My career has been pretty much all 2D, I don’t really do animation, but people in my family do… so I will answer part of the question from the seat of my pants. 

I don’t think that working in medicine and science is any less creative than working in other fields. What is for sure different is that you are bound by the fact that it is fundamentally illustration. That means that your creativity is in the service of communicating about science; projects always have goals and you are bound by the goals and what is real or at least known. Science is broad. Where is the money in science that allows people to use animation? I expect in medicine and smaller-than-cell studies more than whole animal/plant biology.

I would think that perusing the AMI source directory on line would be useful in answering some of the questions about how much 2D vs 3D work there is and who the clients are.

-Clara



On Jul 19, 2017, at 10:37 AM, Britt Griswold <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> This is on the GNSI Forum. Can someone offer some advice?  These are big questions, so just tackle a piece of it. If you post it here, I will copy it over.
> 
> Britt
> 
> _____
> 
> A submission has been made to the site: https://gnsi.org/forum/general-discussion/any-scientificmedical-animators
> 
> Hello! I know this is a forum for scientific illustrators, but I was wondering if anyone here does scientific/medical (what's the difference?) animation, or knows anyone who does. I am considering transferring out of my animation-specific college after one year of classes because I miss learning about biology, my second passion. This is a big decision for me, though, since I love 2d and character animation, and I know that scientific animation would be far less creative, though -- I hope -- still rewarding, and seemingly very interesting and fulfilling. I was wondering, though, what exactly scientific animation entails? How much creative freedom do you generally have? Do you work largely in 2d or 3d, or is there a mix of the two? What kinds of clients do you work for, and are people typically freelance or bound to one specific company? How did you get to this point - a major in biology? minors in art or animation? graduate programs that are more specific?? Any details you can think of about your day to day workflow and path to this career would be greatly appreciated in helping me make my decision.
> 
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