3 ms·

Your comment about the market is incredibly wrong and jingoistic. The majority of popular feature and TV animation is made outside of India. Canada is a larger

by dagmx 3y ago

Your comment about the market is incredibly wrong and jingoistic. The majority of popular feature and TV animation is made outside of India. Canada is a larger competitor to the US market than anything else, and very few companies have Indian outsourcing for feature/TV animation. Its more prevalent for VFX jobs, but even then many studios still have a large presence in North America/Europe. Studios like wild brain, titmouse etc are all North American based, while most feature animation is a mix of North America (Pixar, Dreamworks, Disney, Sony) and Europe (Illumination, Skydance)

dumbo-octopus 3y ago
I am sharing the lived experience of a person I am very familiar with. Do you have specific industry experience to back up your claims? If you know a place actively hiring technically minded animators, verily I say we would love to hear about it. I know for a fact that several of the studios you list as "North American" have recently laid off almost all their animation staff in favor of Indian vendor studios. Not feature, perhaps. But TV people do work too. Or did, rather.
- dagmx 3y ago
  Yes I’ve been a supervisor in both feature film and vfx at major studios, as has my partner who currently still works in the industry. I maintain close ties with several major studios and am still a well known entity in the industry. I feel like I can speak with quite a reasonable level of confidence in this space You made two claims, that the jobs have been laid off (correct) and moved to India (incorrect). The layoffs are parts of market changes due to the strikes and production cuts before then. The implication that it was caused and will lead to outsourcing is not borne in reality for feature/tv animation. But yes several studios are hiring still. The job fair at the recent Spark conference in Vancouver had several studios open. Feature and Tv animation hasn’t seen the slowdown that other areas of the market have and will bounce back faster.
  - dumbo-octopus 3y ago
    It is most certainly incorrect to claim that the jobs have not (at least in part) moved to India. It is also incorrect to claim that laid off workers are not being replaced with foreign vendor studios, largely in India. This is a 100% verifiable fact for at least one of the "North American" studios you mentioned. It would appear you have taken your own experience, which I'm sure is vast, and made the mistake of assuming it applies to every studio. I can tell you that it does not. I can also tell you that the job market is quite dry indeed, and that studios that were attempting to headhunt just months ago will now no longer even reply to applications.
    - dagmx 3y ago
      I think you're greatly overestimating how many jobs have moved to India. The largest company to do so is MPC, but for feature and TV work, it hasn't really impacted job locality. It appears you're taking your own internal biases about India outsourcing and applying it more expansively. I didn't say the job market isn't dry. Again, I'm pushing back on the conflation of layoffs and jobs being offshored to India. Canada and Europe are much bigger source of offshoring for the US. However that isn't to say studios aren't hiring which was what you asked about, and I answered. It's definitely a lot lower, but it's not due to outsourcing. There's so many other factors that I already mentioned (lowered production, strikes) that play in first. Animation is affected to a much smaller degree and several studios in Canada are hiring in reasonable numbers at the moment. You can do with that info what you will, but it sounds like you don't actually want to hear an answer that contradicts your own and are doubling down on something that is not borne out of the reality of where the work is being done right now. It's especially exasperating because you're not even involved in said industry, outside of your partner, whereas I am actively every day. Largely, the main jobs that get outsourced to India is stuff like match move and rotoscoping. There's very little Core Animation, lighting or rendering work for most of the major studios done there, with the exception of MPC
      - dumbo-octopus 3y ago
        Dreamworks has specifically stated that lighting and rendering work is being outsourced to India and that this was the reason for their recent laying off of their entire TV animation department (HUB). You act like somehow me directly knowing someone who was directly told this information by the people making the decision is somehow not a strong enough source? Compared to you who isn't in this country and previously stated you don't even work in the industry anymore?
i_am_a_peasant 3y ago
I've never been hit by offshoring but I have been on the other end of it. When I lived in a relatively affordable-workforce central European country we once had to do a knowledge transfer from our Canadian office which all got laid off. We took all their work, the whole experience was bittersweet, some of the folks there took it well others less so. But I can say that the project itself was reaching a stagnating phase where not much new work needed to be done, and we were mostly doing maintenance/bug fixing. The company itself wasn't doing anything innovative either and there wasn't leadership to put the Canadian guys skills to good use. Eventually most of those guys were hired by Intel and all got to work on exciting new technology that none of us were qualified to do. I think this is more or less okay when it happens, if a company does massive layoffs I take it more as a sign that they are not producing much anymore. And when many companies fire tens of thousands of people all at once I basically take it as a sign that the tech sector as a whole is taking a big downturn. Maybe things will improve when we finally stumble upon some tech that needs developing that has a great potential to be profitable and takes a lot of people to develop.

