Can someone explain to me what they do and why there's so much anonymous posting with how they're the reason the industry is in dire straits right now?
>>150737621I don't know these posting but I'll assume it's the usual unions protecting the mediocre, gatekeeping jobs from the fresh minds who will work for less as an in.
>>150737621If you are an animators you pay them money to negotiate rights up until AI came around and those last negotiations after the big strike resulted in just ensuring protections for current workers but ensured AI and outsourcing will be the thing creating future shows in the futureAnd Stphen Silver went "Fuuuuuuuuuck sorry guys your on your own
>>150737621>*irrevocably ruins the animation industry*>*forces everyone to believe that it is beyond reproach, let alone scrutiny*>"Why are people so mad about this?"
>>150737863But I don't even know what they did.
>>150737621The union is the only reason artists have a livable wage and healthcare benefits. The only people who complain about the animation union are people who are uninformed of what the union does, work a non-union job like adult swim and don’t have any clue about the benefits, or they are generally uneducated anti-union types who think any unionized worker group is bad.The animation guild is not as strong of a union as the actor or screenwriters guilds because of the nature of the entertainment industry. Actors and writers have better leverage for higher wages and better benefits due to royalties and the whole business aspect of these people working with the studios to promote the projects. It’s mutually beneficial. Animators are no-name faceless artists, like most of the industry, who support the stars with their labor. If the union dissolves then no, there will be no one who benefits from it and no, you would not have better quality work. You would simply have studios taking advantage of their workers, paying them as little as legally possible and milking their desperation and hobby passion to profit off of while the artists live unsustainable lifestyles.Adult Swim for example is non-union which is why their work looks like dogshit. Shows like Smiling Friends are made by people who are not paid well, employing artists who are paid even worse and relying purely on fanbase hype to maintain relevancy until they can one day offer bare minimum wages. Cartoon Network and Warner Bros are notorious for this as well, and they work just within the walls of what they can get away with the animation guild.It is a myth that the unions hurt the studios. The studios can afford to pay workers fair wages, they just don’t want to because they know how to take advantage of artists. Artists are not good at negotiating, they don’t know what they are worth and they either expect WAY too much or compromise with WAY too little.
>>150737813Such a dumb take. It seems like a lot of people with blue collar right wing relatives think that unions just support the lazy. Same stupid people who think free health care and food stamps are also only for the lazy. The studios can afford benefits for their employees, it has been this way for decades. Artist minimums in the animation guild are sustainable but not great, but it’s better than if there is no union. Non-union studios like adult swim offer as much to run and create a TV series as a union gig would pay a character designer. If you are too ignorant and lazy yourself to understand what union benefits do then of course you’d think the union is pointless. Meanwhile, without it you have no vacation days, no full-time work, no healthcare or dental insurance, and unsustainable wages for the standard cost of living in California (where these union jobs are located). The unions also unite workers to keep jobs in America. Otherwise, all of this work will be outsourced overseas and then the work will REALLY look like dogshit.The only reason anything in animation ever looks good is because the artists chose to make it look good despite the fact that the studios do not care if a show is good or not. They simply care about the return on their investment. They want to take little risks and pay as little as possible. The union is what allows artists to have livable wages to afford to push the quality and try to make shit that others want to see. Familiarize yourself with non-union work.Just for context, C. Martin Croker who basically invented the look and art style Space Ghost, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and most of the early hit adult swim shows died in poverty. He had to work conventions to support himself. The fucking guy who propped up that non-union company. Same with the voice actor for Brak, he had to become a postal worker to support himself…
>>150738397>>150738520>*spews bullshit like a homosexual spews gallons of semen from his amhole*wew, lad, yngmi.
>>150738397You'd think just ONE of these companies/studios would actually care and try to pay their artists to make good work but I guess not. Crazy how greedy some of these places are.
>>150739054Oh man dude, I'd love to spew gallons of semen from my armhole.
>>150738397>they don’t know what they are worthThats wrong. The problem is that artists rely on big corps and have less negotiating power, because they are replaceable. Until you get a fan cult behind you or did a trending show, you will not have enough power to wrestle corps.Just like actors when they are not A-class.
>>150738520Unions definitely protect lazy assholes. Even the best of the best unions are guilty of this shit
I want to like unions but SAG turned me off.
>>150737621Everyone in charge of this retarded organization constantly starts shit with the industry, which puts animators out of work, until they get a chance to negotiate a deal that benefits the animation guild, as an organization, but not animators.
>>150737621The only way to ensure thevdurvuval if animation industry America us to go back to making what people want, building ir hooking into groups with disposable income and making it THEIR cartoons m, and cultivation of the idea of anyone can animate while being obscenely picky and clannish when it comes to picking talent.
