Thursday, November 12, 2009

Why Animation Keeps Expanding -- Part 12

This will help explain why animation jobs coninue in Los Angeles even as pieces of it are outsourced. The overall pie keeps expanding.

...[F]ilmmakers themselves may still think of their projects as "live action," the way James Cameron does "Avatar," but for those working below the line, there's no denying how dependent these films are on the discipline of animation. Speaking about "Avatar," co-production designer Rick Carter insists: "It's an absolute hybrid. It's got animation, and it's got live-action performances that are being recorded both with a camera and in a digital volume space (using) performance capture. Those two realms have come together to the sense where there's no real sense of pre-production, production, post-production." ...

See, many jobs stay close to production headquarters because A) schedules are tight and nobody can afford an overseas' screwup. (There is no time for a do-over.) B) On big-budget films, quality counts and if something costs $400,000 less, it's not crucial. But making a final product to the exacting specification of the movie's creator(s) is.

Southern California might have less of the overall production pyramid than it did forty-five years ago, but that pyramid is geometrically bigger, so overall there are more jobs than before.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Somewhere in all this jumble, I hope there's more job opportunities for "traditional" artists.

Steve Hulett said...

Here and there.

Pray for "The Princess and the Frog."

Anonymous said...

'See, many jobs stay close to production headquarters'


heh... the lions share of Avatar has been done in New Zealand, including all of the character work AFAIK.

Anonymous said...

"Somewhere in all this jumble, I hope there's more job opportunities for "traditional" artists."

No. Just more opportunities to delay decision making. Learn to speak corporate mumbo-jumbo and you'll be able to obfuscate the forward leaning vision staid onto multiple platforms beyond the generational horizon.

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