I’m a professional animator who actually works in the field. And my uni professors would tell us that there has been a disturbing and terrible shift in the industry in many ways but allow me to explain this one in particular.
So the “experience” thing comes from the death of company training. Back in the day if I wanted to become an animator I’d approach a studio, show them my drawings and say “I want to be an animator will you teach me so I can work for you until I die?” And if my drawings were good enough, and my desire sincear the company would put me into the lowest paying shittiest job they had. Cleaning cells, polishing the cogs of the multi plane camera, organising files, sweeping the damn floor.
And then for maybe an hour or two a day I would get to sit with one of the animators and they would show me a little of what they know. I’d get training much like how I would at University except you know… I’d get paid instead of going into crippling debt.
After about three years of doing the dirty work (you know, the length of an average college course for animation) I’d get that entry level animation position. Usually an in-betweener or a cell painter. And then bing bang boom I’m on my way to working slowly through my career. And this company will want to keep me around because they’ve invested so much into me. I have bargaining power, they don’t want me going to another studio that may pay more because they trained me. So they are more likely to treat me better to incentivise that I stay.
Companies realised this and decided to switch the responsibility of training onto the employee instead of the employer. Because I have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to educate MYSELF instead of the industry educating me. I have to beg, and work for pennies, to get the experience I need to have actual value in the intustry. And because the companies have no incentive to treat me well because they have no investment in me; I can be hired and fired as they please. Oh your contract was for eight months? Too bad we blew the budget and my nephew needs another raise, you’re fired. Oh and I can’t complain, complainers get blacklisted and then nobody will hire you.
But I’m an INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR which means I have so much FrEeDoM to do ‘w h a t e v e r’ I like… 🤮
It’s all bullshit. They industry has no entry level positions because they want to choke you, they want to strangle the workforce and make them submit. It’s now your responsibility to suck cock, tearfully beg and lie on your resume just to get an unpaid internship where you’re worked like a donkey and don’t you dare complain about it.
And the most insulting lie is “oh we have more college educated kids than ever using that wonderful?” NO! NO ITS NOT!!
There were less colleague grads back in the day because not every field NEEDS a college education to be performed!! Doctors and lawyers duh, but software programmers, artists, film students, animators, fashion designers, photographers ect. All used to get their training from the companies that hired them. Even more technical fields like stock brokers, bankers, miners, mechanics, ect. Didn’t have Colleges educations they just learnt on the job.
This system was not perfect or 100% ethical but fuck it was better than the anarcho-capitalist hell scape we currently occupy.
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