2D Animator Cover Letter

Alongside your resume, the professional cover letter is likely to be one of the first things that a hiring manager looks over. This short letter (avoid more than a page) serves as a formal statement of your intent to apply for the position and briefly narrativizes your interest in the job. It should be straightforward and to the point, meaning that you will be revising this letter a fair amount to use the limited space. Since this is one of the first things a hiring manager looks at, it is also one of the first things they will use to determine whether or not they should keep considering your job application, making this a far more critical part of the materials than it might otherwise appear.

How to Write a 2D Animator Cover Letter

Writing a cover letter for a 2D animation job opening can be incredibly difficult because it isn’t a genre of writing that many people regularly need to do. It is a short document that needs to contain a lot of information to be successful. While each letter should be different, they will all want to contain a few specific details and aim to achieve a few specific goals.

Professional Salutation

While it may seem odd, a cover letter is a business letter, and it is expected that you will include basic contact information and a “to whom it may concern” greeting. This might seem superfluous, especially in a document so constrained on space, but it will be noticed if you forgo this kind of greeting and personal introduction. You don’t need to be especially flashy in your salutation, but you should include it alongside your contact information. This section may feel like it isn’t important, mainly because so much of this information is also present in your resume. Still, you shouldn’t consider cutting this since it is a vital part of the professional structure of the letter.

Statement of Intent to Apply for the Open Position

Shortly after the salutation, you should include a brief statement announcing that you intend to apply for the open position. This can often be fairly standardized and accompany your introduction by simply stating, "my name is XXX, and I am writing to apply for your open position as a [Job Title].” Like the salutation, this is an important formality that most letters are expected to include. Following this, you will want to briefly summarize the major ideas that the rest of your letter will communicate. This section of the letter will only be a few sentences long. Still, it will help guide your reader through the remainder of your job materials by signaling what your important qualifications are and what the reader should expect from your letter and resume.

Professional Background and Accomplishments

The following two paragraphs are largely interchangeable. Still, you will want to use this space to create a narrative of the professional background section of your resume. Here, you will want to explain what skills you bring to the table and why these skills make you a good fit for the position. If you have particularly relevant work experience, you should foreground that so that the hiring manager knows that you have on-the-job experience that might be relevant to their position. Likewise, if there is a specific project you’ve worked on that feels relevant to the job opening, discuss that so that the reader has greater context for the piece when they come to it in your demo reel. 

This section should be the largest of the letter, and it should aim for as much specificity as possible. Rather than talking about your general work history, you should be pointing to specific case studies in your work history that illustrate your value to a company. This is also a good place to name or identify your specific style of 2D animation, assuming you have one since this can be a good method of demonstrating that you are going to fit in well at any given company.

Educational Background and Skills

The other significant body paragraph of your letter should be a similar construction of a narrative of your educational background and the skills you bring to the table as an animator. This section will be more extensive if you have minimal work experience, and it will be substantially shorter if you are in the middle of your career rather than at the beginning. In this section, you’ll want to include specific training that you’ve received and describe how that particular experience makes you a more valuable candidate for the position than other prospective hires. It can be assumed that all applicants have a baseline knowledge of essential tools and skills, so you don’t want to emphasize those here. Instead, you should be aiming to explain how your unique combination of skills and experience makes you the most enticing candidate for the position.

Professional Complementary Closing

You will want to end your letter by politely thanking the reader for their time, inviting them to contact you with further information or questions, and signing off with a professional closing statement, such as a “sincerely.” Then you will want to sign the letter if at all possible. These professional formalities are important since you want to leave a good first impression on the hiring manager. You may also want to include a brief summary of your experience in relevant skills that aren’t directly tied to 2D animation, such as experience working on collaborative projects or experience working in creative fields.

Five 2D Animator Cover Letter Tips

The cover letter is a very strange genre of writing, so it makes sense that prospective 2D Animators might be a bit confused when they are trying to write their first one. Read on to learn a few helpful tips for composing a cover letter.

Tailor the Letter to the Job.

While it may seem time-consuming, it is important that every job letter you write is tailored to the specific job to which you are applying. This means you’ll research the company you are applying to know what details to include in the letter. For example, if you are applying to a 2D animation studio, you may want to look over some of their output over the last few years to mention that work in relation to your statement of intent. If they are a consumer software company, you’ll want to make sure that you are referencing your background in animating assets for software during the professional history section of your letter. 

A quick shortcut is to see if the company has a public mission statement. If they do, you can borrow language from that statement or attempt to position yourself in relation to it somewhere in your letter. You don’t want to seem too flattering of the company you are applying to, but it is useful to demonstrate that you have researched the company before writing the letter.

