Excellent.
I am glad you are enjoying the tech and the programmes.
Yes, Walt Disney produced his early stuff on his own, but he must have practised and practised over and over again. He would have also learnt his craft by studying techniques.
Walt Disney actually used a technique called Rotoscoping a lot. This is a really cool technique, it’s abit like what we do for motion capture now. So imagine a rabbit was dancing, they would actually film a man dancing the sequence, and they would take each frame as in the traditional film reel and draw over it in the bunny character to make it look like the bunny is dancing. It’s how they worked out how to do complicated movements.
Also if you think of it every great animation/company has a very particular art direction. If you enjoy watching cartoons like I do, look how different places do the same thing even though they are all different.
Think of stuff like early Disney.
Then you have Warner bros with stuff like Looney Tunes. (I love looney tunes).
Then you have Hanna Barbera with stuff like Scooby Doo and Tom and Jerry.
Then you have more modern stuff like Matt Greoning with the Simpsons and futurama. Disney Pixar, and Aardmann studios.
Then look at Cartoon Network stuff and the work of Butch Hartman. You also have Studio Ghibli. Every single one of these places started out with one or two people who had an idea and they learnt their craft in order to get a bigger team. All of them had a vision. I bet all of them never realised how big they would get.
Also some animators don’t have to be that great to be famous. in the case of Rik and Morty look how the early stuff corresponds to what it is now.
You can’t expect people to follow your direction, if you don’t know it yet. Just learn and have fun, find your own direction. No one ever got famous by copying anyone else.
You also have to think about what these peoples skills are. I don’t know how much the typical animator earns in a year. However, I would hope that anyone who is good is on a fair bit of money based on their skills.
Animation takes a very long time, even one second of a sequence can take days depending on its intricacies and type of technique used.
Minimum wage in the U.K. is now 11.44, with £1500 that will allow someone to work 131 hours before they are paid under minimum wage. In the animation world that’s not a lot of time considering one second could take 20 hours.
Also you have to factor in tax, NI and god knows what the government will tax us on next. and that animator would then only earn around 1200 if that. £1200 a month in this economy is not plausible. I earn £1500 a month after tax, I live in a shared house and struggle month by month. No decent animator would work for that amount because they wouldn’t be able to live. An 18 year old student in their dorm would probably accept anything they could get, but an experienced animator would not.
There is also a saying amongst creatives, never do anything for free or heavily reduced Yes do a couple of high discounts to those closest to you, however never do mates rates or anything like that. It cheapens the work these people do, and it creates the assumption that anyone who works in that industry can do it for cheaper. and it puts emphasis on the fact that you don’t care about how they survive.
Voluntary or charity/non-profits bases are somewhat different depending if it’s a small charity, even then bigger charities can afford it too.