“Clarke blamed Brexit for making it harder to bring over European animators and for the loss of access to vital European media funding. He also lamented the UK government’s decision to stop the Young Audiences Content Fund, despite its success in stimulating homegrown production.”
Plenty of studios are able to hire artists from outside the UK without too much trouble, the main reason studios are moving or setting up other offices is for tax credits. It’s a competitive industry which follows incentivised government schemes which reduces tax bills which cuts costs.
Good old Brexit, at least we are more prosperous than before and have less immigrants without filthy Brussels interfering in everything.
Oh wait…
From the animators point of view relocating to the canaries sounds pretty good to me.
Can’t be that many well paying jobs that allow you to live and work in the Canaries year round.
Anecdotally, my partner works in animation but does so by working for a US company but lives in the UK. I’m told that the comparative wage she would get in the UK would be a lot smaller compared to the union wage she gets working for the US. I expect that the decision to move abroad will be a combo of tax and the fact the UK is chronically underpaying skilled professional jobs for some vague reasons about inflation.
Tons of businesses are projected to leave the UK this year. Last year the projection was over 1k.
if we all leave who will pay the tories to steal from us?
Theres an honest disdain for the arts in the UK as it not being seen as a “proper job” or a “bullshit job”. It’s honestly draining, and it leads to a lot of lowballing in the sector for work too.
I am intrigued by the comment regarding UK graduates not being employment-ready and lacking the needed skills. This is not dissimilar to what is reported in software development – graduates are found to have a lot of theoretical knowledge but little experience in practical application in a likely workplace environment – and in game development, where students have been encouraged to be generalists and lack specific skills for the roles they then apply to, or have also missed out on practical application and the use of certain tools.
This is usually countered with “university is for learning, not employment! Students have enriched minds, that’s what matters” and that graduates must themselves fill in the gaps between what Uni teaches and what they actually need to make themselves employable. Unfortunately the option to take another year to self teach, or take unrelated jobs while trying to specialise in your free time, isn’t always practical, especially when you’re already 40k in debt with an unemployable degree.
Can’t there be some balance, especially in degrees where it’s fairly obvious the students are hoping to be paid for their knowledge someday? I appreciate Ancient Philosophy doesn’t need an overhaul to ensure graduates have the relevant employable skills, but video game development and web development have a fairly high percentage of students who are hoping to get a job in it, one would think.
Can’t even make stop-motion animation in this country without getting fucking in the ass by the Tories.
On the subject of the British economy, Sean Clarke said “It’s aard, man!”
I mean I just would at this point.
Let the UK collapse i’d say. Only then will we shake of this English Exceptionalism.
Look forward to someone calling Chicken Run woke marxist propaganda on Question Time this week then
England has always struggled with this, good to know you twats managed to make it worse.
Studios being given “tax cuts” to stay in a country is just blackmail under a new name
Tories; Defending the culture of the UK, by driving it overseas, one creative sector at a time.
Serious question. If an entire industry (regardless of country) needs government subsidies to survive, when do people look to the private companies making millions off the back of it to fund it properly and pay good wages, rather than blaming the government for pulling the free money?
P.S. I still hate the Tories, just asking a question.
How can I spin this to blame it on the war in Ukraine ?
Well, that’s not the (should have been) headline I was expecting today: “Tories kill Wallace and Gromit.”
Not so much The Wrong Trousers, but definitely the wrong political party at the worst possible time.
How shit does it have to get before we try and actually reverse Brexit?
It’ll be hard, but at the moment we are on the path to poverty.
Well folks. Brexit just priced Wallace and Gromit out of the country. They’ll need to get their Wensleydale shipped now.
Only the uk could sanction itself with brexit and still think it was a good idea lmaoooo
As someone who’s tried their hardest to crack into the UK stop motion industry these are the same issues I’ve heard for over a decade.
It is unfortunately a very small industry though and very ‘gig’ based nearly every studio in media is in a constant ‘balloon’ phase they grow per project then release their freelancers which is sometimes upwards of 80% of their workforce at the end, this is the same for all the media industries here (gaming,film, tv, animation etc) and clients don’t necessarily value all the costs involved.
