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Animation Classes Washington, D.C.

Unleash your creativity and bring your imagination to life with animation classes in Washington, D.C.. Learn the art of storytelling through motion and gain the skills to create stunning visual effects, characters, and scenes that captivate your audience.

Unfortunately, no classes in-person in Washington, D.C. have spots left, but 15 classes live online are available.

Animation with After Effects (High School)

NextGen Bootcamp - Virtually Online

Unlock your creativity and bring your imagination to life with Animation with After Effects. Discover the exciting world of animation and motion graphics in this hands-on summer program in NYC. Join us at NextGen Bootcamp and learn how to navigate the After Effects workspace, master basic animation techniques, and create stunning visual effects.

Monday Aug 12th, 10am–4pm Eastern Time

 (4 sessions)

$1,499

4 sessions

Animation with After Effects (High School)

NextGen Bootcamp @ Live Virtual

Learn to create eye-catching animations and dazzling visual effects with Adobe After Effects in this hands-on summer program at NextGen Bootcamp. Dive into basic animation concepts and processes, and then explore advanced techniques such as title and text animation, 3D layer animation, and motion tracking. Suitable for beginners with no previous experience in animation or design.

Monday Aug 12th, 10am–4pm Eastern Time

 (4 sessions)

$1,299

4 sessions

Video Editing & Animation Certificate (High School)

NextGen Bootcamp @ Live Virtual

Unlock your creativity and bring your video projects to life with the Video Editing & Animation Certificate at NextGen Bootcamp. Master industry-standard software, Adobe Premiere Pro, for professional video editing, and then explore the exciting world of animation with After Effects. Start your journey towards a future in film and media today.

Monday Aug 5th, 10am–4pm Eastern Time

 (8 sessions)

$2,495

8 sessions

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Video Editing & Animation Certificate (High School)

NextGen Bootcamp - Virtually Online

Learn industry-standard video editing and animation skills in this comprehensive certificate program. Master Adobe Premiere Pro to create professional video projects, then take your skills further with advanced techniques in After Effects. Launch your career in film or multimedia with this hands-on course.

Monday Aug 5th, 10am–4pm Eastern Time

 (8 sessions)

$2,495

8 sessions

Motion Graphics & Video Editing Portfolio Development

Noble Desktop - Virtually Online

Discover how to create engaging and meaningful motion graphics and video edits from concept to completion in this in-depth course. Gain the skills necessary to build a professional portfolio and excel in the growing industries of motion graphics and video editing. Take the first step towards a career in this creative field with Noble Desktop.

Tuesday Jan 30th, 6–9pm Eastern Time

 (10 sessions)

$1,495

10 sessions

After Effects in a Day

NYC Career Centers - Virtually Online

After Effects is a powerful component of Adobe's suite of design software that allows you to create professional motion graphics with a simple but powerful user interface. This course will have you up and running quickly, as you learn to create animated GIFs, logos, transitions, and more. You'll get hands-on experience in a small class led by a leading motion graphics instructor.  Get started in this one-day workshop, or dive right into our...

Monday Dec 18th, 10am–5pm Eastern Time

$425

Adobe After Effects Level I (Online)

Manhattan Edit Workshop @ Virtual Class room

Learn the essentials of Adobe After Effects for motion graphics and visual effects with this introductory online course. Discover traditional After Effects workflow, basic animation techniques, keying, and 3D effects. Gain the skills needed to create compelling motion graphics and visual effects.

Monday Dec 18th, 10am–6pm Eastern Time

 (3 sessions)

$1,295

3 sessions

$975

3 sessions

Introduction to Adobe After Effects CC

Future Media Concepts

Unlock the power of Adobe After Effects CC and take your motion graphics to new heights. Join industry professionals at Future Media Concepts and discover how to create stunning visual effects and animations with After Effects CC. Enhance your creative skills and bring your ideas to life in this dynamic course.

Monday Dec 18th, 10am–5:30pm Eastern Time

 (3 sessions)

$1,195

3 sessions

Adobe After Effects Level II (Online)

Manhattan Edit Workshop @ Virtual Class room

Take your motion graphics skills to the next level with a two-day intermediate class at Manhattan Edit Workshop. Learn industry-standard practices for creating stunning visuals in Adobe After Effects. Enhance your movies with text, graphics, and effects and gain a high level of efficiency in your work.

Thursday Dec 21st, 10am–6pm Eastern Time

 (2 sessions)

$1,095

2 sessions

Adobe After Effects Level III (Online)

Manhattan Edit Workshop @ Virtual Class room

Enhance your Adobe After Effects skills with an advanced class covering alphas, formatting, rendering, 3D features, Photoshop integration, Cinema 4D, particles, paint effects, color correction, and more. Perfect for producers, editors, and motion graphic artists looking to master the intricacies of After Effects.

Saturday Dec 23rd, 10am–6pm Eastern Time

 (2 sessions)

$1,095

2 sessions

Adobe After Effects for Beginners (Level 1)

Digital Workshop Center

Learn the basics of vector animation and create dynamic visual effects and motion graphics for commercial video and web designs in Adobe After Effects at Digital Workshop Center. Impress your audience with breathtaking motion graphics and become a visual effects professional.