>>150738520American animation has been outsourced overseas for decades so they seem pretty useless.
>>150737621For the most part they are a pay negotiation management, group health care plan, and other things like retirement planning etc. for people who work gig jobs. But all the gig workers continue working for the same dozen studios in the same town and they all know each other so they pooled their resources together.They have pay negotiations every few years with the big 5 studios, but the latest negotiation time came up in June 2023. >Post covid, >post streaming bubble burst, >And one year after the writers/actors strike so studios were in no mood to negotiate with them. Or could they afford it since productions stopped a year earlier and they were all hurting. Animation Guild having ZERO leverage to negotiate anything at all went ahead and had a strike any damn way, gained nothing for their trouble, and also caused the studios to go a few more years without greenlighting anything. Animation is the lowest priority for all studios already. The timing was terrible since it came right off a particularly bad Writers strike that seriously harmed the studios. Studios were in no mood for their shit and safely called them on it. AG tried appealing to the public and make some crusade out of it, but most people don't give as shit about animation so that fell flat too. It was just bad decision, bad timing, and a foolish attempt from a group that has no bargaining power and companies that are cutting everything back anyway.
>>150738397>work a non-union job like adult swimAnd they are getting pretty famous for how they treat their employees too!
>>150738397>>150738520It's fascinating how workers need to fight tooth and nail with film/tv studios of all things for their barely above low class income wages at that. When the entire management team makes the most out of pretty much any C-Suite in all of the working world. A CEO that pockets $600 Million demands they keep all wages of their workforce down to as low as possible, do not pay any benefits at all, and keep the employees on temporary gig work.
>>150738397>>150738520>Commie shitDidn't read, fuck off with this communist crap Ivan. And get a fucking job.
>>150737621Help jobs I guess
>>150738397t. union leech who sold off the industry to ai
>>150739822>bad timing, foolish attempt, bad timing, nobody cares, bad timingYou’re a retard with a computer. I wish you were in charge of things!
>>150739774The animation has been outsourced as means to afford the cost of production. The actual creative work has always been in-house.
>>150739920You will never be One Of Them, stop sucking corpo cock.
>>150739340There’s an entire union of actors and mess than 1% of all of SAG (screen actors guild) are A-list actors. Nobody needs to become an A-list animator in order to get health care and dental insurance.
>>150739822Jesus Christ shut the fucking fuck up you know nothing retard. A 5 paragraph bullshit word salad does not make you super smart.
>>150737879they fucked your mom hard
>>150739751>entertaining me will save the industryThe industry collapse has a lot less to do with financial flops (which it has had since the beginning and has always found clever loopholes with accounting to survive) and more to do with the evolution of the consumption of media. The secondary market that kept the industry afloat after flops is gone, streaming subscriptions is unsustainable long term without ads and exorbitant fees, the studios have inherited billions in debt over decades, covid ruined the box office for years, and nobody wants to pay for shit with the trash available online for free.Don’t worry. It will all be gone one day and consumers can all enjoy the slop that is uploaded online by people with no talent or creative vision. Every dying industry goes this way until people forget that it didn’t used to suck. You will get accustomed to slop. It’s like how most people in America don’t know what a piece of fruit tastes like when the flavor isn’t sucked out of it with preservatives and chemicals. We eat our slop because we’re told to. Now shut up and enjoy it.
>>150737621Because they are Twitter-addled politics driven troons bent on sinking any ship they are remotely a part of.
>>1507376211. Being anonymous let's you keep your job2. Being anonymous lets you lie.
>>150741640The slop is already imploding. Firsr people are starting to see the samey stuff and are sick of it. Abd there's a backlash coming fir the ai content farms and sites thsg encourage it.Pretty soon home-based slop generators are going to shat out by China with basic ai. Yes. Stupid. Create content for me. Content created for the, or a cultivated unique audience by talent who are trying is the only way to save themselves. And that takes getting out if the animation ghetto of los Angela's.
