As of today our records show 2,565 active members employed at various union shops. Here is the breakdown by employer; the figures in brackets are the number of members employed (click the thumbnails for a full-sized version of these charts.)
Like we've said before, animation has become a more dominant part of the entertainment and movie/t.v. business of the past two decades. It's way beyond being a sleepy little niche inside the industry, as it was for the first four or five decades of its existence.
There was a time in the nineties when animation studios resembled miniature versions of the old live-action studio system, circa 1930-1950. Artists, designers and technical directors would be hired, signed to long-term contracts, and would then work for years at a single company.
Today, only DreamWorks Animation owns that business model. For everybody else, the visual effects "project to project" model dominates the profession. People are hired during production ramp up, work strenuously until the feature or television show is finished, and are then sent on their way to the unemployment office.
But you can see a lot of folks are working, if only for a few months.
(Here is the employment chart from June 2006. As you can see, trend lines go up and trend lines go down. By way of contrast, in the Fall of 1989 -- twenty years ago -- TAG had 700 active members. We've done better since.)
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11 comments:
What do the figures actually show? 1600 artists basically working for three studios doing mostly digital work, leaving less than 950, (minus Imagi), scrambling for work at all the other more traditional houses. That's up about 250 from 1989. Big deal.
You could lump it all together and call it all "animation" if you like, but I'm unimpressed. I'm keeping my champagne on ice.
What do the figures actually show? 1600 artists basically working for three studios doing mostly digital work, leaving less than 950, (minus Imagi), scrambling for work at all the other more traditional houses.
Not quite.
In 1988-89 25% of the active membership was ink and paint. I & P is now gone.
So think maybe 550 board artists, animators, designers, cleanup artists and others in '89.
Disney Feature Animation ballooned from 185 staffers in '89 to 1400+ in '95. Ninety percent of that '95 staff was gone by 2004. Change has been a constant in the industry, and often painful.
Also in 1995, the height of the hand-drawn boom, you had a sizable portion of active membership that consisted of cleanup artists. All those folks have shifted to design, boarding or found other work, because cleanup is a small sliver of the biz now.
Re Disney and DreamWorks, there are large numbers of board artists and designers, in addition to the digital crew.
But hand-drawn work is a much smaller proportion of the work now on a percentage basis. As recently as '94-'95, it represented 90% of the work. Now it's closer to 30-35%. And if you count board artists, layout artists and designers who work on Cintiqs as "digital," you can make it 5-10%.
Imagi? Last time I was over there, they only had board artists. No digital employees at all.
We don't put out these figures to beat our chests or "celebrate," we publish it for informational purposes. So go ahead and put the champagne back in the fridge.
I assume the pie slice marked "Disney" consists of all the divisions of Disney animation including ToonStudios and TV Animation, not just the feature studio?
If so, that would mean there's really not all that many working at Disney Feature. And I assume that ALL of Dreamworks is feature work, not TV? Therefore, the Dreamworks feature operation is MUCH bigger than Disney feature.
Amazing how that's ended up. 10 years ago, before Shrek, I was convinced Dreamworks would end up shutting down.
"1600 artists basically working for three studios doing mostly digital work, leaving less than 950, (minus Imagi), scrambling for work at all the other more traditional houses. That's up about 250 from 1989. Big deal."
You're not making "ART," you're making FILMS. Digital, hand drawn, blood on glass. WHO cares?
Make a good film.
I assume the pie slice marked "Disney" consists of all the divisions of Disney animation including ToonStudios and TV Animation, not just the feature studio?
Correct.
Three Disney division inside that wedge of the circle: television, video and feature.
I think the bigger question here is wether the project-to-project model is here to stay.
Dreamworks being the exeption to the rule. Good for them!
Rufus.
For at least forty of the last fifty years, any pie-chart of MPSC/TAG union-shop employment would have been dominated by one employer.
For twenty years after the opening of Hanna-Barbera in 1959, subject to seasonal fluctuations they would have represented anywhere from 50% to 75% of the chart. With some transitional blips such as Ruby-Spears or the Bakshi features, it’s unlikely that at any point there would have been more than a couple of other union shops employing more than a hundred people (even Disney at least once dropped below that number).
Filmation was king of the pie in the 1980s, with similar percentages of a smaller whole due to the demise of ink-and-paint and animation work at other TV studios. With the advent of the “golden age of features,” Disney dominated the 1990s and early 2000s, while TV work and non-Disney features led to more studios filling the left half of the pie.
So yes, today’s chart seems dominated by Disney and DreamWorks, but together they hold just under half of the whole. This chart is the most diverse we’ve had in a very long time.
I realize that Pixar is non-union, but just out of curiosity, is there an estimate of how many potential TAG members they employ? Also, is there employment strategy similar to DreamWorks long-term model?
As far as I understand,at Pixar, it's more of an "at will" type of arrangement. you leave whenever you feel like, or they let you go, whenever they fell like letting you go.
r.
@ Anonymous:
"You're not making "ART," you're making FILMS. Digital, hand drawn, blood on glass. WHO cares?"
Animation artists do-- it's about employment here on the Union blog. (CGI projects require different kinds of artists than traditional animation)
"You're not making ART"
Says you.
I am making art and I do describe myself as an artist. F You!
Rufus
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