Business and Funding

It is a fatal flaw of many technical persons within the animation and game industries to focus solely on their craft instead of nurturing the business aspects of the company. This is the advantage of working for a larger company where there is dedicated staff to handle sales and marketing.

The benefits of a smaller team, be in the production of an indie game or an animation passion will always be high velocity. Information exchange and decision-making are often slow in larger organizations so a small team can avoid the “middle men” and make the important decisions quickly.

Less persons in the team means that someone will have to manage the business aspect of the project, a necessary evil, to sustain the work. This lesson presents the soft skills for employment and entrepreneurship in animation and gaming and potential sources of funding to be acquired through such skills.

Soft skills and team collaboration

Critical thinking:

Creativity:

Innovation:

Communication:

Agility: This is the ability to pivot the direction of a project when presented with new information. Agility is the tendency to embrace change rather than resist it. A team must be ready to pivot. It is not a matter of if but when.

Venture capitalism

This is where a company with excess resources loans money to support a project/company with the goal of making a profit from the money earned by the project/company.

Angel investors

This is where a company invests in a smaller company with the promise of being able to place their own employees as board members in the smaller company, to influence that company’s decision-making.

Sometimes this can be done to prevent smaller companies from taking away customers from the larger company.