About 90% of Animators Quit Their Jobs Within 3 Years
animenewsnetwork.com
animenewsnetwork.com
People are happy to see you, happy when you do your job, and pay you well. People work as a team rather than compete. Don't underestimate the value of pleasantness in day to day interactions.
Cool sounding jobs are competitive and you are likely to be treated poorly unless you rise to the top (normally through brutal competition). All you get is a cool sounding job to mention at parties (when you have time to go).
If I said I’m a game developer you can bet that’d be way less “boring” sounding.
Game developer working for someone else sounds boring.
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 can definitely be complex.
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.
But instead of boring, you could substitute unpleasant or unglamorous, and the point still stands pretty well. For instance, fixing a toilet is usually not particularly hard, but something that most people are repulsed by.
In 1983 I spent a few months working on a crud app. Finished it and never worked on another.
I have a day job doing computerish things and I produce films in my spare time. I envy the industry people for:
- the creative community - the opportunity to make complex projects - access to production funds, assistants, software, etc. - the distribution and marketing apparatus to get the work seen
The internet solves some of these problems but not all. Generally speaking, YouTube is a terrible deal for animators. Patreon is great but you can’t bootstrap a new thing without having built an audience elsewhere. I’m still searching for a good ecosystem for indie stuff.
Can you elaborate?
I have no idea what it's like for anime. This is subjective - but I think the quality is usually much higher. I'm not sure how it is done.
You may get some of this by joining animation forums. Join in stuff like “reanimation” projects or other weird passion projects. Don’t expect it to be paid for a depressingly long time.
And personally? I use my animator training to draw comics and do commissions, it’s fucking grueling work. Even if you can get a union gig.
Never had a bad manager huh?
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 for the priviledge of allowing you to say the line. And the viewers don't notice or care.
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.
Doing them the same over and over becomes a tedious chore.
That’s got to be part of the reason for churn in software libraries and frameworks.
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?
OTOH there are huge differences in a lawyer with 10 vs 20 years experience. Because experience matters.
I’d say this is because “reality has a surprising amount of detail”[1]. There’s a ton of intricate detail in a field like tax accounting. Even if it seems boring, once you’re immersed in it, you realize all the intellectual challenges.
[1] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
Cool sounding jobs (e.g. actor) have an over-supply of labor because people are attracted to it on the basis of either passion or prestige instead of expected earnings. This drives down wages unless there's a regulatory body that artificially constrains supply (e.g. the case with surgeons).
There's an under-supply of tradespeople because it's gritty work, not very high prestige, and rarely lines up with anyone's passions. This drives up wages. It's also a very difficult thing to scale due to geographic and other constraints, so it doesn't have a winner-take-all dynamic. The result is many a large number of tradespeople that each get compensated very well.
Specifically to software engineering and CRUD type of web apps we are just getting started. Wherever I look around I see a business process that could potentially be automated. Much of the clerical work is still repeatable manual work parts of which could be automated.
I like that you mentioned plumbing alongside software engineering because they are similar to each other in more than one way. People think software is build it shut it, but no. Similar to plumbing it also needs routine maintenance work (preventative as well as reactive).
It's all well and good for the commenters here to say that dream jobs will often have hard conditions, but that doesn't necessarily have to be so if we have government or union enforced labour conditions that aren't predatory.
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 on Canadians working in film in Vancouver. When your staff are "half price", that's hard to compete with.
tl;dr: it's not a lack of unions.
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...
> It's all well and good for the commenters here to say that dream jobs will often have hard conditions, but that doesn't necessarily have to be so if we have government or union enforced labour conditions that aren't predatory.
Well said!
There is even a wiki page for this concept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensating_differential
Some choice quotes on the subject:
"It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur."
"It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I've lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life."
If you get lucky with a game, perhaps can ditch the contractor job, but otherwise at least you’ll have a nice income. Perhaps can save money for an early retirement, after which you’ll have plenty of time to focus on game dev.
Also, if your game becomes a big in this situation, you get to reap all the benefits.
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 if the pay is poor relative to the effort and skills required
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.
(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?
This was clearly the message of Keep Your Hands Off Eziuken and it was a really nice show to watch because of it. Putting passion into your art is about passion, they managed that quite well I think.
There is huge turnover in the mainstream animation Industry. However, One reason is that typically an animation project (for example, an animation feature) have a short production life. Typically two years.
The article also mentions in betweenness (aka tweeners). This is the lowest of the low in the animators world, usually subcontracted to developing countries like Vietnam, the Philippines. From my experience (which is limited) The expectations of these workers generally is very low. They treat it pretty much like a job in a sweatshop. Lowish wages, but low responsibility. Certainly it would not usually attract university graduates, or anyone who has been through an animation school training.
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.
The website is named "anime news network" and the sidebar makes it obvious.
There's a few companies that do it as part of a fully-fledged package to produce video (at hundreds to thousands of dollars per second) but surprisingly the same glut of people looking to break into the industry (like art, modeling, composing) are not very discoverable.
I have very few friends who took animation, and they switched to programming after 1 year of failing to find a job as well. I feel like animation is a very important entertainment area and there should be more of them. Not sure if there are any other big companies other than pixar or disney around the world that attract students to pursue that as a career though.
It would be shocking if there were a large number of animators vying to be technical directors.
There are many TDs who may want to be an animator, and some animators who want to be TDs. But they're the minority. Ones a heavily art based discipline, the other is heavily tech based. There's significantly more demand vs supply for TDs than animators. It just doesn't make logical sense that they'd know multiple animators trying to get into a TD role, because it's the easier role to get. It makes equally little sense for them to know multiple animators trying to become lighters.
The person I replied to is probably commiting the age old foible of describing all people working in animation as animators.
The other thing about art creatives is that many get suckered into fancy art schools, and have insane debt loads.
A detailed survey in Japanese: http://www.janica.jp/survey/survey2019Report.pdf
do you only "enjoy" art from artists who have good corporate jobs, or live in countries with UBI?
no? hmm.
Then later we may see the AI assist in drawing the individual frames so the artist draws an image and uses the shading AI to attempt to shade the image. Again, with manual work to correct where it messes up.
DAIN video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2i6FXVjNT0
RIFE video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqtqmP46LaA