Monday Jan 22nd, 9am–12:30pm Mountain Time

 (4 sessions)

$1,325

4 sessions

Adobe After Effects CC (Advanced)

Future Media Concepts

Take your motion graphics and compositions to the next level with the advanced techniques of Adobe After Effects. Master 3D features, the 3D engine, Cinema 4D, 3D camera tracking, warp stabilizing, particle playground, and other simulation effects. Enhance your projects with stroke, scribble, write-on, and paint effects. Join us at Future Media Concepts for this 2-day course!

Thursday Dec 28th, 10am–5:30pm Eastern Time

 (2 sessions)

$795

2 sessions

Adobe After Effects Advanced (Level 2)

Digital Workshop Center

Take your animation and motion graphics skills to the next level with a hands-on advanced workshop. Learn the latest techniques and best practices used by motion graphic professionals, and gain the real-world job skills needed to succeed in this industry. Contact us today to launch your video production career.

Monday Feb 5th, 9am–12:30pm Mountain Time

 (4 sessions)

$1,325

4 sessions

Adobe After Effects CC (Intermediate)

Future Media Concepts

Take your Adobe After Effects skills to the next level with this intermediate-level course at Future Media Concepts. Learn how to incorporate text, graphics, and effects into your movies, and gain a thorough understanding of the menu and tools in After Effects. Perfect for videographers, graphic artists, and animators looking to enhance their skills.

Tuesday Dec 26th, 10am–5:30pm Eastern Time

 (2 sessions)

$795

2 sessions

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Discover the Best Animation Classes in Washington, D.C.

“I know this defies the law of gravity,” Bugs Bunny says as he and a high diving board remain suspended in mid-air at the end of the Looney Tunes cartoon High-Diving Hare, “but, you see, I never studied law.”

The law of gravity failed to apply very frequently in the wacky Looney Tunes universe during Warner Brothers Animation’s 1940s heyday. Therein lies the wonder of animation: it enables characters to perform feats that are unhindered by not only the law of gravity but those of physics and nature in general. (The Road Runner’s nemesis, Wile E. Coyote, regularly defies the laws of medicine, for example.) This ability to make the impossible visible is one of the reasons why the world of moving—and seemingly living and breathing—drawings has been so compelling since the invention of the spinning phénakisticope In 1833. Rabbits aren’t bipeds, and they don’t talk, let alone with Brooklyn accents, yet there is something that makes us believe that this nonsense is possible because Bugs Bunny does it right before our very eyes. In one sense, we know he’s “only” a cartoon; in another, he’s one of the most real movie stars Hollywood ever produced. (He even has his own star on Hollywood Boulevard.)

Warner Brothers’ animation was an edgy, manic, and irreverent answer to what was happening deeper in the San Fernando Valley, in Burbank, at the Walt Disney Studio. Indeed, the name Looney Tunes was a riposte to Disney’s series of Silly Symphonies animated shorts. Warner’s animation may not always have been great art in the Disney sense, but the patently insane Daffy Duck is as much an American icon as his fellow Anas platyrhyncos, Donald. The technology behind both ducks is the same: drawings viewed at the rate of 12 per second go by too quickly for the human eye to track individually, and appear to be animate, whence the term animation.

Both Daffy and Donald Duck are still in production today, and although they don’t look a day older than they did in the 1940s (more magic of animation), they are created by an entirely different process than the pencils, paper, pens, ink, paint, cels and 35mm motion picture film that brought them to life in their salad days. The 1990s saw the advent of computer animation, which has grown into the world of the computer-generated imagery (CGI) that is now used, not just for anthropomorphic ducks and rabbits, but also for most of the special effects in “live-action” films today. Whereas whole sets had to be built and then flooded with actual water for 20th Century Fox’s 1939 epic, The Rains Came, precipitation and even flash flooding can today be added to an image with a few clicks of a mouse.

Software such as Autodesk Maya, Pixologic ZBrush, and Houdini are currently in favor at Disney Studios, and are complex programs that can create astonishing things. There are, however, simpler-to-use programs that can create motion graphics, most notably Adobe’s After Effects. While you can’t reverse engineer Frozen (and probably not even High-Diving Hare) with the Adobe Creative Cloud and a MacBook Pro in the space of an afternoon, you can create impressive animation without needing a four-year degree in the field. Such is the need for animation across all platforms today that you can make a good, solid career at an independent studio creating motion graphics for commercial purposes.

