As most people know, producing an animated cartoon—whether movie, TV series or video game—involves an assembly line process with lots of different personnel. One of the most important positions in this process is the layout and background artists and their Online Basic Computing Degrees.
By definition, layout artists plan the action of scenes under the supervision of the supervising or episode director. They draw both the background and how the character elements fit within a shot. To do this, they take information from the storyboard and translate it into a format and size that can be utilized by the animation and camera departments. Experienced layout artists will even plot camera moves.
At its core, a good way to look at this is if you have an animation sequence of a fight. In the foreground would be the principle fighters and their props. In the middle would be all the other characters rooting for one fighter or another, trying to get out of there or even fighting amongst themselves. The background is the environment is taking place in. The layout artist defines each layer. Putting a background of a room in a house is very different from a bar, street corner or a sport arena. Whichever one used sets up the entire context of the sequence.
In many ways, the layout design dictates what action takes place. Going back to that fight, you want a character in the foreground to either jump over, slide under, run around or even pick up a table in front of it, not run through it (unless it happens to be a ghost). Because of things like this, the layout artist usually reports directly to the episode director.
Those interested in this specialty should not only love to draw, but also show a special proclivity for drawing landscapes and interior settings. They should also be exceedingly comfortable in working in a number of mediums; from pen, ink and paint to computer-generated imagery. On top of this, they must be familiar with all the other roles in the animation world.
As for the right Online Video Game Design Degrees education, any good online or one campus art school will give a layout artist all the basics of the profession he or she will need. What is suggested though is to find one that also offers animation courses, if only to learn how to better blend one’s work with the others you’ll end up working with. From there, the goal is to build a good portfolio and see if one can get an assistant’s job at a studio with an experienced layout artist.
Like everything else in the animation field, salary and employment in general is on a for-hire basis. A layout assistant usually earns about $25,000 a year. The average salary is double, at $50,000, for experienced artists. If you make it to the top studios, such as Dreamworks, one can easily earn over $100,000 a year.
It’s not impossible for a layout artist to eventually end up a director, too with the proper online degree. One of the greatest of all times was Maurice Noble, who did the backgrounds and layouts of the Roadrunner cartoons for Chuck Jones. He became an award-winning director himself. Also, layout artists can move on to painting and other forms of art, even getting gallery exhibitions on their own.
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