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About 90% of Animators Quit Their Jobs Within 3 Years

animenewsnetwork.com

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Re: About 90% of Animators Quit Their Jobs Within 3 Years

#101

Post by ransom1538 »

ornornor wrote: post #100
ransom1538 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Cool sounding jobs are competitive" Also! The problem with Animators is projects being canceled. Animation takes forever . A project getting cut a year in is normal. That takes a huge toll on you mentally. THEN, you have the art experience problem. Do your art skills scale with time? I bet not.

> Do your art skills scale with time? I bet not. I’m not an artist in any way, but I would think it does? The more you do something (anything), the better you get at it. Why would art be different?

Diminishing returns. Example try doing Golf, tennis, etc. IMHO you wont be any better at it in 10 years vs 20 years. Most likely you will be worse. This is why 16 year olds win Wimbledon. Experience matters in the beginning, but if you took your animations from year 10 to year 20 - you wouldn't see a difference. EG. Try looking at Rembrandts over time. Do they get better? No.

OTOH there are huge differences in a lawyer with 10 vs 20 years experience. Because experience matters.

Re: About 90% of Animators Quit Their Jobs Within 3 Years

#102

Post by pfranz »

boulos wrote: post #74
ClemFandango wrote: post #68

Is nobody going to address the series of elephants in the room here? Even the embedded video in the article didn't say anything about it, and the author's proposed and current solution is more or less a social band-aid. These animators need to unionise, or demand full-time/part-time employment conditions that are outside of their current contractual arrangement if they want to see any progress. At least then they sho…

The animation and VFX artists in California are unionized. For example, here's the Animation Guild [1] and the list of studios covered [2]. It's basically all the big names plus many of the small ones. What the union couldn't do is prevent jobs from offshoring: the jobs moved to Vancouver, Montreal, and wherever else the tax credits were. I think it's still the case that the studios are getting like a 50% tax rebate…

I think you're conflating animation and VFX. They both have different stories than the Japanese anime industry this article is about. These [1] are the kinds of studios I think of for VFX and none of them are in the Animation Guild.

The Animation Guild has been around since the 50s. There were fights in the 70s and 80s over offshoring. In my experience, in the past few decades the Animation Guild has great training programs, medical and retirement, but doesn't really swing its weight around over employment.

VFX was completely separate and has never been unionized. There were efforts in the 90s that turned into the Visual Effects Society, which is more about promoting VFX and recognizing achievements. There were efforts again when Rhythm and Hues closed the same year it won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects that also didn't go anywhere.

[1] https://studiohog.com/vfx-studios/United-States/California/L...

Re: About 90% of Animators Quit Their Jobs Within 3 Years

#103

Post by busterarm »

Daub wrote: post #89

The article title does not make it clear that The linked YouTube vid is actually specific to the Japanese anime industry, which is famously low paid. The issue goes back to the birth of the industry with Astro boy in 1963. The project was proposed with a certain budget, but ace0ted by the heads of studio on the grounds they cut the budget to 20%. They are a class apart from the rest of the animation industry. It is n…

Animation here in the US can also be fabulously low paid but through a different kind of labor exploitation.

Especially in New York where SVA is producing a glut of animators, many people work at "internships" for _years_ after graduating. I have met someone who was in an unpaid internship for 8 years at the same company...

Also the pay terms are usually Net180 and many clients just don't pay, knowing that animators are too timid to sue. This can happen to the studios too.

Animation Collective (defunct) was once doing months of animation work for a faith-based organization that late into the project the client said "God came to me in a dream and told me not to work on this" and then stopped paying the studio. The animators never got paid for the months of work they'd put in.

Re: About 90% of Animators Quit Their Jobs Within 3 Years

#104

Post by mrmuagi »

yann2 wrote: post #50
paulpauper wrote: post #38

THis is not suprising at all. It's similar to game design. 1. demanding hours and work with mediocre pay and little hope of promotion 2. no lucrative stock options ,even working for Disney or Pixar pales in comparison to how much $ Facebook,apple, netflix and amazon, workers made 3. no fat six-figure salaries. It's one of those jobs where people do it out of a passion, so there will always be a supply of workers even…

>working for Disney or Pixar pales in comparison to how much $ Facebook,apple, netflix and amazon, I dont think you know too many creative people. Artists i.e. people with an imagination, are much more capable of finding routes out of corporate energy draining traps, than the rest of the chimp troupe. The rest have no hope really other than to claim their salaries justify whatever meaningless shit they are made to do…

> are much more capable of finding routes out of corporate energy draining traps

(X) to doubt. See original poster for statistics on animator. I have no doubt other "artist" jobs sold to youth has same pitfall.

I've talked to some "artists" and friends of before, they all say the same shit. The music industry is hard to break into. You can't paint a dollar but you can paint a house. Nobody cares if you draw nice, the reward for the effort is not there and worth the issues in your wrists, so you hope to earn enough to hire people to do it for you.

