Most people are probably best off with good jobs that sound boring but are highly demanded. Could be plumber or software engineer or accountant or whatever.
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).
So I’m an animator and I’d like to work on my craft. I’d also like a comfortable living, nothing outrageous by American standards. I’m not interested in the “job” of animator (unless something really wild came along), because these jobs don’t sound very appealing. It is very competitive, a “dream job” that attracts lots of young artists willing to work to death for a chance to break in to the business, but with relatively low pay and low jongterm job security.
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.
I trained as an animator and really, if you want to be able to pick up any of these things, move to Los Angeles. Find classes, visit figure drawing sessions, find people who are in the industry or on its periphery. The internet spreads it out but you are still much more likely to luck into things like “hey my buddy is looking for help on a project” and “I’m gonna go visit my friend who works at WB, wanna come along?”.
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.
I'm a musician with a day job. This is a widely familiar approach to a music "career." I've learned to satisfy myself with playing for a live audience and not trying to do any kind of recording or publishing. There are things that a "day jobber" misses out on, such as more elaborate projects that require rehearsals that are held during the day, or anything involving travel. On the other hand I have the freedom to play fairly esoteric music that is not commercially viable.
I’m an animator and the complex jobs == production hell. Every facet of the industry is a race to the bottom, just a matter of how insulated you are from it. Luckily I’m in medical animation where things move a little more slowly
Watch the credits (which is hard for modern TV, but not so hard for movies). When you see hundreds of people listed under animation and 99% of them have names associated with one culture and that culture's home region is low income, chances are it was outsourced to that region.
It depends on the production. I think this was especially true on US/CA productions while everything was predominantly hand drawn in the 80s/90s. You'd have key-frame animators that laid out the actions, and in betweening would be outsourced. I'm sure it is still done now, especially for TV where the budget is tighter. It's a tricky business, I empathize with owners that want to make the situation better but need to compete on bids, and employees (if that) having difficulty making rent on the frames they can get approved. Like with code, you have to love it to stick with it.
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.
For pretty long now. I've been interning in a larger German animation studio in 2003 and while the directors and key animators were sitting on site, I distinctly remember being stunned by the logisitics of the weekly arriving Betamax tapes from Vietnam. All inbetween painting was outsourced back then already.
I’ll also add that many things which seem boring from an abstracted and removed perspective can be quite fascinating when you get into the weeds.
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.
SysAdmins fit this bill, but I know them as having a pretty terrible social position — no one cares about you until something goes wrong, and then they’re pissed at you. Fix it, and go back to your dungeon.
I've worked in IT support for many years and this generally comes with the territory. Although some users/customers value your contributions and are very grateful, the majority unfortunately view IT as dial-tone service; only interacting with IT when something "doesn't work for them." As an IT professional, patience is highly-valuable skill.
In addition to just really liking the IT people at some of the places where I've worked, I've found that the people who are hostile are really shooting themselves in the foot when they do need help. Making friends across all departments goes a really long way, and there are cool people in most every walk of life.
doesn't sound bad tbh. who cares if some random person at work is pissed at you? most colleagues are not friends, they're just professional acquaintances
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.
This is so right on. If you care about the remuneration, then you'd best do something highly valued. If you care about doing something you "love" instead, that's manifestly not highly valued, then don't complain about the money.
Highly valued is subjective to humans but not the economics of employment, which I think is worth noting because being a doctor in the middle of nowhere is highly valued by the people you help but not monetarily. Versus online advertising which makes disgusting amounts of money and yet most people hate to see it.
This is spot on. An additional factor worth mentioning is the target segment for plumbing and software engineering is huge.
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).
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.
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.
I'm not really sure what you're saying applies. Animators in the US make good salaries and a good living in contrast. Japan has an unusually exploitative structure and culture where animators can produce huge amounts of value, but see only the tiniest fraction of it. It's a highly specialized job that takes a huge amount of training and work to get good at. Almost all these animators have university degrees and spent significant amount of time in apprentice roles to even be able to start working.
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 for the priviledge of allowing you to say the line. And the viewers don't notice or care.
Yes. Sometimes, when my spouse is really having trouble sleeping, she asks me to tell her about something I'm working on. About 30 seconds in, dead asleep.
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.
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.
Having also worked on mortgage software, there are ways to "sell" it -- the people your software helps are getting homes when they might not otherwise have been able. That's pretty exciting for them.
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.
It doesn't have to be boring to you. But I will admit that as a college student, when I had a summer internship in a government computer facility, I came away with the impression that while I enjoyed programming when I could do it on my own terms, an actual programming job would be boring.
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.
Everything. It certainly isn’t as sexy as CSS and JavaScript. It doesn’t have the arcane mystical aura of Haskell and Brainfuck. Nor the fanatic intensity associated with Rust and C. Nor the stupid simplistic charm of Go and Ruby. “Select a from b where x join blah blah”. What about that isn’t boring? It’s like ordering around a servant who has to do the real planning and stuff.
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 should come under some kind of minimum wage law. Lamenting the issues of the industry as if they are some kind of force of nature that is part-and-parcel with the nature of the work seems intentionally ignorant to me. They only have to suffer these conditions because of the companies they are working for.
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.
It's nice to see comments that actually talk about unionizing.
