A few brighter spots in television production shine like stars in a dark sky.
At Nick, The Mighty B has been picked up for an additional twenty episodes, and crew is sloowly trickling back. As a production person said:
We should have most of the crew back by October. We're writing new scripts now ...
So you see? It's not all layoffs and black despair. Islands of employment do exist ...
At Starz Media/Film Roman, most (but not all) of The Simpsons crew is back in place, but the mood is not ... ah ... sunshiny. The pressure to produce new episodes better, faster, cheaper is unrelenting.
"Fox and Gracie are demanding faster work on shows, and I don't know how much quicker we can work" ...
"They're paying the actors and writers so much, that I guess they've decided the place to squeeze budgets is us." ...
"We used to put extra things into the work, trying to make it better. But now there's just no time. We've got to just shovel the stuff out, getting it off our desks. The shows get more complicated and the schedules don't get longer." ...
In my experience, no matter how good or bad any given studio is, the place always has three groups working inside its walls:
There's the discontented, unhappy group; the crowd of creators for whom nothing can be right and the work situation is "horrible."
There is the group that is neither particularly glad nor particularly gloomy; it's happy to be working and it suffers the small daily bummers that come its way with stoic resignation and without (much) complaint.
Lastly there is the happy and contented group that believes everything is fine and it's laboring in the best of all possible worlds. (Okay, I exaggerate the "best of all possible worlds" thing slightly, but you get the idea.)
You can always tell the overall temperature of a 'toon factory by the size of any given subset of artists. If the majority is happy, the place probably is a good place to spend eight hours of labor each day. If the majority is unhappy, then the reverse is true.
And without making vast, sweeping judgments, what I'll say about The Simpsons unit at Film Roman is, people who never complain to me are now coming up and complaining to me.
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And without making vast, sweeping judgments, what I'll say about The Simpsons unit at Film Roman is, people who never complain to me are now coming up and complaining to me.
Translation: The Simpsons crew now hate their job due to the pressure being put on them now.
"people who never complain to me are now coming up and complaining to me."
When asked why all this blazing computer equipment hasn't made our lives more smooth and efficient in the day-to-day workplace, a student replied, "the faster the equipment becomes, the more is expected from us." There it is.
In the past you'd have to wait a week just to see a rough pencil test that was sent to the camera dept, shot on film, sent out for developing, and finally seen.
Now it's instant gratification, immediate results, better, faster, cheaper, but the workplace seems more manic than ever.
The quota drumbeat gets louder and more urgent on every show. The quota system dehumanizes the workplace. It's based on the fear that people won't do their jobs.
Those who implement the quota numbers don't spend time in the artistic trenches so they arbitrarily hike the numbers to see how much they can squeeze out of people.
Thumbscrew management, akin to the days at the auto plants where you'd be followed to the bathroom and your time on the can was monitored before the unions stopped the abuses. We aren't there. Yet.
An observation, not a complaint. Please don't fire me. ;)
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