Ana Aranda – Freelance Animation in Spain

Jan 11th, 2016Features

My name is Ana Aranda, a Freelance Animator working in Spain, which is the topic of this article where I aim to give you an insight into working here as a freelancer.

First I am going to introduce you to how I ended up working in animation. I started out studying advertisement, because I liked creativity and design, and later, Audiovisual Communication, because I was attracted to the idea of being able to narrate with images in movement. I guess that animation is the perfect combination of the two branches.

When I finished Audiovisual Communication, I did an internship in a well-known film producer company in Seville.I was very excited because I had seen many animation works in their Reel. But really, they do not work on animation as much as I thought. In general, companies in Spain usually subcontract the animation work that they are requested.

Nocurama

For film producer companies and advertising agencies, it seems to be not worth employing an animator as part of the staff, since they never know when they will be asked about this type of job. They are usually one-time works or specific ones. When I finished my six months in the company, I decided to try to become that person the companies look for when outsourcing.

I focused my training on the subject of 2D animation & motion graphics, taking it very seriously, and on my own. During the years of my degrees I had settled the basics, but I set myself a 7 hours schedule and I practiced animation daily and I helped myself with the resources that Internet offers. There was more animation information available that I could ever imagine.

I began to design a website, to be able to show all the work I was doing: www.anaarandarico.com. I was lucky to have a friend who worked as an illustrator in a big agency in Seville. They trusted me to animate an ad for a food company and later a video for our government.

Nowadays, I work as a freelancer, animating explanatory videos and promotional pieces for various agencies, and doing the script and the creative idea if necessary.

Digger App

The spanish motion graphics industry is very complicated right now and it is very difficult to get orders. I think there are two main reasons. The first one is the deep economic crisis we are living through, which has meant that companies don´t want to spend money in advertising and are not looking after their brand image as much as they used to.

The second problem, in my opinion, is that particularly in Spain, and more in Andalusia, clients ignore how the animation world works. They are not conscious of the hidden details: how much time and effort it is needed, so they are surprised of the prices and about how the work can´t be done as fast as they would like.


Hopefully, little by little, animation in Spain will begin to be more known and valued among entrepreneurs and ordinary people. We need more initiatives and festivals to bring the fascinating world of animation to people.

The other major obstacle that I would highlight is the issue of legality. Spain has one of the highest fees in Europe. In my opinion, the logical thing to do for freelancers would be to make them pay a proportional quantity of to the money they earn. The current system doesn´t work. Every self-employed people have to pay 300€ per month, even if they have earned no money that month. The result is that some months, you end up working, only for paying fees.

There is a kind of loophole I usually use. If you earn less than the minimum wage (650€), you can generate bills legally without having to pay the social security fees. The downside is that you are not contributing.

And this is not all. Almost every company in Spain tend to pay late, or very late. I have seen myself in more than one occasion, having to pay the VAT from a bill that I haven´t collected yet. This is so common that, when a company pays me just after I hand over the work, I call my friends for beers to celebrate! haha.

At this moment, I´m working on a video for the government of our region. It has been ordered by an advertising agency from my city, Sevilla. They are in charge of the script, in which they are trying to summarize how they have spent the budgets they had in 2015. They have explained everything they need to show and I am now working on the storyboard. Once they approve it all, I will begin animating everything!


Ana Aranda Gym 1

As well as this client work, as a personal project I am also working in a serie of GIFS, in order to practice different movements, which I will be sharing every Monday on Twitter, in order to motivate people to begin the week with energy, because all of them will show the same character, doing different exercises in a gym! 
As a long-term project, I want to create an avatar of myself and illustrate and animate short funny stories from my day to day, so stay tuned!

Ana Aranda – http://www.anaarandarico.com

Ana Aranda Gym

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