> 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.
Understandable, but it's beside the point. The point is that legally mandated (and enforced!) employment agreements should exist regardless of the amount of people vying for jobs.
I mean in cases like that, unions often just constrain supply artificially. But that just creates a new problem, in that people who want to fill a role and are capable of filling a role can't necessarily fill a role that the company would be happy to give them if not for the union saying that this individual is locked out from filling the role.
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 on Canadians working in film in Vancouver. When your staff are "half price", that's hard to compete with.
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.
I'll be honest in saying that I didn't consider the American experience. The article and video in question was about the Japanese Anime industry, which as far as I could see, works by contract direct to animation studios, without union representation.
It's like all those jobs - game developer, film jobs, graphic artist, artist, musician - too many young people want to do it and there's a lot of money if you're successful so it attracts sharks up the top who keep all the money. Just don't is my advice, unless you have a trust fund, which a large number of those successful have, you can weather out the early years then until you make a name for yourself.
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 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."
Derek Sivers had a blog entry with similar advice. Have a tolerable day job so that your hobby can remain an enjoyable pursuit rather than trying to make your passion into a viable business.
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".
Yep, all the fun jobs have horrible work environments because people stick to it even if the job sucks. I'm a big fan of the boring jobs. If its not working out, you just leave and go somewhere else so employers have to compete by making the job more attractive in other ways.
Also, writing for lifestyle magazines/publications can be like this. Loads of 20s writers competing for few spots. I remember hearing what a friend was getting paid by a recognisable brand to interview/write - I have no idea how she could afford Sydney rent. But countless hopefuls would've fought to steal that job regardless.
I think if people are interested in game dev, it’s probably a better idea to work as a contractor doing boring business apps for income and then do games as a side project.
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.
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 if the pay is poor relative to the effort and skills required
> It's one of those jobs where people do it out of a passion
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.
>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 or cut out a niche and sell your soul for commission.
> 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?
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 not helpful to compare this industry to the mainstream animation industry.
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.
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.
Incidentally, when I was looking for an animator for a short animated segment for an indie game trailer, it took many many months of searching.
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.
The main problem with regards to the anime industry is there is a production committee who own the rights for the ip that will be turned into an anime and usually studios aren't on there so various studios have to bid to get the rights to make the anime and it leads to a race towards the bottom where the lowest bidder wins. One more thing is despite how popular the series becomes if the studio isn't on the production committee they will just get a flat fee for producing the anime and most of the profits will go to the companies on the production companies so for the studios there really isn't much point increasing the salary for the animators
This is pretty sad, I actually have been trying to find animator around some countries in south east asia but I found it really hard to find one. It seems like it is not a very popular subject for anyone anymore.
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.
I'm curious what data is underlying the claim in the headline. Are these animators leaving the industry entirely, or just quitting one job and taking another?
I think they quit the anime jobs entirely and move to more marketable jobs like graphics design. This 90% claim is more or less anecdotal, as I read that the industry veterans say that they saw only 1 out of 10 young people survived in this industry. Many work environments are similar to each other: there's no written contract and they have almost no unemployment insurance, etc. I don't understand how those anime lovers turn blind eyes to this and still somehow "enjoy" anime. It's horrible, horrible stuff.
> Many work environments are similar to each other: there's no written contract and they have almost no unemployment insurance, etc. I don't understand how those anime lovers turn blind eyes to this and still somehow "enjoy" anime. It's horrible, horrible stuff.
do you only "enjoy" art from artists who have good corporate jobs, or live in countries with UBI?
There’s a digital agency that does a lot of animation across the street from me. The normal car you see in the lot is a 2006 Kia. They are mostly 1099 workers doing multiple things.
The other thing about art creatives is that many get suckered into fancy art schools, and have insane debt loads.
The few animators I have known personally said the hours were grueling, the pay was so so, and they all wanted to move up to "Technical Director" or "Lighting Director" as soon as possible. (And I think most of them did.) Though I'm not sure if they quit the industry entirely after that.
I suspect the comment came from someone who was confusing "people who work in animation" with "people who are Animators." I have known a great many Technical Directors who wanted to be Animators. I have known only one Animator who wanted to be a Technical Director, and he faced no significant obstacles in transitioning to become one.
Those are more logical progressions from a software engineer.
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.
Animation is about acting - sometimes comedy, always emotions. Like acting it is hard to specify the desired end state and harder still to identify the decisions and actions required to achieve it. "She needs to look more nurturing" or "that ocean wave needs to look more aggressive (but not malicious)" are legitimate things a Director might say to an animator. Machine Learning can already make an image walk. The trick is making it walk in a way that the audience will connect with emotionally in that moment.
Is this true of in-between animation (which is what's being discussed in the linked article)? I would think this doesn't require much creativity, since you're interpolating between keyframes, and might be a reasonable target for ML methods.
IMO AI is going to be like code autocomplete is today. A real animator will draw in keyframes and then the AI will try to interpolate correctly. The human then watches the interpolation and assesses the result. If anything looks off, they then go and draw in manual frames until the AI gets it right.
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.
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".
Decades, perhaps. I don’t think there have even been an ML model that generate vector drawings, only patchworks of existing bitmaps from training data.
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).