We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Antonina Osnos a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Antonina, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What were some of the most unexpected problems you’ve faced in your career and how did you resolve those issues?

From early days of my career (long before i even realised it was even a career), i wanted to be part of a cool project that would influence someone’s life just like some cartoons and videogames changed mine. With inspiration, finding friends in fandom etc.

The expected problem was that I am from Russia. We do have small animating industry, but the education, the budget of the projects here and many other things simply don’t allow big projects to appear. No independent animation, as there is no money for it. 99% of all released cartoons are preschool animated series with very limited animation. So I set my goal to get to a “cool project somewhere abroad”, which meant, that I must compete for a spot with animators from all over the world.

I spent four years hopping from one project to another, learning, gathering portfolio. In December 2021 a lovely series have launched, that not only looked absolutely fantastic, but was aiming to be sold to some international streaming service, which would be a huge step up for me. I only needed several months to gather scenes for the portfolio and wait for the project to release…

Then my country decided that international connections are overrated, attacked it’s neighbour and messed everyone’s lifes up.

It’s been a couple of years. Now it’s obvious that I can’t start slowly crawling out of my bog by working remotely for someone abroad, but I have to make a leap of faith both moving to another country and finding job at the same time. I can only imagine how many more problems I am going to encounter on my way :)

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My name is Antonina Osnos aka Belemonguin, as people call me online. I live in Russia, Saint-Petersburg. I don’t think anyone ever heard about me, as I am a very average animator for preschool cartoons that has almost zero presence online. One of those people you see in a “mass grave” in the titles you never read. I get a piece of an animatic, I animate, I send the animation over. Rinse and repeat.

I do not mind being invisible to the big audience. Fame isn’t important to me. The reaction of the audience is. Making someone’s day a little bit better is what I want. World is a harsh place, but a beautiful one. I wish to make people a little bit happier and give them inspiration and strength to live their lives or remind that there is a sunny blue sky somewhere behind the clouds.

But you can’t do it if you are chained to a conveyor that spits out silly stuff for an audience that can’t speak and probably will forget what they’ve just watched in a span of a minute.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

Resources? I’d say I’ve underestimated the importance of having an audience in social media. You see, networking is an important thing to have. Not only there is a chance that through these connections someone is going to notice your portfolio and hire you, but also audience allows you to find other creators who can help you on your journey by giving a good advise, or just cheering you up.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

Honestly, I’d say people who never deal with creativity on daily basis tend to have some mystical attitude toward it. People think that you need to have some sort of magical talent, be born special to have a chance at any creative career. I say there is no such thing as a talent. Ask any person who works as an artist – they’ve probably been drawing since their childhood. Or as least were very into comic books and cartoons. Creativity is a skill that must be learned just like any other complex skill.

And vise versa I’ve seen some people who decided that they were born with a talent, but never used it and now they are going to show the world how it’s done. People like this usually watch a couple of movies and think that’s enough to start a career. Then they fail miserably, because their learning database was so tiny, that, just like badly trained AI does, they create repetitive boring nonsense.

Creativity is a complex skill, but it’s still a skill; just like any other.

Contact Info:

• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/antonina-osnos-a609a51a3/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/belemonguin
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsi6AVtlBqr40uKdXdGLyfQ
• Other: I use good old DeviantArt as a stash of my art :) https://www.deviantart.com/belemonguin

Image Credits

Two first pictures are mine. The kids with an oldman and arctic animals are from “Umka and His Friends” by Souzmultfilm. The last photo made by https://twitter.com/redthecaptn