I am often hurt when I hear that there’s no home grown talent available, knowing how many times I’ve applied to the companies myself, but there’s simply only 1 or 2 positions available and there are upwards of 200 new students applying for it each year, plus existing animators, odds simply aren’t in your favour.
I’ve been highly considering the Aardman Academy already but would need some guarantee of income available at the end, which I already know is very slim. I would have truly appreciated sponsorship and apprenticeships available for my degree but these have all but disappeared unfortunately for media (and most other) employers so they do end up scratching their heads why no one is a fully trained dedicated lighting and camera engineer with professional production experience available to start yesterday.
Years back there was a budget tax break for animation announced, however it ended up being essentially impossible to get and only truly applied to feature films and still required many legal hurdles, to the point that the legal fees outweighed the savings of the tax break I know of a handful of productions that went through with it, none who did it again.
There’s companies like cartoon saloon (wolfwalkers, song of the sea, secret of kells) who’s productions were multinational collaborations which greatly benefited from EU help and working alongside European studios and benefits available to them to help achieve various aspects of the film, this has been completely decimated since and much much harder to achieve if at all.
And to commentors, CGI isn’t “cheaper” or necessarily faster, certainly not from any western companies.
Aardman are also heavily involved with CGI based animation also so they’re not a 1 trick pony.
Thankfully the industry workers are some of the nicest people ever and will usually engage with anyone on twitter (honestly animators twitter is like a whole other nice cosy world, you never see the vile vitriol trolls) so if anyone wanted to know more you could tag anyone on there and get a response
About five years ago, I had an interview with Aardman for a tech artist role. Narrowly missed out on the position to another candidate. Now I live in USA. As much as I liked being in the UK, the salaries are atrocious in our industry. There is no way I would accept a low ball UK salary when I can earn three times the money and have better weather, as much as I miss UK culture. It’s sad really, because there used to be so many opportunities and a competitive market. When I graduated as a 3D artist in 1998, I got a starting salary of £18k. Junior artists now get closer to £12k, less than half when you figure in inflation. But UK folk keep voting for non-progressive governments so you do it to yourself.
25 comments
“Clarke blamed Brexit for making it harder to bring over European animators and for the loss of access to vital European media funding. He also lamented the UK government’s decision to stop the Young Audiences Content Fund, despite its success in stimulating homegrown production.”
Brexit, the gift that keeps on giving.
one of the slightly surprising facts i know (i.e. read it on the internet) is north korea has a fairly successful amination industry.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_animation
Plenty of studios are able to hire artists from outside the UK without too much trouble, the main reason studios are moving or setting up other offices is for tax credits. It’s a competitive industry which follows incentivised government schemes which reduces tax bills which cuts costs.
Good old Brexit, at least we are more prosperous than before and have less immigrants without filthy Brussels interfering in everything.
Oh wait…
From the animators point of view relocating to the canaries sounds pretty good to me.
Can’t be that many well paying jobs that allow you to live and work in the Canaries year round.
Anecdotally, my partner works in animation but does so by working for a US company but lives in the UK. I’m told that the comparative wage she would get in the UK would be a lot smaller compared to the union wage she gets working for the US. I expect that the decision to move abroad will be a combo of tax and the fact the UK is chronically underpaying skilled professional jobs for some vague reasons about inflation.
Tons of businesses are projected to leave the UK this year. Last year the projection was over 1k.
if we all leave who will pay the tories to steal from us?
Theres an honest disdain for the arts in the UK as it not being seen as a “proper job” or a “bullshit job”. It’s honestly draining, and it leads to a lot of lowballing in the sector for work too.
I am intrigued by the comment regarding UK graduates not being employment-ready and lacking the needed skills. This is not dissimilar to what is reported in software development – graduates are found to have a lot of theoretical knowledge but little experience in practical application in a likely workplace environment – and in game development, where students have been encouraged to be generalists and lack specific skills for the roles they then apply to, or have also missed out on practical application and the use of certain tools.
This is usually countered with “university is for learning, not employment! Students have enriched minds, that’s what matters” and that graduates must themselves fill in the gaps between what Uni teaches and what they actually need to make themselves employable. Unfortunately the option to take another year to self teach, or take unrelated jobs while trying to specialise in your free time, isn’t always practical, especially when you’re already 40k in debt with an unemployable degree.
