Top Animation Projects to Sharpen Your Skills and Build Your Animation Portfolio

Although it was once a mainstay for kid’s cartoons, animation is now a multi-billion dollar industry with several sub-genres that have spurred the need for talented animators to meet the growing demand. If you are a film or game enthusiast with a knack for visual creativity and digital media, this is a good career choice.

In this article, you’ll find animation projects for beginning, intermediate, and advanced animators that will help you develop or advance essential animation skills. It also includes five key skills that animation projects can help you practice, as well as a few tips for compiling your professional portfolio.

5 Skills That Animation Projects Can Help You Practice

Embarking on an animation career path requires a lot of practice and learning. Earning a degree in animation or graphic design is a great way to learn these skills. Animation projects can also help you practice some of the skills you learn in degree programs and other skills you may not have covered. The skills listed below will help you build a career in animation.

• 3D Animation. 3D animation is used by Disney Animation Studio productions like The Avengers, Frozen, and other movies in this style. The idea of 3D animation is to bring digital characters and locations alive in a life-like manner. 3D animation is also used in gaming.
• Traditional Animation. Before computer-generated imagery, traditional or hand-drawn animation was used. Traditional animation was used for films like The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and Bambi. It’s a frame-by-frame process of making characters look as real as possible without computer-generated images.
• 2D Vector-Based Animation. As the name suggests, 2D animation is drawing characters in a two-dimensional format and then adding movement. With this type of animation, you have to draw the characters by hand, add some color, and then capture them digitally for each scene. 
• Stop Motion Animation. Stop motion refers to a technique where you repeatedly take pictures of inanimate objects, making subtle adjustments to give the impression of movement. It is basically photography that becomes 3D animation. 
• Motion Graphics. Motion graphics is animation with text as a major component instead of characters. An example of motion graphics is movie credits. It’s a way to communicate with the viewer using words and adding depth to the story. This form of animation is also used in ads, explainer videos, and sporting events.

Best Animation Project Ideas for Beginners

As a beginner in the animation field, you can complete beginner animation projects to help you learn skills in animation. The five projects listed below cover a variety of skills and develop your knowledge of different design software. 

Make a Physical Drawing Come to Life

• Animation Skills Practiced: Traditional Animation, Stop Motion Animation

Through this project, a simple drawing can tell a story. For example, you can draw a lion chasing a zebra, followed by a drawing where the lion is getting closer, and another where the lion has captured the zebra. After that is done, simply scan the drawings, arrange them in the right sequence, and add movement and sound in the background.

Show the Lifecycle of a Butterfly

• Animation Skills Practiced: 2D Vector-Based Animation, Photography

The lifecycle of a butterfly goes from egg to larva, to pupae, and then a butterfly. Animating each process can be quite interesting, especially if you do it with pencil and paper. Once you have the pictures ready, scan them, add some background color using Harmony and add sound and movement. You can also use motion graphics to add an explanation of each process.

Make Animation for a Song

• Animation Skills Practiced: 2D Vector-Based Animation, Motion Graphics

Some music videos include unique animations. For this project, you will pick a song that you like and make up an animation video to go with it. It is best to use traditional or 2D animation because it’s more captivating to watch as it unfolds than 3D animation.

Doodle a Tutorial or a Story

• Animation Skills Practiced: Motion Graphics, Traditional animation

Doodling videos, also referred to as whiteboard animation videos, are a type of animated video often used in marketing and tutorials. In this type of animation, you show handwriting or a drawing as the narrator speaks in the background. You can draw pictures to convey the message you want or simply write the words. 

Tell a Story about Your Life

• Animation Skills Practiced: Stop Motion Animation, 3-D Animation

Think about a short story you want to tell about yourself. You can take pictures or short videos explaining the story. You may have to start and stop the video or shoot many times to change the facial expression and add a few elements. You will then compile the pictures together and add movement.

Best Intermediate Animation Project Ideas

Once you are familiar with the basic skills and knowledge involved in animation, you can complete more difficult projects. These projects will allow you to demonstrate the skills you’ve learned and help you build on them.

Animate a Natural Event

• Animation Skills Practiced: 3D Animation, Motion Graphics

The best natural events to animate are live volcanoes and avalanches. With this project, you will use a 3D animation program to design the model of the volcano, clouds, and smoke. Then you will animate it so that each aspect is moving in real-time. You can use 3D software like Maya and Blender to animate any natural event.

