Animating for children is enjoyable, and you can have a great time doing it if you love to animate. Even if you have zero experience, you can still be a good animator for children’s programs if you keep a few things in mind.
This guide will discuss some of the best practices you can use while animating for children. With these practices, you can engage the young ones and educate them through your content and grow as a cartoon animation services provider.
Widen Your Imagination
Children have a very imaginative imagination, and everything seems possible to them. As they grow up, they start to find things limited and impossible. But at a young age, their imagination is powerful.
This is the reason why children don’t like news or dramas. So, to be a great animator for children, you have to widen your imagination. Please don’t limit yourself to the possibilities of this world; create something out of your vision but in a way that provides an excellent message to the kids.
Humor
Make sure that you have humor in your content. It could be in the form of jokes, or when doing your 3D character animation, you can design it in a funny or amusing way. One thing to take care of is that you should stay within the line.
Your jokes and animations should be respectful and amusing – not insulting or offensive. It’s okay, even if your jokes are silly. Your target audience is kids of young children who are easily amused by silly things.
Sound Effects
Sound should also be your focus as an animator when you’re animating for kids. Make sure that your character is animated in a way that when it speaks or makes sound, the animation also supports that sound.
If you’re doing a solo project, then you must know what the script is and how you’re going to sound, but if you’re only the animator, then work in accordance with the writer and voice artist of your project.
Use Scripts or Storyboards
You can create storyboards or write scripts for what you want in your story, and should have a definite idea about where you will start and where you will end. Each scene should have a different storyboard.
This is a common approach used by professionals. If you don’t follow this, when you start to animate, you’ll stop after a few frames and begin to think, then continue, and then stop again to think. This will make the process longer, and you will miss out on several small details.
Keep It Short
Make things short and simple. If you have very long episodes then there is a high chance that the kids might forget how the episode started. This is because their attention span is short, and they only focus on things for a short time.
This is why most TV animation projects for kids are under 10 minutes. You should care about the story less and try to be more amusing. You can give small messages in short animations to educate them about different things.
Be Simple
Keep the language, concepts, or objects as simple as possible. Children tend to lose interest in things that they don’t understand. You should use and explore objects that they see in their daily lives.
You can educate them about other things as well, but make sure you do it with proper introductions so they can catch up with it. Also, select a primary focus that you are creating educational or entertaining content.
Select An Age Group
Start your work with keeping a certain age group in mind. Study their current trends, what is the suitable content for that age group and then create content for them. This will help you in getting better viewership.
For example, if you want to create content for school-going kids, you can show classrooms, school buses, and picnics. You can also add your target age group in the description of your projects so that the parents can choose the best content for their kids.
Watch And Learn
It is helpful to watch famous cartoons and animations that are popular with kids to become a good animator. You can get an idea about what kids like these days and what are the mistakes or missed things in their content so you can avoid them.
Be Patient
A key thing that you should keep in mind when you enter this industry is that you will not get your desired viewership, and results or achieve your revenue goals immediately.
After your project has gone on-air or released on a specific platform, it would still take a lot of time to get famous or generate revenue. Also, if you have followed all of the above guidelines, there is no guarantee that it would be a super-hit. People who follow similar patterns are more likely to succeed.
Conclusion
Here are some tips for becoming a good animator who creates content for children.These tips are used by many of the top animators and 3D animation production houses in the industry. If you are looking for the best 3D character animation or cartoon animation services, I recommend contacting Prolific Studios.
