moment they join, there’s this video saying watch this first and then come to this session. You can attend the live sessions but you’ll not get what you’re supposed to be getting out of it if you haven’t done the checklist, because we’ll be using words you won’t have heard of before. We worked really hard developing that so it’s simple to remember, but it’s also required to be a review, asking students “what’s wrong with the post?” and they have to explain why it’s not working. That’s the cognitive side of it.”
Badruddin likens the checklist to a cooking recipe, explaining that if you don’t follow it, you’ll undoubtedly get lost. “I think a lot of places that teach animation treat it so theoretically it’s overwhelming. You must feel the essence of the pasta, you put it in there, you boil it… it’s a similar approach. You follow the six steps one by one, and if you follow them you should end up with animation that is not going to be 100 per cent feature-quality perfect, but is 75 per cent there and that’s when the polish comes in.
“It’s so easy to get lost in the polish when you haven’t even set up the foundations. The six steps are just the foundation and when the students who went through the programme followed the steps and the recommended training, they are the ones who have improved most. To give an example, the very first person who went through the programme, she used to animate about 80 frames in four days, she couldn’t get a job after her internship. I proposed she do a four-week programme and by the end she started to do 290 frames in two days.”
Box and Badruddin also developed Mojo, where the more comments a student posts on others’ work or the more they post their own work, the more Mojo points they get. Then, at the end of each week, the people with the most points bag themselves a free review session with Badruddin. It’s the Animdojo way of motivating and rewarding those who participate in the community. “Critiquing is left out of education,” Box says. “They construct how to make your animation better, not how to make you a
“The majority of The jobs out There are in long-form TV series, adverts and online content. We’ve Tried To cater for The real market rather Than The idealistic job” Tom Box, managing director and co-founder, Blue Zoo
better person at reviewing your animation. We really wanted to get people to critique; if you don’t critique someone else’s work then you don’t develop very quickly. It’s hard to critique your own work because you’re so close to it. If you critique someone else’s work, that gives you very good analytical skills of reviewing something you’re not very close to.”
Getting JOB ready
When hiring new animators, Box says that it’s difficult to know what the animator’s actual skills are just from watching their reel, as it’s tricky to know what they’re like outside of their comfort zone. “It’s very uncomfortable for us when we employ someone without knowing their raw skills because we’ve only seen what their tutored work has been,” he adds. “When we look at starter hire, we’re not in the position to give them three months’ training when they start so they’re up to speed when running. We thought with Animdojo, it’s a way of allowing them to speed up in their own time.” In fact, Box and Badruddin have seen such improvements on Animdojo, Blue Zoo refunds the cost of the course if the student ends up getting hired at their studio. 2018 marked their first Animdojo hire in the form of Chester Sampson.
“Animdojo was very different to my previous academic experience; being given short, focused exercises that can last anything from an hour to a couple days vastly contrasted the weeks and sometimes months given to complete my university assignments,” Sampson explains. “What helped me the most while doing Animdojo was following along with Bader’s animation process through his lessons and livestreams. Being given a real adaptable process for approaching animation improved my confidence considerably and allowed me to realise that animation isn’t as complex as I had always assumed. This translated into massive speed and quality improvements allowing me to feel more comfortable in animating more creative and ambitious work, as well as giving me a basis to critically analyse my own work and make any improvements.”
With their second hire already on the cards, it seems that throwing their students in the deep end has secured phenomenal results for the Blue Zoo studio. “The worse you are, the more we want you to take part in Animdojo,” says Badruddin. “We know our system works and we don’t care about what your animation looks like. We care more that you improve as an animator. We always have to repeat that. We’re trying to make you a better animator, not your animation better.”