A Guide to Taxes for Freelance Animators

This short video offers a short introductory guide to taxes for freelance animators.  At BNU we can't offer our students formal legal or tax advice, but we can explain the basic rules of freelancing.  Freelancing need not be complicated. You don't need a license to offer your services to clients and, as long as you pay your taxes to HMRC at the end of the tax year, doing small freelance animation jobs can be a great way to get started in the animation industry. 

Eight Rules for Success with a New Client

Above is a short video setting out what we believe to be the eight rules for success when dealing with your first client.  For our students at BNU studying on the MA in 3D Animation for Professionals, dealing with their first client is part of our academic program.  During Module COM7028 "Client Brief" our students seek out a client (this could be a friend, a company, a charity, or a small business) that needs a short piece of animation.  The video above explains how to make the experience of working with a new client as smooth as possible. You can also find out more by reading this blog post.

Reminder - Producing Animation Workshop with Steve Burch on Tuesday 26 May!

Steve Burch

Don't forget! On Tuesday 26 May we welcome Steve Burch visit Bucks for a lecture and workshop on Producing Animation.  Steve has 26 years experience in the animation industry, having worked on around dozen animated features including Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant.  His roles have included Special Effects Supervisor for Dreamworks and Warner Bros Feature Animation. Steve has worked with three Oscar winning directors and has produced and directed many commercials and animated shorts. So, what can our students expect on Tuesday?

Five Rules for Handling Tricky Clients

How do you deal with a tricky client?  Difficult clients are so common that there are websites such as are clientsfromhell.net, dedicated entirely to horror stories written by freelancers about having to deal with hard-to-please clients. So, if you are starting off on your career, how do you handle a difficult client? Below are our five rules for success

Miles Skarin Self-Starts His Freelance Career

Animation image by Miles Skarin

Miles Skarin is a first year animation and VFX student at Bucks, but he is already tackling professional freelance work, creating websites and animation for musicians, bands, and record labels. 

Miles already has an impressive client list - including major artists such as Jethro Tull. We asked him to talk about how he broke into the industry, founded a successful freelance career - while still in his first year at university.

Should Freelance Animators Set Up a Limited Company?

A freelancer at work

Part of our job at Bucks is to teach our students to be working professionals, which includes not only the ability to do excellent work at a high level of professional skill,  but also the ability to run a small business and tackle freelance work. Almost all digital artists take on freelance work of one kind or another, and we help our students out by bringing in small commercial projects at our virtual online studio at nano-films.com, giving our students paid experience on live briefs. Being a freelancer involves learning a lot of new business skills, and one of the most common questions asked by students is: "Do I Need to Set Up a Company before I become a freelancer?" The short answer is "no", but it's not quite as simple as that - it all depends on your personal circumstances.

What questions should you ask a client when you start work on your first freelance job?

What questions should you ask a client when you start work on your first freelance job - or indeed any freelance job? It's your job as a professional to keep everything on track and deliver what you promised. All projects start off full of optimism and excitement, but the scope for misunderstanding is great, and the risk of things going wrong is considerable. So it's worth asking the right questions up front, to ensure that the job goes well and your happy client comes back for more. Below is a list of useful questions to get you started.

Should Artists Ever Work For Free?

Scofield Entertainment

Should artists work for free? This is a knotty problem and a subject on which people tend to have strong feelings. Students and graduates do of course often work for free, taking work experience, unpaid jobs or internships which do not pay actual money, but which offer training in the industry and real-world experience of what the world of work is like.

The trouble is, there are many people out there looking for a free lunch. The trick with working for free is to ask yourself what the benefit will be to you, and whether or not it's likely to be worth it in the end. In this very funny 2009 video by Scofield Entertainment, some film-makers have cooked up a very entertaining satire on on the "Work For Free" culture of much digital media today.

How Do You Handle a Difficult Client?

Every freelancer occasionally has to be deal with a difficult client. In fact, in happens all the time. Talk to any freelancer, especially after a few drinks, and they will gladly tell you stories to make your hair stand on end. Clients, even the good ones, drive everyone crazy. Tricky clients are so common that there are websites such as are clientsfromhell.net, dedicated entirely to horror stories written by freelancers about having to deal with hard-to-please clients. So, if you are starting off on your career, how do you handle a difficult client?

What is www.peopleperhour.com?

www.peopleperhour.com is a website that every freelancer should know about. Why? Because it's a way of finding and hiring skilled freelancers, people you may never have heard and have never worked with before. If you're doing a job for a client that involves stuff you can't deliver yourself - no problem. Find someone online who can do the work, and you still deliver the whole, completed job to the client. Equally, you can post your own skills online, bid on jobs, and start to build a successful portfolio career as a freelance digital artist by doing work for other people. What peopleperhour.com does it put freelancers and jobs together. So, if you're serious about building a career as a freelancer - it's a great place to start.

