Over the past several weeks and months, various production board artists have shown me the wonders of their Toon Boom and Cintiq systems.
Not only can artists draw on various levels, store characters and different poses, they can drop the voice tracks into the program and build their own digital story reels (or animatics, as they're known far and wide.) IT-enquirer summarizes it thusly:
Toon Boom Storyboard Pro has Animatics and Final Cut Pro Integration
... In Toon Boom Storyboard Pro ... the animatics phase [now] happens simultaneously with the storyboarding phase, resulting in time savings.
When you read the words "time savings," they are often synonyms for "worker displacement" ...
With animatics, that often seems to be the case. Timing and animation directors have complained for years about animatics encroaching on their territory. And for years I've derided animatics as a crutch for executives who couldn't decipher story and production boards.
But last year I woke up and inhaled the metallic aroma of the newer, digital technology, and figured out it was permanent. (I'm a slow learner.)
At this point in animation history, it's as pointless to rail about animatics as it was -- fifty years back -- to yell about Xeroxed cells. Animatics are embedded deep in the animation landscape, and they're not going away. A few animated shows don't use them, but for 95% (or more) of the industry, animatics are ubiquitous.
The challenge is to employ animatics without driving quality into the toilet, because there's a number of producers starting to wonder what they need timing and slugging directors for when they can simply ship animatics -- created by computers and production board artists -- to a sub-contractor and let the magic happen. But as a veteran television cartoon director told me:
"They can ship animatics to an outside studio, but if they don't have a detailed breakdown of exactly what they want, then when the studio sends the finished work back and the producer and director don't like it, the home studio is going to be on the hook for paying for changes. Because the sub-contractor will say: 'Hey, we did it just the way you told us to, dude. You want us to rework scenes, you'll have to pay more money.'"
Based on past experience, the route this latest development will travel is:
1) Studio, in quest to streamline and save money, has production board artists build animatics in the computer. (Buh bye, animatics editors.)
2) Studio ships animatics to sub-contractor. Sub-contractor produces finished product from the digital story reel.
3) Studio gets work back, decides the show doesn't gel the way it expected, that the quality is off, and complains to sub-contractor.
4) Fight ensues over who pays for the retakes. Sub-contractor says it did things just the way it was instructed. Studio ends up throwing more money at fixes on the back-end.
5) After paying the extra bills, studio decides to:
A) Have more poses in boards. (Extra work for artists! Same tight schedules!)
B) Have show-runner give more notes to sub-contractor.
C) Have exposure sheets done (and bringing us, of course, full circle.)
Now. Do I know this is the way all the scenarios will play out? Of course not. (CG shows, I'm told, already have a number of built-in controls. They know shipping a plain-vanilla animatic with nothing else doesn't work real well.) But the lesson I draw from these latest developments is that the industry will continue to change as new technologies come on-line. And for animation workers, that will mean adapting to the newer realities to remain employed.
Not exactly wonderful, but this playlet has happened before. Just ask all the inkers who found themselves displaced by Xerox five decades ago.
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Happens here at Lucasfilm on the Clone wars stuff. Footage is thrown from script to 3D animatic, and of course comes back from Asia looking like crap. So the scenario you outlined happens on a fairly regular basis. While Lucas himself touts they don't storyboard the show--that instead they go straight from script to 3D animatic--that is, in fact, not true. The show is boarded, but out of his view. It is the only way to bring the show in on extremely small budgets and maintain some consistancy.
The show is still crap.
But pulling ratings.
At least, it was.
So now that we have established that TV story board artists or production board artists are doing more work than they have before, can we start to push for more pay on the next round of contract talks with the studios since they are getting board and layout artists all wrapped into one. I mean, I'll take home those two paychecks, but if this is just going to mean more work for same pay then I think I'll go try and find another job doing something and that can get me home at a normal time so I can spend time with my family.
indeed technology has played a very important role nowadays. people tend to get used to in and adopted it as part of their day to day living. it gives them the convenience and the informations they need for them to easily interact with each other.
