(Kind of.)
I have recently been on vacation, and away from electronic keyboards. A few observations of recent events (which I was paying little attention to, since no access to news or internet.)
Live-action film-making in L.A. is going through a rough patch. I get this from all the business agents to which I talk. Lots of work has left Los Angeles due to tax incentives (rebates) elsewhere. This is true of t.v. series and feature films alike.
Animation, on the other hand, is fairly robust. Sony Imageworks is sending work to Vancouver (a HIGH cost city, but with BIG tax rebates for Sony.) However, the rest of Los Angeles animation is still pretty much in L.A.
How do I know this? I look at the job stats. TAG members are working in large numbers. I attribute this to the difficulty of outsourcing animation jobs. It's one thing to train an individual for a job on a live-action set; quite another to train a board artist or designer who has worked
years to acquire her skill set.
L.A.'s wide and deep talent pool of animation artists makes many jobs harder to outsource. And animation studios seldom want to change winning hands.
Wreck-It Ralph, after all, is a box office winner. Anybody think Disney is going to close the Burbank studio?
(A bit of anecdotal evidence: Just before I left, I talked to a CG animator who turned down Sony's offer of a job in Vancouver. He didn't want to uproot his family for a job that had few guarantees of lasting long-term. He stayed in L.A. and picked up a job at a contract studio a couple months later. I would submit that you don't do that if there are few prospects for jobs.)
All that said, I'm aware that nothing is forever. Just because L.A.-based feature and television animation is weathering the current jobs downturn in the entertainment industry doesn't mean it will do so into the infinite future ...
About the recent ballot festivities, I'll make a couple of observations:
The Presidential election: Mitt Romney lost because he was a weak candidate running on a platform a majority found hard to swallow. There have been three Presidents re-elected over the last century with unemployment above 7%: Franklin Roosevelt (twice), Ronald Reagan, and now Barack Obama. Some of that had to do with Obama's strength as a candidate and some with economic trends, but if the Republicans had been running Dwight David Eisenhower on an Eisenhower platform, Obama could well have lost.
California's Proposition 32: The proposition went down because private and public unions worked hard to defeat it. And the reason that the Animation Guild worked against it was that the guild's wages, benefits and pensions were in serious jeopardy if it passed. Simple.
If you don't vote your own economic self-interest, you're made of different stuff than I am.
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