Freelancing Workshop on Monday with Lydiah Igweh from Enterprise at Bucks

On Monday May 12th we welcome Lydiah Igweh, who runs the Enterprise at Bucks program, to introduce a freelancer's workshop for our Animation and Visual Effects Artists. As the long summer vacation approaches, we strongly encourage our students to take on small freelance jobs, do internships and work placements, and in general take advantage of the many opportunities to develop real-life work skills. Lydiah's workshop has been custom-designed for our digital artists, so this is a great opportunity to start thinking about how you might develop a freelance career.

Student Showcase - David Wheeler takes on Premier nappies

David Wheeler is one of our talented third year students at Bucks, building a portfolio of work to start looking for freelance work and employment in the digital arts. He has developed some excellent skills in digital design and illustration, doing a good deal of design work on group film projects. He is especially proficient with Adobe Illustrator, which led to a recent freelance job for a manufacturer of baby-related products - Premier nappies. We asked him how the job went, and what he had to do to complete it.

Steve Burch Reveals the Mysteries of Producing Animation

Animation Producer Steve Burch

Animation Producer Steve Burch visited Bucks recently to talk to our students about the business of producing animation. It was an excellent talk, well structured and clear, and offered an insight into the challenges of successfully bidding on, winning - and delivering - freelance animation jobs.

Many universities talk about employability; here at Bucks we are trying to deliver on that promise by preparing our students not just to be employees but also entrepreneurs, working from home and in small groups on their own projects, and perhaps - who knows - even building the next big animation studio in the UK.

After all, Blue Zoo was founded by a group of animation graduates fresh from university - why shouldn't our students do the same?

How do you start a small animation business?

Our new animation collaboration at Bucks

One of the most common questions asked by prospective students at our university open days is "how many of your graduates find work in the industry?". After all, it's all very well to train animators and digital artists to do excellent work, it's quite another to turn that knowledge into a successful career.

In media production of any kind, jobs for life are nowadays almost non-existent. Even highly successful artists tend to be freelancers of one kind or another. But there is another way of dealing with the perpetual uncertainty of finding paid work in the arts - and that is to start your own business. So how, exactly, might you go about doing that?

The Freelancers' Survival Guide

If you work in the animation industry, the chances are that at some point you will be self-employed, either running your own small business or working as a freelancer. Even if you do land a good job as an employee of a company, most likely it will last at most a year or two, since jobs in our industry tend to be project-driven. Even well-established companies tend to expand and contract according to the size of their order book. So what’s an animator to do to stay afloat and pay the rent, let alone finance a mortgage and a family? The answer is, you have to be smart, and you must understand the rules of freelancing.

Introducing Nano Films

Everyone needs an animated film, even if they don't know it yet. Ten years ago, no-one could have imagined that every plumber would need a website. I predict that, in ten years time, every business will want a short animated film that tells the story of what they do.

Maybe it will be an animated logo, a mini infomercial, something to play on a smart phone, or a short film on their website, something that makes their business unique and different, something that reaches audiences (especially younger ones) who don't want to read pages of dull text on a static site.

The only trouble is - the cost. Animation is time-consuming and expensive. But what if we could make animated films really cheaply, for a tiny budget? Then, surely, everyone could afford one, and businesses all over the world would queue up to commission small films.

We're famous! Bucks animation course is featured in Skwigly!

We're famous again! Well, sort of. Skwigly, the Online Animation Magazine, have run a piece by me about how to survive and thrive as a freelance animator.  A career in animation is seldom a straight line - almost all of us who work in the animation industry will have to carve out our own path, and for most of us that means embracing the world of freelance work. Even highly successful digital artists who are employees of big companies are generally doing some kind of freelance work on their own time.

Student Showcase - the art of Sabah Masood

Sabah Masood is one of our many talented students here at Bucks, specialising in 3D modeling - with a focus on design and architectural visualisation. She is in her final graduation year, but she has already established a successful freelance career doing digital 3D modeling for clients such as Pinewood Studios and many others. We asked her about her work, and about how she managed to launch a freelance career at such an early stage.

Freelance artists and taxes - what you really need to know

Render unto Caesar what is due to Caesar

The tax code in the UK runs to 10,000 pages, and there is no human being who knows the whole code. But, every freelance artist needs to know at least the basics. Below is a short introduction to how the system works, from a self-employed artist's perspective. It is by no means complete, and it is no substitute for paying a qualified accountant to give you proper advice (which is highly recommended), but it should explain some of the basic rules of tax survival for freelancers, and get you pointed in the right direction.

Your First Client Project - 8 Rules to Ensure Success

OK, so you have got your first freelance job. You've pitched the idea, you've agreed a price for the job, the client is shiny-eyed with excitement about the amazing work you're going to do for them. Now all you have to do is deliver what you promised. What can possibly go wrong?  Plenty!

Below is our simple guide to getting it right and making sure that your first client is not only so happy that he or she comes back for more, but also tells everyone they know what a great job you did. Over the course of your media career, almost every job you get will come to you on the strength of a recommendation - it's how the business works.