Last Thursday, Rhode Island-based 38 Studios laid off its entire staff of nearly 400 people, which presumably included many artists and animators. The unceremonious layoff notice sent to their employees can be read on Gamasutra.

The game studio was started by former baseball player Curt Schilling, and had received a $75 million loan guarantee from the state of Rhode Island (population 1 million), which gambled that Schilling’s company would bring high-paying tech jobs to the state. The company managed to slip out one game before collapsing, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, which both looks and sounds like the creation of a sweaty-palmed, pimple-faced high school student.

Amalur shipped 1.2 million copies in its first 90 days (according to Schilling). The governor of Rhode Island, Lincoln Chafee, said in a press conference a couple days ago that the game would have needed to sell more than twice as many copies just to break even.

There’s a lot of lessons to be learned here, the first of which would be that just because you know how to throw a ball doesn’t entitle you to tens of millions of taxpayer dollars so that you can pretend to run a video game technology company. Schilling just made it that much harder for legitimate video game entrepreneurs to receive any type of investment for their companies.

Internships are addressed with increasing frequency on Cartoon Brew. While there is value to the concept of internships, too many studios use internships as a means to free labor for their animated projects. The practice is both unethical and illegal.

Time published a piece earlier this month suggesting that the era of unpaid internships may be coming to an end. It’s a good introduction to the issues surrounding interning and a must-read for any student.

The growing backlash to unpaid internships is not limited to just the animation industry. Companies who are accused of wrongdoing in the Time article include movie studios (Fox Searchlight), TV shows (PBS’s The Charlie Rose Show), and magazines (Harper’s Bazaar). More and more workers who have been victimized are filing lawsuits against their employers, a trend that could eventually pressure the US government to more strictly enforce labor laws regarding interns.

If you work in the animation industry and feel you have been subjected to an unfair labor situation, please contact me (names and contact info will be kept confidential). I can’t follow up on every request, but Cartoon Brew will continue to bring light to labor issues as much as possible.

(Thanks to Jaime Ekkens for the link; photo of girl via Shutterstock)

Animator Ken Harris becomes a meme. Via Reddit. (Ironically, Harris was one of the fastest animators at Warner Bros. and would often leave work early to play tennis. Does anybody have that luxury nowadays?)

The New York Times published a piece about Disney’s consulting division called the Disney Institute. The aim of the unit is to teach other companies and organizations how to behave more like the Disney corporation, and everybody is partaking in the lessons from United Airlines to the country of South Africa:

Desperate for new ways to connect with consumers, an increasing array of industries and organizations are paying Disney to teach them how to become, well, more like Disney. Revenue from the Disney Institute has doubled over the last three years, according to Disney, powered in part by its aggressive pursuit of new business. Over the last two years alone, 300 school systems across the country have sought its advice. Other clients range from very large entities — Häagen-Dazs International, United Airlines, the country of South Africa — to small ones: three Subway restaurants in Maine, a Michigan hair salon, a Boston youth-counseling center.

(Thanks, Rob Kohr)

There’s a price to pay for working in visual effects, and we’re not talking about the money that students need to pay John Textor to work at Digital Domain. Many artists are faced with paying the ultimate price—a matter of life and death.

The LA Times published an important article yesterday by Richard Verrier about the health problems faced by visual effects artists and how they’re fighting back. The stories aren’t pretty:

After midnight, when the coffee and Red Bull had worn off, Sari Gennis and her co-workers would take a brisk stroll to make it through their graveyard shift. For four months straight, often seven days a week, a team of visual effects artists worked 12-hour shifts to complete the 3-D conversion of movie blockbuster Titanic. Gennis said the long hours aggravated a severe arthritis condition. She’d already had both knees replaced, and needed a third surgery, but couldn’t afford to take time off for the operation.

or:

The matte painter, who asked not to be identified for fear of damaging his career, said he nearly died when he fell asleep at the wheel after working 75 consecutive days, up to 17 hours a day, doing visual effects work on National Treasure: Book of Secrets. The money was good — $1,000 a day — but the long hours were taking a toll. Three months after his car accident, he began experiencing chest pains and was rushed to the hospital. He said emergency room nurses initially didn’t believe he was having a heart attack because he was only 37. As a freelancer, he didn’t qualify for the company insurance plan to cover his $100,000 in medical bills. His employer, the now-defunct Asylum Visual Effects, refused to hire him back.

