How to make money from animating?

It is certainly possible to make money from animating. There is always a contest going on that you can enter your animations into, and many are giving away money and lego (brickfilming) as prizes for the winners. An example of a really good contest, is the Marillion Whatever is wrong with you? contest, which is a music video contest in which people have to make any video for their track, and post it on youtube. Whichever video gets the most youtube views wins. The video doesn't have to be an animation, which is why animators have an advantage here, because not many people have seen animations before, so they find it more interesting and unique, and your video would stand out from the rest of the entries, considering most other entries are just attempts to rack up the views with pictures of half naked hot women in the middle of their video. The marillion contest can be found at http://whateveriswrongwithyou.com , the prize money for the winner is £5000, and there is also a prize for the entry that they think is the best one, that way it isnt entirely based on who has the most views, but you don't know what this prize is, its likely to be a CD or something, which is mediocre compared to £5000.

There is always a contest going on that you can enter your film into, not all give alot of money, but if it is a contest based on your type of animation (eg brickfilming) they often give prizes that help you with future animations or something you can use in animations, brickfilming is the animation of lego, and most brickfilming contests give lego as prizes, such as sets like cafe corner etc which is a really good prize for a contest like this, as many are funded by one person, the user. http://www.bricksinmotion.com is a brickfilming site, and there was recently a TEC (Technical Excellence Competition) in which brickfilmers had to make an animation in one shot, to show excellence in animation. This contest has not yet been judged, but as an example here is the 1st and 2nd prize pictures so you can see what sort of stuff you win.



As you can see, rather nice sets that would be very useful to a brickfilmer in future films to help develop sets and improve.

All you need to do is find a contest yourself is research, use Google and look for contests that you desire, or join a community relating to animation as these often host contests that you can enter.

Another new way to earn from your animations is advertisements, Google adsense is a good one as you can now put adverts on your youtube videos, and if people click the ads, you get money from them so if you have a really popular animation, it is wise to put ads on it as you will definitely receive clicks, and if you have a website, put your films on there then put some adverts around so that they may be clicked.

I was wondering what you thought about this, how do you make money from animating? Any ideas on how you could possibly make money from animating?

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Thanks

Richard

http://www.rsteenoven.co.uk