Patrick Maté
In this month's issue:
 |
This issue of The Peg-Board is also available online in Adobe Acrobat format, as published in print. Click the icon at left for the Acrobat file. |
Over a thousand people came to celebrate the holidays at our annual party on Friday, December 8 at the Pickwick Center in Burbank.
The festivities started at 6 pm and went at full throttle until midnight. The Guild handed out over eight hundred Christmas presents at the door and collected (so far) almost $2,200 for the Motion Picture and Television Fund and the ASIFA Animation Archive.
The Motion Picture and Television Fund offers programs and charitable services to enrich the lives of people in our entertainment community. The ASIFA Animation Archive is a museum and library for the benefit of the animation community, students and general public.
The Animation Guild will be matching donations until December 31. So,
if you didn't have a chance to donate at the door, we urge you to consider
sending us a donation, by check made out to the Motion Picture and Television
Fund and/or the ASIFA Animation Archive.
On November 30, members working at Disney's theatrical feature division under the so-called Secret Lab contract unanimously ratified a three-year deal, effective November 1, 2006 to October 31, 2009.
The new contract was negotiated in October by a committee of TAG members, Guild rep Steve Hulett and IATSE representatives, and was unanimously recommended to the members. This particular labor agreement is with the IATSE, our parent labor organization, and has been in effect since 2000.
The new contract offers conditions very similar to those under our Guild CBA, including:
Congratulations to the member volunteers and labor reps who populated our committee, and thanks to the management reps who helped make this a short and successful negotiation.
From the Business RepresentativeIn the July Peg-Board we showed a graph of employment over the last twenty years, titled "The animation roller coaster". It's not the first time life in our industry has been compared to a gut-wrenching up-and-down thrill ride.
In theatrical features, big employment follows big grosses; then the reverse happens when box office goes south. Television employment is dictated by the number of shows ordered, and of course the budgets. Work on direct-to-video features is usually months long, then it's on to another gig. Only Disney direct-to-video sequels offer work that might go on a year or more. But then, the Mouse House's budgets are way higher.
Over the years, business models have shape-changed like sci-fi villains as corporate income has flowed, then ebbed in the animation marketplace. When I started as a worker bee in the industry, the 'toon landscape was relatively simple.
For television, ABC, CBS and NBC were the ball game; hiring and layoffs followed the networks' buying season. Every animator, board artist and cel painter knew that when the Big Three gave their orders for a new season of shows, it was back to Hanna-Barbera, Filmation and Ruby Spears for six months of work. After that, there was a half-year's unemployment and spotty freelance until the next season arrived. Likewise for theatrical features: one full-length cartoon every few years, the producer of which was just about always spelled D-I-S-N-E-Y. Decade after decade, all this was as predictable as Southern California's sunshine.
Today, of course, all has changed. In television, seasonal employment has blurred if not disappeared altogether. Work slows down during the holidays and picks up in the Spring, but there are no hard and fast schedules anymore. Multiple distribution pipelines -- cable, network, DVDs, foreign co-productions -- demand different requirements and deadlines, so artists might work for three months, six months, eighteen months on a series, then scramble to find their next project. No longer are six months of work guaranteed based on network buys for Saturday morning cartoons, followed by six months off, and then back again. And the Mouse House is no longer the only feature player in town.
Theatrical feature employment, as always, moves to a different rhythm. Long ago at Disney, I used to watch management lay off assistants, inbetweeners and non-supervisory animators the instant the latest feature project ended. That changed in the era of Katzenberg and Eisner, when jettisoning production personnel stopped due to multiple, overlapping productions. Long-term personal service contracts became the norm.
By the mid-1990s, with Disney, Fox, Warners and DreamWorks fighting over a relatively small talent pool, wages skyrocketed, and twenty-two year-olds fresh out of CalArts were making two thousand dollars a week. Minimums for trainees were forty percent below what Disney was offering. They hired a trainee for fifteen hundred, then complained to me about paying so much. (My response: "It's a free country. Pay less if you want to.")
Those days are now long gone, and guaranteed employment in multi-year personal service contracts pretty much over. Disney is phasing out PSCs altogether, reverting to an earlier, pre-Eisner model, when every artist worked "week to week."
And that's not the only reversion. Sony Imageworks has long used a two-tiered production model, with permanent staff (Tier A) working year-round and temporary production hires (Tier B) hired to get out the big, labor-intensive assignments. This is known as "the visual effects model," but it's similar to what Disney Feature Animation did with its lower-level animation staff from the 1960s to the 1980s. Word circulates that another animation studio will soon adopt this hiring model.
What this means for the working artist/animator is, long-term employment at one company is the exception instead of the rule. As President Emeritus Tom Sito often says, to be in animation means you'll work for a baker's dozen companies through the course of your career. The one-studio-for-life model, being one of the'"Nine Old Men" under a benevolent studio mogul, is gone. The seasonal work model -- six on and six off, year after year -- is also a memory. Now it's our skill sets, our portfolios/reels and our networks of professional friends that are important to career viability.
We'd better get used to it, and plan accordingly.
-- Steve Hulett
From the PresidentA funny thing happened on the way to the foregone conclusion that the public was sick of C. A. T. A. P.s -- Computer-Animated Talking-Animal Pictures. In November, yet another C. A. T. A. P. dominated at the box office. All year we've been reading the dire and knowing and repetitive and superficial news articles decrying the supposed glut. It makes one wonder why these newspapers don't save some time and money and just keep reprinting the same article. (Or maybe they were?)
