the chinese are coming!
Posted by dermot on March 18, 2009 at 12:35 pm
OK kiddos, here’s a word of warning…
One of the long running trends in animation since the 1980s has been the out-sourcing of work to Asia and other cheaper sources. In general, this has resulted in an appalling lack of quality - but the suits and bean-counters haven’t cared about quality for decades.
In the 80s there was a union strike on behalf of the cel-painters, who were underpaid for a pretty skilled job. Result? The work was shipped off to Korea and Japan, then China. So, from being underpaid to not paid.
Oops.
Anyhow, the trend has continued…and we have some pretty heinous animation to show for it:
Until recently, when Flash allowed character animation to be created in the US - albeit at a much lower pay rate than traditional or 3D. The last few years have been kind - with plenty of work for talented animators.
Until…
Currently I’m directing a small (5 minute) project. Can’t be more specific, due to an NDA.
We shipped the work to three sources:
1. Canadian animators - people I worked with before.
2. Chinese animators - a studio in Beijing, run by a talented American animator.
3. LA animator, with 20 years experience working in the BIG studios, and a local Flash house.
Guess what the quality scale was?
Well, the Canadians kicked ass - their work was fantastic - no surpise there.
The LA animator’s work was, fair to say, mediocre at best. No overlapping action, no drag on the hair -had you shown me his scenes without telling me who had done what, I’d have sworn that his were from China.
The Chinese animators blew me away. They took my rigs and really pushed them, creating a high quality performance - and their work has only improved as the project has progressed.
So - watch out. If this is any guide, the Chinese are coming. And when they do, it’ll suck to be a Flash animator in Hollywood.
I’ll be brushing up on After Effects and Toonboom’s Storyboard Pro. The only people who can survive in a devasted industry are those in the first and last phases of the production pipeline. The jobs in the middle (animators in particular) can be disposed of.
7 Responses to “the chinese are coming!”
While China, Korea, and Japan are full of talented, industrious people they always eventually self-destruct because of their blind obedience to Confucian social structure. God help us if they ever develop imaginations.
Sex Mahoney for President
Hey! I’m learning animation in Spain. You’re right about a lot of things. Thanks for the walking cycle, It helped me polish an excercise during the weekend.
Cheers!
Dear Dermot,
That’s grossly unfair to American animators. You dealt with one turkey and are damning an entire country’s artists to permanent mediocrity?
As for the Chinese, you might be on to something. Our college is partnering with a Chinese university and they have advisors coming over here, soaking up knowledge like a sponge. We will have Chinese students working for a year or two in our program and our students presumably can reciprocate in China.
Canadian animation is the same as American. Some brilliant people, some turkeys.
Either way, we are all doomed by the mentality that cheaper is always better.
FLASH at least makes it cheaper to do the work domestically but FLASH can also be done long distance and exported through the Web.
The real way to stay employed, as you said, is to work in preproduction. I keep telling this to my students and hope that some of them are paying attention.
Well, regardless of the talent in LA, it’s just too expensive to hire people here - at least with the budgets of smaller projects - which is most projects these days.
Even if this guy’s work had been A+, we’d still have been better off to use Canadian or Chinese animators.
Hello Dermot,
When I lived on the East Coast we just laughed at the high prices and low footage the Californians got. They were paid about twice what a New Yorker was getting.
Now, I like making money as much as the next person and want to be paid for my work, but it did seem like the Californians were pricing themselves out of the market.
What do you do when an Indian studio offers to produce a pilot for NOTHING? That’s already happened. (In that case, the studio got what it paid for.)
oh, and no matter how much you are paid…or how little…you can’t afford to turn out less than good work. It always reflects back on the artist, low budgets are not accepted as excuses.
Well, I’ve worked for peanuts on many projects - but always did the best work that I could. You have to take pride in your work. It’s one reason why I get pissed off when someone “phones it in”. In the case of the Disney veteran mentioned in the above article, he was making my job a lot harder than it had to be. Just writing a revision for his scenes was taking up to 10-15 minutes. There’s no excuse for that.
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