Hey ! great subject to discuss, there are some similar thread on this forum that you may read too !
I think the first step is to start practicing and show your work, from that you can get a hint on your level. At some point don’t hesitate to ask if your work is close to what one can expect from a professional.
That said, what you can be asked to do professionally and what you can see in some gallery can be quite different. Nonetheless, personal work , as you can see on this forum is a good way to practice and improve.
For the question 1/ :
Really it depends on your personal work / level , your luck, your connections, what kind of job you’re looking for in what kind of company…
The thing is, getting your first job may be difficult in general. Because someone will look in your portfolio for previous professional work (even if personal work is very important too). As soon as you’ve worked on a few projects it’s easier to get the next ones.
So it’s cool to have some previous teamwork experience, like doing asset for a collaborative game, doing some FX for a student short film, that depend on what you want to do… It can be a good way to add “professional” work to your portfolio, even if it’s not paid.
2/
Start by doing some personal work, and from there you can build your portfolio and add the remaining bits if needed.
3/
It really depends, it’s possible to work remotely on some projects, but that would mean you really know the job well. It’s best to work on site for a few years first, you’ll learn a lot and from there it will be possible to work remotely.
You can still start to work remotely, but you may have a hard time.
Interesting projects are made with teams working in the same room.
This is the kind of small projects I work on alone and remotely :
This is the kind of small projects I do with a team in the same room :
For the first one, what I get was a brief from the client and a few photos of the washing machine, I had to take this a make a clip out of it, touching every aspects. Of course the clients generally don’t know film making and have a very naive vision, you need to take these informations and make something they like. In the end, like on every project a lot of changes are needed (even if they can be contradictory to the initial brief) you need to know how to handle all this while staying on the budget/schedule.
In the second, I was also involved in different aspects, but there is more room in the team for less generalist profile. One of the artists was very good at camera work , editing and lighting, but didn’t know how to do rigging, shading, modeling ect…
It’s really a different way of working, clients tends to know better the subject, and if you get stuck there is always someone with a solution. As it’s more technical every one as a lot of questions every time.
That’s also why it’s hard to do remote work, we need to talk constantly on every aspect of the project, also all the pipeline, tools and infrastructure may not allow remote work.
4/
It depends on the country and the kind of job, I live in France and worked mostly in corporate films, animated series, advertising. It was always freelancing gigs and companies hire you for a particular project. It could be 2 weeks, 1 year, really it depends. For most people here it’s the same , but you can also join a company a get a regular contract. It really depends on the field you’re working on.
5/
Ok ! if that’s what you like start practicing these.
After that, it’s ok to accept whatever job is offered to you, being able to do a bit of everything and produce good looking images, or little animations like a product presentation is a good start.
Blender is good to start learning, it’s possible to work with it, at least that’s what I did for 15 years, and there are more projects/companies using it now. But it’s hard to work with it for big companies. If that’s an issue for you, concentrate on Maya or Houdini, or try to know which tools these companies are using.
Hopes that helps a bit, don’t want to sound obsessive compulsive, but I wanted to see what you can do with blender , but didn’t find any of your work on the site. From that I could have told you more valuable information.
Good luck in your first steps toward the CG world !