> than the rest of the chimp troupe.

The artist in your caricature is a dressed up chimp paid to paint then I guess.

> The rest have no hope really other than to claim their salaries justify whatever meaningless shit they are made to do.

Ah ye olde it's-all-meaningless shtick. I and others work for our salaries doing interesting things and enjoy it. To turn your projection back to you, it sounds like you were not a capable in finding a route of a corporate energy draining trap. Perhaps you should become an artist?

Re: About 90% of Animators Quit Their Jobs Within 3 Years

#105

Post by Dracophoenix »

paganel wrote: post #85
mumblemumble wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm rather fond of the story of the Pulitzer prizewinning poet Wallace Stevens, who worked as an insurance attorney by day, and did his writing during his free time. He considered his unexciting day job to be something that enabled him to do his writing, by giving his life a stable foundation that left plenty of mental resources remaining for doing what he loved. Some choice quotes on the subject: "It is necessary to…

At some point even Kafka worked for an insurance company by day, Assicurazioni Generali if I remember well.

I've heard it said that Kafka never wanted his works published and, during his lifetime, they weren't. But I agree with the general sentiment. Gene Simmons had pretty good advice about it: "Even Clark Kent had a day job".

Re: About 90% of Animators Quit Their Jobs Within 3 Years

#106

Post by Zababa »

Daub wrote: post #89

The article title does not make it clear that The linked YouTube vid is actually specific to the Japanese anime industry, which is famously low paid. The issue goes back to the birth of the industry with Astro boy in 1963. The project was proposed with a certain budget, but ace0ted by the heads of studio on the grounds they cut the budget to 20%. They are a class apart from the rest of the animation industry. It is n…

> The article title does not make it clear that The linked YouTube vid is actually specific to the Japanese anime industry, which is famously low paid

The website is named "anime news network" and the sidebar makes it obvious.

Re: About 90% of Animators Quit Their Jobs Within 3 Years

#107

Post by afterburner »

chmod600 wrote: post #70
afterburner wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People are happy to see you, happy when you do your job Never had a bad manager huh?

Maybe your manager is mean, but maybe customers, coworkers, or partner businesses are happy. I don't mean it's all roses, but usually someone somewhere is happy even for fairly simple tasks. But not necessarily for, say, a starving actor. Nobody really appreciates that you delivered a one-line part as an extra in a B movie. Anyone you work with is likely to either be jealous that you got a line, or feels you owe them…

OK, it's just that you mentioned "software engineer" in the list and they rarely speak to the "customer".

Re: About 90% of Animators Quit Their Jobs Within 3 Years

#108

Post by ipaddr »

tharkun__ wrote: post #44
afavour wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way that being a game developer does not sound interesting and complex. I say this as someone that doesn’t even play many games! But it’s something almost everyone has a point of reference for and has (hopefully?) enjoyed at some point in the past.

I would say it depends. Never say never. Personally mortgage software sounds complex but boring to me. Game developer sounded interesting and complex before I knew more about it. Now it's more boring as in after knowing the death march culture I don't want to know more. I guess your parent meant that too by 'boring'. If you work for yourself or with like minded indie developers that sounds more interesting to me. It…

Working by yourself (or with friends) you get to make the engine and that's where the fun is. You can write really unique stuff that may or may not work.

Working for a big studio is like creating a movie with directors and for some that feels like fun but working on mortgage software is about data normalization which can offer it's own high.

Re: About 90% of Animators Quit Their Jobs Within 3 Years

#109

Post by chansiky »

artursapek wrote: post #24

How far are we from automating the job of animators with tech like what makes DeepFake videos?

I forget where I saw it but there was a documentary or a short that showed a series on Netflix using AI to fill in-between frames, allowing animators to draw less frames. Of course it didn't seem to change the workload of the animators, they just improved the quality of each keyframe - so another case of "robots are taking our jobs, but not exactly".

Re: About 90% of Animators Quit Their Jobs Within 3 Years

#110

Post by motioncuty »

yann2 wrote: post #50
paulpauper wrote: post #38

THis is not suprising at all. It's similar to game design. 1. demanding hours and work with mediocre pay and little hope of promotion 2. no lucrative stock options ,even working for Disney or Pixar pales in comparison to how much $ Facebook,apple, netflix and amazon, workers made 3. no fat six-figure salaries. It's one of those jobs where people do it out of a passion, so there will always be a supply of workers even…

>working for Disney or Pixar pales in comparison to how much $ Facebook,apple, netflix and amazon, I dont think you know too many creative people. Artists i.e. people with an imagination, are much more capable of finding routes out of corporate energy draining traps, than the rest of the chimp troupe. The rest have no hope really other than to claim their salaries justify whatever meaningless shit they are made to do…

Until they have kids or want to settle down...
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