In the 15 years I have yet to work on a production in animation that matched the job classification structure built into our collective bargaining agreement. Agreements have not kept pace with innovation and diversity in the marketplace. It's a large part of the reason that you get a big question mark from kids. You speak different languages within a few short years. When management and labor sit down every few years, the priorities seem to be salary, health, and pension numbers. Labor's number one job is to shoot first on the quantity of jobs and to ask quality questions later. The changing quality of jobs, where those jobs are headed, is not the first topic at the table. The contract job classifications reflect this.
Comic strip fees? Hello?
"then I think I'll go try and find another job doing something and that can get me home at a normal time so I can spend time with my family"
I've been looking into other jobs that would interest me. It's depressing to see how little other jobs pay. However, I've been surprised by how much some jobs pay as well....A crane operator at the long beach port takes home about 200K a year. It's one of those huge cranes that lift containers, and he's been at it for about 15 years.
So now that we have established that TV story board artists or production board artists are doing more work than they have before, can we start to push for more pay on the next round of contract talks with the studios since they are getting board and layout artists all wrapped into one.
Doing two jobs for one ain't the problem. Getting PAID for the time it takes to do one is the problem.
If schedules stay the same, yet artists are doing more work, they'll be arm-twisted into working uncompensated o.t.
The point is for artists to be compensated for the time worked, not do more of it off-clock.
Will the webmaster please erase Arshad's comment? It's spam.
"...this playlet has happened before. Just ask all the inkers who found themselves displaced by Xerox five decades ago."
There have always been two basic elements to animation work, creativity,(including talent, knowledge and experience), and labor, (involving skills, but minimal decision making). For the first 3-4 decades of our business, generally, it was all done by hand and it was all done here.
In 1961 with the advent of Xerography on "101 Dalmatians," inking cells began to become unnecessary. Inking was labor heavy and creativity light. It was a printing press/ sewing machine/ cotton gin kind of change-unavoidable.
The next major change came, (more or less), a FULL 29 years later, in 1990 when "Rescuers Down Under" used the CAPS system to color the characters, that spelled the end of cell painting. Like inking, it was a low creativity/ high labor job.
It is now 30 years after the release of RDU and we are on schedule for the elimination of another labor intensive job category by technology. The problem is, we have gone up the pipeline and this kind of job category is harder to find. CG eliminates hand drawn clean-ups and inbetweens, provided ALL animation is CG, which it's, thankfully, not.
Even 2D TV clean-up could not be eliminated, it was just exported to cheaper labor markets. The case with TV animation is much more interesting and has more to do with what is going on today. TV animation was passed on to sheet timers and board artists. Both of these jobs now had extra character posing added to their jobs to compensate for the elimination of the animator. When that didn't provide enough information for the overseas studio to get it right, they added animatics. Nothing was really eliminated. It was just an illusion. You still need animators to animate, even if you give them a different name or conflate their job with other jobs.
It is wrong and misleading to compare boarding with ink and paint. We have run out of non-creative jobs, despite the wishful thinking of some of our employers.
Even these storyboard applications really eliminate nothing, outside of a five minute trip to the copy machine. So, you can re-use poses and backgrounds. Is that really so much less work than writing "S/A" on an empty space? Enough less work to justify cutting staffs and schedules in half? I don't think so.
The producers need to get off it and back off of all the cutting back. Computers don't animate. All of the creative decisions that had to be made in the past, still have to be made.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ_Dk8e2XLk
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DQ: A TV production house. Cheap overseas labor, just like I said. The creative work still comes from "the client," as they said in the report. I worked on a TV series that went to DQ for production. They got posed out boards, microscopically times X sheets and animatics worked out to the frame. Still, there were retakes. It's interesting how Mr. Chakravarty let his hair down, being interviewed by an Indian reporter. He seems to have quite an axe to grind against "Hollywood." Exactly who did he have in mind when he bragged that his people were the "equal" of anyone in Hollywood after two years of experience? Who does TV production work in Hollywood anymore?
It is wrong and misleading to compare boarding with ink and paint.
I was making (or trying to make) the comparison between putting together animatics and inking.
Both jobs had lower-wage animation workers doing them. And both jobs have been subsumed by newer technologies.
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