Create a Book Trailer

• Animation Skills Practiced: Motion Graphics, Stop Motion Animation

You can use animation to create a trailer for a book. All you have to do is capture static scenes portraying each message and then add motion graphics to explain the narrative. You can get the pictures online from royalty-free image sites and put them together to make a video.

Make a Christmas Video

• Animation Skills Practiced: 3D Animation, Motion Graphics

Instead of a simple Christmas card, you can make an animated Christmas video this year. This project can use all aspects of animation, including drawing 2D characters, writing words, and creating motion graphics and 3D pictures. 

Make an Educational Video

• Animation Skills Practiced: Motion Graphics, 2D Animation

Animated educational videos help people visualize and remember important lessons. The goal of this project is to illustrate what you are teaching with animated pictures and words. A combination of 2D animation and motion graphics works better than 3D images for this project.

Capture a Historical Moment

• Animation Skills Practiced: 3D Animation, Photography

For this project, you can animate any historical moment. For example, you can use 3D animation tools to create dinosaurs and animate them. Add movements, sounds, and other effects to make it look more realistic. You can also add a background to bring everything together.

Advanced Animation Project Ideas

Advanced animation projects are meant for animators who have work experience in animation or have mastered the intermediate projects. You will learn high-level skills that can be applied to real projects. Here are five advanced projects for skilled animators.

Create a Film

• Animation Skills Practiced: Stop Motion Animation, 3-D Animation

This is a larger project. This project teaches you to create a full-fledged animated film, particularly in 2D or 3D. Come up with a script, identify the characters, and follow the animation process to make a fully animated film.

Make an Animated Ad

• Animation Skills Practiced: 3D Animation, Motion Graphics

This project is not as intensive as creating a movie, but it involves the same skills. An animated advertisement is one way to introduce yourself to a big company and show how you can contribute to their marketing team.

Create an Animated Monologue

• Animation Skills Practiced: Motion Graphics, Traditional Animation

When making an animated monologue, you can choose to have the animated character moving and talking, or you could have the voice in the background and hand-drawn illustrations on the screen. 

Make a Cartoon

• Animation Skills Practiced: 3D Animation

For this project, you have to create characters, write a script for them, animate their movements, and add voices. A lot of detail and animation knowledge is involved in making a cartoon like this. This project can be completed with 2D or 3D animations.

Create Visual Stimuli

• Animation Skills Practiced: 3D Animation, Traditional Animation

Creating a visual stimulus like a moving logo is another advanced animation project. These stimuli should help viewers to associate the company, service, or product with them. You can create the animated segment for your website or a business and incorporate the brand colors and slogan.

Animation Starter Project Templates

Templates are an excellent resource for developing animation skills. Templates are provided by other designers who have already done most of the hard work, making it easy for you to insert your creations. Some of the best templates to help you learn animation are listed below. 

• Milanote Brief Template. A detailed brief is the best way to plan, create, and structure your next project. This Milanote brief template contains an overview of every project. You can drag and drop components you want to add to it.
• Stomp Opener. Stomp Opener is an after-effects template that gives a strong introduction to your project. With this template, you will have a perfect start without much effort.
• Smooth Logos Pack. One of the most common and yet extremely challenging tasks is to animate a logo. Instead of learning all the keyframes, this template allows you to replace the placeholder logo with your own.
• YouTube Promo 2. Most YouTubers don’t have a lot of time to learn something as complicated as Adobe After Effects, and they don’t have to. With this template, they can update their YouTube channels with branded assets to make it stand out.
• Motion Graphics Project Template. This template from Wrike helps you start your project with a brief description and enables you to store and share the file version with other team members.

Next Steps: Start Organizing Your Animation Portfolio

When pursuing a paid animator position, your professional portfolio can help you get the job. You should organize your portfolio to be easy to navigate, interesting, and relevant to the prospective employer.

Show Relevant Work

You should assemble your portfolio with your target audience or employer in mind. Before sending a portfolio to any employer, review their website and see what kind of work they need. You can use the information to organize your portfolio, starting with the most relevant projects that demonstrate your ability to meet their needs.

Show Your Personality

Your reels, characters, and everything else you create should represent your personality, as the maker. People want to see your style of storytelling, feel your emotion, and be entertained. That is what sets you apart from other candidates.

Engage Your Viewer

You can engage your viewer by showcasing your best, most impressive work first. As you grow in the business and complete better projects, keep updating your portfolio to show your best and most recent work first. Organizing your portfolio to be clean and concise will make it easy for the viewer to focus on one project, instead of getting distracted by everything else.

Animation Projects FAQ