> why do all of those adverts on the back of the legendary Nick Park stuff? You've gotta pay the bills and keeps the lights on while you're painstakingly craft

> why do all of those adverts on the back of the legendary Nick Park stuff? You've gotta pay the bills and keeps the lights on while you're painstakingly crafting the next masterpiece. IIRC ads are typically one of the places in the animation industry where you can get the highest budget per second. You can turn out acceptable-but-not-amazing work and save the big fee you got to extend your runway to work on the huge projects - or you can experiment with some crazy ideas you've been kicking around, on someone else's dime, without committing to an untried new technique for the length of an entire short or feature. This doesn't always work out well - see Richard Williams'The Thief And The Cobbler for instance, with years of amazing animation by some of the early masters of the craft left on the cutting room floor, both before and after Williams got investment money that came with a deadline he couldn't finish that glorious mess of a film before - but it's a common pattern for animators. There are of course many pitfalls. Once you staff up, you've got a crew that you may be loathe to break up - they work together well, they're used to your workflows. Do you lay them off, wish them luck finding the next gig, and hope you can get a bunch of them back the next time you need help on a project? Or do you come up with more stuff for them to do? There's lots of successes and failures along both of these paths.