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Outsourcing Blues - L.A. Animation Work Heads Overseas
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So, your prestigious Los Angeles animation job hasn't been outsourced yet? Well, that nasty surprise may be coming down on you like an anvil from the blue.
Layoffs for L.A.-based animators, compositors, technical directors, programmers and other visual effects artists are broadening and deepening as major animation and visual effects houses across town - ranging from megaliths Disney and Dreamworks to Nickelodeon and Fox - are increasingly shipping 'toons and VFX work overseas. Where to? Here's a short list that I Googled together in less than an hour:
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- Cheaper shops in the Philippines are cranking out shows such as Kim Possible, Static Shock, Dexter's Laboratory, Dragonball, Sailormoon and Slam Dunk.
- Marina del Rey-based Rhythm and Hues Studios sends menial "wire removal" work (the time-consuming and generally looked-down-upon task of making the machinery of aerobatic stunt work disappear) to more affordable CG experts in India.
- Dreamworks SKG plans on shipping some of the CG modeling and animation for its John Goodman-voiced Father of the Pride TV series to Hong Kong.
- Some of the visual effects in Warner Brothers' Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed is coming from Montreal-based Meteor Studios.
- The Simpsons creative execs have been bridging the cultural gulf between the show and its South Korean animation house for several years now - trying to explain U.S.-centric gags (such as one involving an automatic firearm, which is being animated in a country that has outlawed guns).
- And what are we to make of the peculiar behavior at once-proud Disney Animation? The Mouse shuttered its Orlando animation studios and virtually walked away from the hand-drawn art that built its empire (apparently upon seeing successful and somewhat cheaper CG-only features such as Shrek and Ice Age succeed for the competition) .
Now, Disney - known for sending straight-to-video projects such as Lion King 1-1/2" overseas - is rumored to have offered $10 million to 25 Cal Arts students if they can deliver the concept for a successful CG feature.
Where does this leave the seasoned vets of L.A.'s animation and visual effects industries who are still employed? Nervous.
Full disclosure: I have several very good friends in the VFX/animation industry, and yeah, they're honestly worried about their futures.
From a pure-bottom-line perspective, it makes a lot of sense for studios to send work to cheaper workers, wherever they may be. It's the American way - and it's what killed textile and machine manufacture in the northeast in the postwar years and auto and aircraft production in Los Angeles in the latter half of the 20th Century.
For the don't-panic, 30,000-foot view, NPR just reported cheerfully that foreign companies are bringing jobs into the U.S. almost as fast as American companies are sending them out. But the figures quoted there are three years old.
But hey, your job is secure, your income decent, your industry well-rooted here in town, right? You're not a just- or soon-to-be-laid-off animator or CG artist, so why worry?
Because unlike the broader problem of "runaway production" that's sapping the Hollywood trades of jobs for lowly PAs and union-vet gaffers alike, this great animation-suck is hitting mostly highly-paid artists and programmers.
Soon there will be less of their generally healthy salaries going into the L.A. economy in the form of mortgages and rents, major hardware purchases, restaurant meals and vat upon vat of coffee. We'll all feel it before long, one way or another.
And the ebbing of talent is condensing the working creative energy of the industry into the most highly-paid, hands-off - and aging - segment of the active workforce.
Is it long before much of the American VFX and animation industry that brought you the brilliance of Samurai Jack and the mindbending visual density of the Matrix battle scenes is being banged out in a Bangalore server farm under the control of a single ponytailed d00d in Silverlake?
Or am I just being an alarmist...
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| Posted by: mack_reed on Thursday, March 18, 2004 - 10:54 PM
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