Against all the "expert" opinions, another C. A. T. A. P. put up huge numbers (as in a $42 million opening). Happy Feet bested James Bond, and it crushed the contention that we (the animation industry) had long ago maxed out our audience with too much product.
None of this is to say that making a C. A. T. A. P. is a guaranteed success. Lord knows they're ridiculously expensive and difficult to make, and there have been some genuine failures this year. But what have we really learned?
The conventional wisdom was that, for the viewing public, animation is animation. That they see all these films as a big, blurred whole. That's it's a zero-sum game at best, and if you put out too many animated films, they'll just cannibalize each other, or, worse, the audience will fatigue and ignore all of them. That, clearly, is false.
The real lesson is the same thing that many of us have been saying for a long time: Audiences respond to appealing movies, not to filmmaking techniques. Animation, whether CG or hand drawn or stop motion or some crazy combination, succeeds not because the audience is wowed by a new technology, but because a film promises to give them what they want for a couple of hours -- escape, excitement, entertainment, emotional catharsis.
With animation, we have an ideal set of techniques to provide that. And
based on the repeated successes of animated films this year, by a wide variety
of studios, I have a feeling we'll get the chance to keep doing that for
a while.
-- Kevin Koch
a non-denominational celebration of departed friends from our animation communityÝ:
Dawn Benedict
* Ed Benedict * Nicolette Bonnell * Walerian Borowczyk
Harvey Bullock * Marlene Burkhart * Kimie Calvert
* Brad Case
Elizabeth Case Zwicker * John Collins * Suzi Dalton
* Barbara Dayyan
Gloria Estrada * Blanche Germanetti Phifer * Peter Hawkins
Edward Herskovitz * Thomas Hickson * Libby Hilberman
* Rin Inumaru
Tony Jay * Patrick Kenney * Don Knotts
* Pavel Koutecky * Bill Kovacs
Bill Lorencz * Dennis Marks * Norm McCabe
* John McCartney
Donna Paiker * Bob Papenbrook * Sid Raymond
* Lloyd Rees * Tim Rooney
Joe Simon * Terry Smith * Helen Soule *
Maureen Stapleton * Jan Svochak
Alex Toth * Myron Waldman * Shirley Walker
* Dennis Weaver * Lennie Weinrib
Robert "Tiger" West * Shelley Winters
* Berny Wolf
Saturday, February 3, 2007
Food and refreshments, 1 pm * Memoriams, 2 pm
Hollywood Heritage Museum (Lasky-DeMille Barn)
2100 N. Highland (across from Hollywood Bowl), Hollywood
The Afternoon is free of charge and is open to all; no RSVPs necessary.
Ý The Afternoon Of Remembrance will honor those in the animation community who passed away in 2006. This list is not final; it is accurate to our records as of 12/12/2006. If you know of someone who should be on this list, please contact Jeff Massie at (818) 766-7151.
Earlier this month, we completed our application for reimbursement for CG skills training at Studio Arts in Los Angeles. The Guild is joining forces with five other Hollywood unions to request training reimbursement through the Contract Services Administration Training Trust Fund (CSATTF), an employer-sponsored training program, and the state Employment Training Panel (ETP).
Under the program, eligible Guild members who take Studio Arts classes will be eligible for full or partial class reimbursement during the grant period from February 2007 to January 2008.
We expect to hear back from CSATTF by late January or early February. Further details will be published in the Peg-Board and on our member e-mail list.
Taking classes on unemployment
If you're collecting unemployment insurance, you have a sixteen-week window in which you can declare to the EDD that you are going to school while collecting benefits.
The Venice Skills program, offered through Studio Arts, allows you to receive instruction and tutoring in software such as Maya or complete other individualized learning programs in other software for only $75 for a full twenty-week semester. This program begins January 8, 2007 but has open enrollment until June 22, meaning you can join at any time.
To top it off, if you should complete the self-paced, twenty-week schedule of activities you will be eligible for demo reel services, which will aid you in preparing a demonstration reel for seeking work.
For more information, contact Studio Arts at (323) 227-4776.
A newly revised version of the Summary Plan Description (SPD), that pithy tome that explains the ins and outs of your 401(k) Plan, is on its way to Plan participants' mailboxes as you read this. We suggest you take a look at it, and let us know if you have any questions about how your 401(k) Plan works.
The 401(k) Plan Trustees have completed their annual review of the Plan's investment options. Effective January 3, 2007 the Plan will offer a Mid Cap Equity Index fund.
The Mid Cap Equity Index will replace the AIM Mid Cap Core Equity fund. On January 31, 2007, all TAG 401(k) Plan funds still sitting in the AIM Mid Cap Core Equity fund will be automatically "rolled over" to the Mid Cap Equity Index.
So if you don't want this to happen automatically, now is the time to change your investment directions. To do so, log into the Mass Mutual website or call (800) 743-5274, using your PIN number. The MassMutual website will have detailed prospectuses and information on all the current investment options.
If you have any questions, contact Marta Strohl-Rowand at our office, (818) 766-7151 ext. 101.
In the next couple of weeks you'll receive our annual wage survey questionnaire, in which we ask members to anonymously share with us information on what they're being paid to work in animation and CG.
The survey results are used by members to negotiate their rates of pay, and by the Guild office to help determine where wages are and where they're going. So please fill out the survey and return it in the postage-paid envelope. Thank you!
Contents © 2006 by TAG Local 839 IATSE.
All rights reserved. Publications of bona fide labor organizations
may reprint articles from this newsletter so long as attribution is given.
Permission is also given to distribute this newsletter electronically so
long as the entire contents are distributed, including this notice.