>>150741425>he actual creative work has always been in-house.which is why it's so bad
>>150740683lol yeah, it was the unions who wanted to do everything with aioh wait, you're a fucking idiot
>>150741640>by people with no talent or creative visionso no different from any show or movie the west has produced in the last decade or so
>>150737621well OP it turns out the promises of 2 years ago when TAG and SAG were striking over AI and the AIbros were saying 2 years from then (ie now) we'd be seeing the first fully AI rendered animated movies ready for release - that hasn't happenedso TAG were right (lots of money was being thrown at AI by studios and it was costing jobs, which means losing expertise and experience from the industry) and the AIbros were wrongand that means that - in common with all those AI chatbots that were briefly popular 2 years ago when it turned out you could milk them for social media comedy - AI seems like a money sink with no particular return on investment likely, which means this huge bubble is about to burstand obviously TAG still has problems because AIbros don't know when to shut the fuck up and they're now themselves very aware there may not be a whole lot of AIbro jobs in the near futureso everybody's picking as many fights with AI deniers as they can as fast as they can because it's almost like hype for AI, and they're all hoping that the crash that's coming doesn't take the dollar and renminbi with it and leave two more Russia-likes controlled by pathetic hardline nationalists rotting on the international stage, because then who would buy their crap?
>>150737621I have no idea who those people are?
>>150737621Great, more /pol/ posting
>>150742738That has less to do with being in house and nothing to do with the union and more to do with how the studios are run. It is absolutely about saving money, taking low risks and expecting high reward. It has been the formula cycle that every network executive has been trained to believe and try to honor for their bosses in order to protect their own ass, pay off their mortgage, and collect enough money for their kid’s college tuition. The artists are the only people still trying to entertain and not make it cynical trash. It has been the bane of a union worker’s existence to deal with a spineless development executive trying to appear cool to the artists and also earn brownie points from their boss so that one day they hopefully can have the big paying job too. It’s a hierarchy of hacks dictating what will be “the next big hit”. And when it fails, they scapegoat the show and the showrunner(s) in order to protect their ass so they can move on to the next failure until someone eventually catches on that they suck ass and have lost the company more than they’ve earned that year…and no tax write-off is going to save their ass from this quarter’s losses.
>>150741489But you need to have leverage to negotiate a living wage or getting hired in the first place.
>>150738397>while the artists live unsustainable lifestylesAt worst they have shock collars on their dogs and raise their cats on vegan diets. Each animator should seek the lord, for their drawings are going to have them cooked on judgement.
>>150741425>animation isn't creativeIt might look it if all you've watched is American slop of the last 60 years.
>>150739822>went ahead and had a strike any damn wayWait, is that what that short period of artists drawing cartoon fists and having those Adam shorts were all about? And this is seriously why we've barely had any new cartoons premiering as of late?
>>150737621They do animation, duhhh
>>150743724It's a working formula because showrunners and writers are endlessly replaceable and disposable. Behind every guy with a dream and outline for the next big hit...there are about a thousand more behind him waiting fir their big chance. And about 100K more behind them with a vague idea and willingness to try. The fact that there are soooooo many people willing and waiting to get in the industry and make their concept real means the studio execs can be as callous and uncaring as they want because "People who want to make their Show" is the most perfectly renewable resource on Earth. You can fire ten of them today and replace all ten tomorrow. So it inspires a level of arrogance in the executives that it really doesn't matter who they hire as long as they keep the revenue flowing. it doesn't matter how shitty they treat them since no amount of bad treatment is going to have others walking away, they will all jump at the opportunity to replace the last guy that was treated like shit.
>>150745648No they don't.
>>150745038Yes that was during the Animation Guild strike. The imagery started popping up during the SAG/Writers strike a year earlier since the AG negotiations were coming up so they wanted to ride on that same wave of popularity. There are barely any new cartoons because of that and the other issues mentioned earlier. Animation is always the first thing studios cut back on when times are bad since it's more expensive with the largest crews, and the lowest priority for studios.>Every studio was doing badly since streaming was working at a loss, >Studios starting in 23' were cutting back on all productions in anticipation for the Writer's strike so almost nothing was greenlit>Strike lasted a lot longer than anticipated seriously hurting the holiday 23' production plan>At the end of it all, streaming is even less profitable for them since they now have to pay writer royalties for streamed content similar to cable broadcast, plus barely any new content for the later half of 2023>Everyone is behind schedule and studios are worse off for the really bad summer and holiday 23' outputs.>Animation strike happensAnimation Guild strike happened at a weird time since it occurred about a year after the studios cut all projects and the people striking were mostly out of work. Typically they need some kind of leverage like there are 10+ projects mid production right now and the people working on them go on strike and the studios have to negotiate so they can get their people back to work. But the AG did it when there was barely any work at all, with most strikers were unemployed. Studios did not really have to treat them, just wait them out which is what they did.
>>150741752even if AI did everything that was promised it would fail as a businessnobody's going to watch your ai-generated masterpiece because everyone is too busy making their own ai-generated masterpieces. and any attempt by businesses to monopolize it will cause a massive shitshow and will be undercut by some furry in Idaho releasing a free open-source model.AI has no place in the business world. it's a novelty, a hobby. it's a toy.
