From Beginner to Director in a Year – Animation Production in 100 Chapters by GAMJA

Want to go from drawing still images to directing your own animated shorts? This 100-chapter class with freelance animator GAMJA walks you through the entire solo production pipeline — from character design and storyboards to cleanup, coloring, and After Effects filming — with 81 exercises so you actually finish with work to show.

🎯 What you’ll learn

• Animate basics with bouncing balls, arcs, anticipation, and cushioning
• Act faces with blinks, lip sync, head turns, and emotional timing
• Move full bodies with walks, runs, hands, turnarounds, and rotoscoping
• Design effects for light, fire, water, smoke, and explosions
• Plan like a pro with character sheets, storyboards, layouts, and animatics
• Direct shots using Japanese industry terms, timesheets, and camera work
• Clean up, color, and polish shots with professional makeup techniques
• Film in After Effects with plugs, blur, color correction, and rendering
• Build a solo workflow for shorts, loops, commissions, and freelance debut

✅ Requirements

• Skills: Basic drawing skills and familiarity with digital illustration
• Tools: Clip Studio Paint EX, Adobe After Effects, drawing tablet
• Hardware: PC or Mac capable of running Clip Studio Paint and After Effects, minimum 16GB RAM recommended

📝 Description

This isn’t a watch-and-forget theory class. GAMJA built it as a production line you follow yourself. You start with balls and hair to get timing and spacing into your hands, then move to faces and full-body acting. Every principle gets an exercise right away, so you feel how pose-to-pose, arcs, and cushioning change a shot.

Then it gets practical. You’ll design an original character, lock the concept with storyboards and animatics, and set up layouts that actually read on screen. GAMJA shows her real Clip Studio Paint setup — cels, cameras, animating sheets, shortcuts — plus the Japanese terms you’ll see on real jobs like hookups, tsume marks, T.U, pans, and filming notes. No guessing what a director wants. You learn to write it yourself.

Production is where most solo animators get stuck, so there’s a full block on that. Emotional acting for shock, laughs, and crying. Multi-character interaction. Cleanup, coloring, and makeup demos with file settings that save hours. Then you take it into After Effects for filming: plugs, bokeh and light effects, blur for depth, hue shifts, masking, Puppet tool, and final render settings.

Last part is straight talk about work. How to simplify the pipeline when you’re alone, how to make sellable looping shorts, what’s different between personal work and commercial jobs, and how to package a portfolio that gets freelance gigs. If you want to debut as an animator or small-team director, this is the checklist.

🧑‍🎓 Who this course is for

• Aspiring animators who want practical skills to debut as freelancers
• Beginners who can draw but have never finished an animated shot
• Junior animators who want more natural, lively character acting
• Future directors who want to run planning to filming solo

🧑‍🏫 About the Author

Hi, I’m GAMJA — freelance 2D animator and director working across Korea, China, and Japan. I started at outsourcing studio ZOOTON and served on the SICAF committee, then moved into commercials, promos, and music videos where speed and strong acting matter.

My credits include layouts and keyframes for Shinbi Apartment, Pokémon, Seasons of Blossom, Maple Story promos, Sanrio x Corelle, and direction for Maroani’s VOID. I teach the way I work: clear basics, lots of acting it out yourself, and a repeatable flow you can use on client work tomorrow.

🏁 Final Result

• A finished solo-animated short featuring your original character — planned, keyframed, cleaned, colored, and filmed — plus 81 practice shots and loop animations ready for your animator portfolio.

📢 Guys, this is a Group Buy campaign, check the GBC forum thread to get access

You can find the course preview in the download section below.