Animation is everywhere these days — and so are the opportunities for animators.

While many students may be drawn to the field by the glamour and creativity of big-budget Hollywood feature films, animators and their skills are needed in industries as diverse as defense, law and biotechnology.

Legal Advantage is a support service that assists attorneys or law firms in everything from writing and reviewing contracts and documents to patent illustration, and now animation. Hal Pieroway, the company’s design director, says Legal Advantage’s animation services were established in response to requests from clients to animate the patent illustrations the company was already creating for them. “Normally, it’s new products that we will animate,” Pieroway says. “We’re showing them being used, showing them in various iterations, various embodiments. And this can be used for marketing purposes; it can be used to show consumers how to use the product. It can be used for anything, really.”

Pieroway says the company has about five employees with animation skills, and they will divide up the work on a new project according to each person’s strengths when it comes in from the client. Most of the animations are short — between 30 seconds and three minutes — and cover topics as diverse as accident recreations to explaining biotech chemistry. Samples can be seen on the company’s site, www.legaladvantage.net.

The company’s animators mostly are recruited in-house from the company’s patent illustration department. Pieroway says illustrators interested in 3D animation have been motivated enough to learn software and new skills using company resources rather than any outside education. “People who do 3D animation, we find it’s a passion for them,” he says. “So if you give them the tools and give them the work, you don’t have to worry, they just take it from there because they have that passion — they’re asking for the work, they want to do it.”

Accuracy and legal liability are key issues in everything Legal Advantage creates. Pieroway says that most of its animators do have some kind of science or engineering background and they work closely with their clients or client’s clients to ensure scientific accuracy. As in working on a feature film, there are constant reviews and notes provided along each step of the production process. “Inevitably, there will be tweaking to do and it’s better to get that out of the way early on,” Pieroway says.

Going in a different direction is Keith Johnston, a 2007 Animation Mentor grad who is using his skills for the U.S. Department of Defense on a project called “The First Person Cultural Trainer.” The project creates a 3D Middle Eastern environment in which soldiers learn how to interact with the local culture via avatars. For example, Johnson says there are ways to search a house in the Middle East that are more culturally sensitive and will engender more cooperation than simply kicking in the doors.

“There is a lot of acting involved with these avatars as players have to be able to read non-verbal expressions and cues to pick up on what type of human behavior is developing,” he says. After 25 years in the U.S. Army, Johnson went to work for defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton in 2001. His employers knew he had animation training and asked him to submit his resume for the trainer project. He works on the project from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, with a modeler and a terrain generation engineer at that location. He is unaware of other animators on the project and says most of the animation prior to his coming on board was being generated by machine.

He says his story shows that there are opportunities for animators in unexpected places. “Don't keep your passion a secret - let others know about what you are doing. They may be your eyes and ears and talk you up for potential work,” he says.

Animation also has a business-to-business aspect, as exemplified by the work of XVIVO Scientific Animation. Creative director and partner Michael Astrachan says the Connecticut-based company does some work for museums and broadcast, but is mostly focused on educating physicians, patients and people in the biotech sales forces. A typical project would be for a pharmaceutical company that has a new drug that wants an animated demonstration of how the drug works on a molecular level. “I’ll talk to their scientists, we’ll confer with our medical illustrators, and we’ll come up with something that tells the story of the mechanism,” he says.

A typical film will run about three minutes and include background information on the mechanism of the disease the drug is treating as well as how the drug works. The work is heavy on special effects, he says, with a lot of particle systems used to show biological processes and motions. Projects typically take eight to 12 weeks to complete.

The company doesn’t require a science background for its animators, but it definitely helps. “We have a bunch of artists who have a science background and a bunch of artists who don’t and it takes both types to make a nice piece,” Astrachan says, adding that the company usually hires generalists. “It’s not enough to be a very good modeler, we want somebody who can be a good modeler and can light and render and make a beautiful image out of what they put together.”