by dagmx 3y ago

dumbo-octopus 3y ago

I am sharing the lived experience of a person I am very familiar with. Do you have specific industry experience to back up your claims? If you know a place actively hiring technically minded animators, verily I say we would love to hear about it. I know for a fact that several of the studios you list as "North American" have recently laid off almost all their animation staff in favor of Indian vendor studios. Not feature, perhaps. But TV people do work too. Or did, rather.

dagmx 3y ago
Yes I’ve been a supervisor in both feature film and vfx at major studios, as has my partner who currently still works in the industry. I maintain close ties with several major studios and am still a well known entity in the industry. I feel like I can speak with quite a reasonable level of confidence in this space You made two claims, that the jobs have been laid off (correct) and moved to India (incorrect). The layoffs are parts of market changes due to the strikes and production cuts before then. The implication that it was caused and will lead to outsourcing is not borne in reality for feature/tv animation. But yes several studios are hiring still. The job fair at the recent Spark conference in Vancouver had several studios open. Feature and Tv animation hasn’t seen the slowdown that other areas of the market have and will bounce back faster.
- dumbo-octopus 3y ago
  It is most certainly incorrect to claim that the jobs have not (at least in part) moved to India. It is also incorrect to claim that laid off workers are not being replaced with foreign vendor studios, largely in India. This is a 100% verifiable fact for at least one of the "North American" studios you mentioned. It would appear you have taken your own experience, which I'm sure is vast, and made the mistake of assuming it applies to every studio. I can tell you that it does not. I can also tell you that the job market is quite dry indeed, and that studios that were attempting to headhunt just months ago will now no longer even reply to applications.
  - dagmx 3y ago
    I think you're greatly overestimating how many jobs have moved to India. The largest company to do so is MPC, but for feature and TV work, it hasn't really impacted job locality. It appears you're taking your own internal biases about India outsourcing and applying it more expansively. I didn't say the job market isn't dry. Again, I'm pushing back on the conflation of layoffs and jobs being offshored to India. Canada and Europe are much bigger source of offshoring for the US. However that isn't to say studios aren't hiring which was what you asked about, and I answered. It's definitely a lot lower, but it's not due to outsourcing. There's so many other factors that I already mentioned (lowered production, strikes) that play in first. Animation is affected to a much smaller degree and several studios in Canada are hiring in reasonable numbers at the moment. You can do with that info what you will, but it sounds like you don't actually want to hear an answer that contradicts your own and are doubling down on something that is not borne out of the reality of where the work is being done right now. It's especially exasperating because you're not even involved in said industry, outside of your partner, whereas I am actively every day. Largely, the main jobs that get outsourced to India is stuff like match move and rotoscoping. There's very little Core Animation, lighting or rendering work for most of the major studios done there, with the exception of MPC
    - dumbo-octopus 3y ago
      Dreamworks has specifically stated that lighting and rendering work is being outsourced to India and that this was the reason for their recent laying off of their entire TV animation department (HUB). You act like somehow me directly knowing someone who was directly told this information by the people making the decision is somehow not a strong enough source? Compared to you who isn't in this country and previously stated you don't even work in the industry anymore?

i_am_a_peasant 3y ago

I've never been hit by offshoring but I have been on the other end of it. When I lived in a relatively affordable-workforce central European country we once had to do a knowledge transfer from our Canadian office which all got laid off. We took all their work, the whole experience was bittersweet, some of the folks there took it well others less so. But I can say that the project itself was reaching a stagnating phase where not much new work needed to be done, and we were mostly doing maintenance/bug fixing. The company itself wasn't doing anything innovative either and there wasn't leadership to put the Canadian guys skills to good use. Eventually most of those guys were hired by Intel and all got to work on exciting new technology that none of us were qualified to do. I think this is more or less okay when it happens, if a company does massive layoffs I take it more as a sign that they are not producing much anymore. And when many companies fire tens of thousands of people all at once I basically take it as a sign that the tech sector as a whole is taking a big downturn. Maybe things will improve when we finally stumble upon some tech that needs developing that has a great potential to be profitable and takes a lot of people to develop.