Can’t there be some balance, especially in degrees where it’s fairly obvious the students are hoping to be paid for their knowledge someday? I appreciate Ancient Philosophy doesn’t need an overhaul to ensure graduates have the relevant employable skills, but video game development and web development have a fairly high percentage of students who are hoping to get a job in it, one would think.
Can’t even make stop-motion animation in this country without getting fucking in the ass by the Tories.
On the subject of the British economy, Sean Clarke said “It’s aard, man!”
I mean I just would at this point.
Let the UK collapse i’d say. Only then will we shake of this English Exceptionalism.
Look forward to someone calling Chicken Run woke marxist propaganda on Question Time this week then
England has always struggled with this, good to know you twats managed to make it worse.
Studios being given “tax cuts” to stay in a country is just blackmail under a new name
Tories; Defending the culture of the UK, by driving it overseas, one creative sector at a time.
Serious question. If an entire industry (regardless of country) needs government subsidies to survive, when do people look to the private companies making millions off the back of it to fund it properly and pay good wages, rather than blaming the government for pulling the free money?
P.S. I still hate the Tories, just asking a question.
How can I spin this to blame it on the war in Ukraine ?
Well, that’s not the (should have been) headline I was expecting today: “Tories kill Wallace and Gromit.”
Not so much The Wrong Trousers, but definitely the wrong political party at the worst possible time.
How shit does it have to get before we try and actually reverse Brexit?
It’ll be hard, but at the moment we are on the path to poverty.
Well folks. Brexit just priced Wallace and Gromit out of the country. They’ll need to get their Wensleydale shipped now.
Only the uk could sanction itself with brexit and still think it was a good idea lmaoooo
As someone who’s tried their hardest to crack into the UK stop motion industry these are the same issues I’ve heard for over a decade.
It is unfortunately a very small industry though and very ‘gig’ based nearly every studio in media is in a constant ‘balloon’ phase they grow per project then release their freelancers which is sometimes upwards of 80% of their workforce at the end, this is the same for all the media industries here (gaming,film, tv, animation etc) and clients don’t necessarily value all the costs involved.
I am often hurt when I hear that there’s no home grown talent available, knowing how many times I’ve applied to the companies myself, but there’s simply only 1 or 2 positions available and there are upwards of 200 new students applying for it each year, plus existing animators, odds simply aren’t in your favour.
I’ve been highly considering the Aardman Academy already but would need some guarantee of income available at the end, which I already know is very slim. I would have truly appreciated sponsorship and apprenticeships available for my degree but these have all but disappeared unfortunately for media (and most other) employers so they do end up scratching their heads why no one is a fully trained dedicated lighting and camera engineer with professional production experience available to start yesterday.
Years back there was a budget tax break for animation announced, however it ended up being essentially impossible to get and only truly applied to feature films and still required many legal hurdles, to the point that the legal fees outweighed the savings of the tax break I know of a handful of productions that went through with it, none who did it again.
There’s companies like cartoon saloon (wolfwalkers, song of the sea, secret of kells) who’s productions were multinational collaborations which greatly benefited from EU help and working alongside European studios and benefits available to them to help achieve various aspects of the film, this has been completely decimated since and much much harder to achieve if at all.
And to commentors, CGI isn’t “cheaper” or necessarily faster, certainly not from any western companies.
Aardman are also heavily involved with CGI based animation also so they’re not a 1 trick pony.
Thankfully the industry workers are some of the nicest people ever and will usually engage with anyone on twitter (honestly animators twitter is like a whole other nice cosy world, you never see the vile vitriol trolls) so if anyone wanted to know more you could tag anyone on there and get a response
About five years ago, I had an interview with Aardman for a tech artist role. Narrowly missed out on the position to another candidate. Now I live in USA. As much as I liked being in the UK, the salaries are atrocious in our industry. There is no way I would accept a low ball UK salary when I can earn three times the money and have better weather, as much as I miss UK culture. It’s sad really, because there used to be so many opportunities and a competitive market. When I graduated as a 3D artist in 1998, I got a starting salary of £18k. Junior artists now get closer to £12k, less than half when you figure in inflation. But UK folk keep voting for non-progressive governments so you do it to yourself.