>>150746350They immediately fucked up all ability to monetize AI animation by releasing it for free to everyone the minute it was kinda sorta ready. So everyone churned out their own slop, some of it better than the studio crap, and it also shaped the public view of it as a free to use toy for anyone, which kills it's capacity to be considered a shiny new technology for the big elite studios. Executives look down on it as a free public thing, consumers look down on it as a free to use public thing. This is before we get around to the camp that hates it on basic principle and refuses to humor it. The people who do humor it already view it as a low class common man thing.
>>150737621>why there's so much anonymous posting with how they're the reason the industry is in dire straits right now?If this is the group I'm thinking of then what I recall they partnered with a group that wanted to get more women into animation, and that group basically took control of the guild and stopped them from helping their male members being treated poorly and didn't fight for them when they were being sacked, then took advantage of the seasoned animators quitting/getting sacked replaced them with cheaper, inexperienced women.I might be wrong and/or there might be other stuff that's happened subsequently, feel free to correct me.
>>150738397>they just don’t want to because they know how to take advantage of artistsvery few people can do what those artists and animators do, so if they want to work in that career, they have no negotiating power. they can't just hire some non union retards to fill in. striking will always hurt animators more than the companies they work for.
It's funny really because the conditions for japanese animators are absolutely fucking insane due to a lack of unionisation, but the only really good animation comes from Japan anyway.You basically cannot win.
>>150747086If you mean WIA then kind of...They started a mentorship program that by late 2017 became pretty much the only means for a student or an up and comer to actually be capable of getting their foot in the door. It is incredibly hard for someone with no real history to get that first step and tends to take years for most people. WIA made a very easy step up program for new blood, but it very quickly turned into Twitter friends helping Twitter friends. by 2018 it was very obvious twitter friends helping twitter friends. And it essentially made Twitter into the primary means of actually getting a job at all. Due to the fact that it was primarily a means of newcomers to get their foot in the door, studios did take advantage of that and replaced seasoned employees with brand new inexperienced people for much much lower wages. Since a fresh student looking to land their first gig will never negotiate salaries at all, they will accept the first offer that comes up and Studios (Disney TVA!) were all too happy to take full advantage of this while hiding behind the excuse of they are helping previously underprivileged and marginalized groups get into the workplace and level the playing field with all those rich affluent white males etc etc. Then a solid majority of the hires were rich affluent white women with zero experience. It kind of fizzled out by 2021ish
>>150748784I remember it being mostly a twitter friends club. It popped up on Linkedin a lot too around the same time. I think it fizzled out when they started inviting everyone, including men and the whole function sort of fell apart when the mentors were not getting gigs any longer so they were not going to go out of their way to replace themselves by propping up graduates into jobs that they themselves want.
Damn, thats crazy
saving an interesting thread
So this jobless epidemic with the industry is only temporary then, right? It'll bounce back in a couple of years and the job market will be like 2010 all over again, right?!
bump
>>150737621>they're the reason the industry is in dire straits right now?I assume industry shills.
>>150750785It will bounce back as soon as studios figure out how to monetize old and cheap content again. Cable was great for it since the licensing to other company owned channels and advertising bucks paid for just about everything while DVD sales also made damn sure every single thing Hollywood churned out eventually turned a profit within 3 years every single time. Until then...naah... things are kind of fucked with the entertainment industry divided up between a dozen private owned streaming platforms that only get a fraction of the viewerbase and cannot even come close to bringing in cable revenue. Nobody wants to make a bigger move because it might ruin any studio that tries so we are mired in safe betting nostalgia and known IPs. So nothing is going to change from the current status quo unless there is a new technology shift or some amazing new thing that basically replaces cable and costs about the same as cable too ($100+ a month) and has 80% or more of the total viewership glued to it.
>>150750785Every industry guy that was saying shit like >Don't worry, Hollywood has setbacks all the time, this is nothing new>Just stick it out and give it time, things will get better>This is normal, there are lulls every 20 or so years...They all quit saying this stuff about a year ago. Seems most of them are no longer assuming things will bounce right back to where they were in 2018. Pic related was one of the most positive guys around leaving videos about how things will get better eventually for a few years. He gave up, moved to Georgia and is now teaching at SCAD.
>>150737621What do they do though?
>>150739170Corporations are legally obligated to maximize profits at the expense of both customers and employees.
>>150739388I'll take a union that protects everyone, even lazy assholes, over being totally at the mercy of unchecked corporate bullshit. Like, in terms of lesser of two evils the former is that by an order of magnitude.>>150739889Corporate greed is a hell of a drug.