Work off of Templates

On the other hand, it can be laborious to write a dozen unique cover letters if you are applying for several jobs at once. To address this issue, it is often useful to have a template of a letter that isn’t tailored to any specific job but can be altered to fit the need of any given application. There is likely a reasonable amount of content in your letter that will be applicable in almost any application but needs to be made more specific or re-arranged. A working template is a good way to speed up the process of writing multiple letters simultaneously.

Working off a template means you’ll need to pay a lot of attention to ensure that the final letter you send out has been correctly updated. Nothing will sink your chances of getting a job faster than forgetting to update a template and applying to one job with a letter that looks like it is applying to a different position.

Pay Attention to Word Economy

Assuming your letter is less than a page and a half in length, once you’ve factored in the professional salutation and complimentary closing, you probably only have several hundred words to work with. This means you’ll want to pay attention to your word economy to get the most out of your limited space. Accounting for this can be as simple as cutting superfluous adjectives and clauses or as elaborate as cutting entire sections of the cover letter because they require too much setup. You will also want to consider the opportunity cost associated with word economy. Every example you give to demonstrate your desirability as an employee is a space that could be spent on a different example. Thus, you want to ensure that you use this limited space in the most proficient way possible.

Put Your Best Foot Forward

The cover letter is the place where you are given space to narrate your own professional skills and accomplishments. While a strategically written resume can also serve this purpose, the cover letter offers you the opportunity to appeal directly to a hiring manager regarding your candidacy. Therefore, you want your cover letter to represent the best possible version of your qualifications for the open 2D animation position. This doesn’t mean embellishing your credentials but presenting the most persuasive case for your employment. Many new writers make the mistake of using the letter to explain a gap in the resume, but this concern can be addressed later, like in an interview. The cover letter should highlight your strengths and draw a hiring manager’s attention toward your demo reel.

Tip #5: Get Feedback

Since most aspiring 2D Animators have never written a cover letter before, it can be helpful to get multiple sets of eyes on it. Ideally, this means having experienced animators who have written or read cover letters before looking them over and offering their feedback and advice. One of the advantages of enrolling in a career training program, such as Noble’s Motion Graphics Certificate program, is that you are placed alongside trained professionals who can provide you with feedback you might not otherwise be able to receive. Everyone who enrolls in one of Noble’s career certificate programs will receive one-on-one career mentorship sessions during which they can ask for feedback on the state of a cover letter or simply inquire about what they should include in their letters.

Learn the Skills to Become a 2D Animator at Noble Desktop

Once you’ve committed to learning the skills necessary to become a 2D Animator, Noble Desktop is available to make that dream a reality through professional skills instruction. Noble offers a wide array of 2D animation classes, available in person or online, and all of these classes are taught by expert instructors with years of on-the-job experience. This structure means that regardless of how your course is delivered, you’ll receive real-time instruction and be able to ask questions and receive personalized feedback on your work. Similarly, no matter whether you take the course in person or online, you’ll benefit from small class sizes and all of the professionalization support options, including one-on-one career mentoring in the career-certificate programs. Finally, every Noble class comes with the option for a free retake within one year, meaning that you’ll have the chance to build your portfolio and get even more hands-on experience in preparation for entering the job market.

Students interested in a career change may consider enrolling in Noble’s Motion Graphics Certificate program. This class aims to teach students how to use tools like Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro to create evocative 2D and 3D animated assets for many practical projects. In this class, students will be guided through the process of using After Effects to animate text, photos, and videos, and they will learn how to modify these animations in subtle but perceptible ways slightly. Students will also learn how to create animated images using layered Photoshop and Illustrator files (this course does not include instruction in either of these tools, they are prerequisites for taking the course). Finally, students will learn how to use Premiere Pro to edit their animated assets into video files. All this work will culminate in a series of professionalization seminars, including a portfolio-building workshop and a one-on-one mentorship session, intended to prepare students for a career as a 2D or 3D Animator.

Students who aren’t ready to make a significant career shift but do want to learn 2D animation skills may want to consider one of Noble’s many motion graphics bootcamps. These classes include the Adobe After Effects Bootcamp, which provides students with guided instruction in the use of After Effects for creating animated digital assets and the Adobe Premiere Pro Bootcamp, which teaches students how to use that program to compile their animated assets into a completed project. These courses are excellent starting points for new animators looking to learn the trade. However, they don’t provide students with any of the professionalization services offered through Noble’s career certificate programs.

Finally, students who aren’t sure that they want to start learning 2D animation but are intrigued by the possibility should consult some of Noble’s free training resources to learn more. Noble’s Learn 2D Animation page, as well as their Learn After Effects and Learn Premiere Pro page compiles a weird range of articles, free seminars and resources that students can use to help them on their 2D Animation career path. Noble also provides prospective 2D Animators with a career information hub to help them decide if a career change is right for them.