Animation and Video Life

One way to give your animated productions the best chance of success is to prescreen them with a test audience before you release them publicly online or send them off to a festival etc. Big, Hollywood studios do this all the time so they can make changes that will hopefully give their movies a better chance for success, so why shouldn't you? While it may not be practical to gather an audience together, and have them sign a bunch of non disclosure agreements, for your 2-3 minute animated production, Screenlight is a free (with paid options for additional features), convenient, online app, that's a great alternative. Screenlight is actually intended to be a group productivity tool for gaining client feedback on every step of a video production but the 'free forever,'  single user, one project,basic account, is an ideal feedback tool for small, independent productions and hobby animators. Simply upload your video(s) (up to 1 Gigabyte) to your Screenlight Project, share t...

From 2012 to 2020 I ran a service called Animation 4 Business that created animated explainer videos for businesses and educational organizations world wide. It started as a group of three freelancers (including myself. obviously), then became just me for a couple of years, and then expanded to me and three other subcontractor animators until 2020. For me it was a very successful side hustle that could have been a full time job if I hadn't subcontracted quite as much of the work out, or charged more per animation. My base fee per two minute animation was just under USD$500.00 using Vyond as my animation studio. I know a considerable number of animators that say Vyond isn't real animation in the sense that you, personally, don't animate everything from scratch. However, it's not all modifying templates with your own information either.  Vyond's content library is quite vast at this point. A good Vyond animator, who is very familiar with the library, can run circles...