Best Animation Classes & Schools in

One of the very few tech schools running in-person animation classes in the District of Columbia is Ledet Training. They offer courses in Adobe’s Animate and After Effects that cover both vector animation and motion graphics. Animate 101 is a two-day introduction to that program, and teaches students to create animations, manage the timeline and even add sound to their creations. That class can be followed by Animate 201, which covers, across the span of two additional days, such advanced topics as inverse kinematics, springiness, and creating interactive movies. The two classes may be combined into a four-day bootcamp. For those interested in After Effects, Ledet has classes that fit the same pattern, with the slight change that After Effects 101 runs for three days, not two. Thus, there is also an After Effects 201, and the two classes may be combined into a five-day bootcamp. Ledet’s Washington classrooms are located on I Street N.W., a block from Lafayette Park. If you don’t live in the White House, the nearest Metro stop is either Farragut West or Farragut North. (If you do live in the White House, the instructions are: go out the front door, cross Lafayette Park, grab a tea at Teaism, proceed along 17th Street for a block, then hang a left on I street and Bob’s your uncle.)

Washingtonians whose address isn’t 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., particularly those who are really Marylanders or Virginians, might prefer not to have to confront downtown D.C. on business days. They might want to consider instead an online class that can be taken from anywhere, from the District of Columbia to Washington state to Washington Island in French Polynesia. Live online courses offer something of the best of both worlds, as you get the unbeatable convenience of being able to study anywhere you want, but you also get to have live interaction with the instructor, ask questions, and even have the instructor take a look at whatever mess you’ve gotten yourself into on your screen.

Future Media Concepts is an example of a tech school that brings its New York-based classes to the internet. The school offers an Introduction to Adobe After Effects CC (the CC simply stands for Creative Cloud, the portmanteau term for all of Adobe’s software), an Adobe After Effects CC (Intermediate), and an Adobe After Effects CC (Advanced) class. Running for three, two, and two days respectively, the curriculum takes students from where their knowledge of Photoshop left them off through to advanced functions and effects such as the 3D Camera Tracker, Particle Playground, Warp Stabilizing, and the difference between foam and bubbles.

Another New York-based school with ample experience in teaching over the Internet is Noble Desktop, which offers a program that combines After Effects with Adobe’s video editing software, PremierePro. Put them both together, and you get a 17-day Motion Graphics Certificate program. In addition to the software training, you will also be able to build your portfolio (demo reel) and take advantage of 1-to-1 sessions with established mentors in the field to help you find your way in the animation world.

A much briefer way to approach After Effects can be found hosted by NYC Career Centers: After Effects in a Day. The class instructs students in the making of Animated GIFs, logos, and transitions, and, by the end of seven hours, will have them conversant with the software and able to use it to create simple motion graphics, incorporating such features as easing in and out, fade-ins and layer animation.

Another extensive online motion graphics certificate program is the Video Design Certificate from Digital Workshop Center in Fort Collins, Colorado. The certificate program combines instruction in both Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects, including Adobe After Effects for Beginners (Level 1) and Adobe After Effects Advanced (Level 2), which may also be taken à la carte. The After Effects classes meet in the mornings, Mountain Time, which means they start at 11:00 a.m. in Washington. That should give you time for a proper breakfast before reporting to your computer to start your school day.

Industries That Use Animation

Article I, Section 8, Clause 17 of the United States Constitution refers to a “district” that would become the capital of the United States. It says nothing, however, about the production of animated motion pictures, and, indeed, the District of Columbia was never an important player in the country’s film industry, which is probably a good thing.

That said, there are animation studios operating in and around the District. Although they’re unlikely to offer much chance of employment to the likes of Bugs Bunny, they do offer work to those interested in creating animation for commercial and, naturally, political purposes. Today’s world has created a need for all manner of catchy visuals to promote products, causes (both public and private), and candidates, to which end several animation studios have set up shop in our nation’s capital. These studios often work with advertising agencies and political campaign staff to come up with images that can be used across a variety of platforms, from broadcast to social media. There are far less exciting places to be a commercial animator than

Animation Jobs & Salaries in

The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) groups animators and special effects artists under a common rubric, reflecting the enormous role CGI plays in the special effects that used to have to be created manually. More specific job titles are to be found on O*net Online, a job-seeker-oriented database maintained by the U.S. government. It breaks the BLS category down into such job titles as 2D animators, 3D animators, graphic artists, digital artists, and animators.

The BLS’ 2022 figures for the greater Washington area (officially known as Washington/Arlington/Alexandria, although it includes parts of West Virginia and Maryland as well) show that 310 individuals were employed as animators and special effects artists. While that’s perhaps more than one might have guessed right off the bat, the location quotient for the area reflects the fact that the area isn’t exactly the omphalos of computer animation: the figure is a meager 0.42. That means that you’re less than half as likely as the national average to find a job as an animator in the Washington area. If you do find an animator job, you will be rewarded with an annual mean wage of nearly $96,000, which ranks tenth for all metropolitan areas, although it is still less than the median wage for animators in the country, which is approximately $99,000. It is, on the other hand, significantly higher than the mean wage in of $78,500

You’ll have to weigh that against the very high cost of living in the District of Columbia: it’s 52% higher than the national average, mainly because the cost of housing is 152% higher than the national average. Food comes in at a relatively modest 9% higher than the national average. On the other hand, a hot dog at Nationals Park is going to set you back some: it’s one of the most expensive in Major League Baseball at $7.49, and specialty dogs, including a characteristically Washingtonian version with onion, mustard and chili, cost even more.

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