Meanwhile, on Friday afternoon, union representatives hosted an information session for Sony Pictures Imageworks artists who are pushing to unionize the studio, a story that we covered last week on Cartoon Brew. The Animation Guild reported that the meeting was a success with over 75 Imageworks employees attending.

So will this turn out to be the VFX Spring as some are suggesting? There’s a lot of positive sentiment right now, but no one is under the illusion that working conditions will improve overnight. Animation Guild rep Steve Hulett noted on his blog that the Imageworks meeting was “only the first few steps of a long hike, but we’re going to do whatever it takes to reach out and get visual effects artists and technical directors under the big union tent.”

Walt Disney Studios chairman Richard Ross was forced to resign after less than three years on the job. “I no longer believe the chairman role is the right professional fit for me,” Ross said in a company-wide email. He had taken over the spot in 2009, after spearheading the Disney Channel’s growth with properties like Hannah Montana and High School Musical. Though Ross didn’t greenlight John Carter, the film’s spectacular failure resulting in a writedown of $200 million played a role in his departure. Deadline Hollywood reported that Ross’s own slate of theatrical features hasn’t debuted yet.

The studio’s live-action units will feel the impact of Ross’s departure more acutely than Disney Feature Animation and Pixar, which are still overseen by Ed Catmull and John Lasseter. In fact, the most notable animation-related decision of Ross’s tenure had nothing to do with Disney Feature or Pixar. Ross will be remembered for shutting down Robert Zemeckis’s mo-cap studio ImageMovers following last year’s Disney bomb Mars Needs Moms.

No replacement has been named, though plenty of names are being floated in the media. Lasseter’s name has been mentioned, though he is considered a longshot for the position.

Read more about Ross’s departure at Deadline Hollywood and New York Times.

The New York Times has a piece about the nasty in-fighting between the two families who own control the Archie Comics universe, which also includes properties like Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Josie the Pussycats. In short, one side—Jonathan Goldwater—wants to bring aboard outside investors and get Hollywood involved, while the other side—Nancy Silberkleit—wants to preserve family ownership of the company. The animosities have led to accusations of sexual harassment, defecating dogs, and punctured car tires. Currently, there’s a restraining order against Ms. Silberkleit, though she was recently fined for violating that order and showing up at the company’s headquarters accompanied by an ex-football player.

As it stands, it’s remarkable that Archie hasn’t already succumbed to corporate media consolidation. Few classic comic and animation properties are owned independently nowadays. Warner Bros. owns DC, Disney owns Marvel, and Classic Media owns Rocky and Bullwinkle, Gumby, Underdog, and the Harvey Comics library, just to name a few.

Archie Comics remains one of the rare holdouts, along with Alvin and the Chipmunks, which is owned by the creator’s son, Ross Bagdasarian Jr., and his wife Janice Karman. In a day and age when few mainstream cartoon creators even have the option of owning their creations, it’s nice to see an independently held company overseeing such a classic group of characters—even if its owners are fighting each other to the bitter end.

(Illustration by Mark Matcho)

This past Monday, John Textor sent a letter to Digital Domain employees, saying that he chose his words poorly, but didn’t make any indication that he was backing away from his plan to charge students to intern at his studio.

Textor’s rationale for making students pay to work at Digital Domain is that he felt strongly about keeping jobs in North America. That’s why yesterday he announced a co-production deal with Chinese company Beijing Galloping Horse Film Co., Ltd. which will serve as co-producer and distributor of Digital Domain’s first feature The Legend of Tembo.

It’s easy to understand why Textor is so enthused about China. The Chinese government is giving him free land and Chinese investors are handing over $50 million for Digital Domain to build a motion capture facility. With a deal like that, students will have to pay Textor a lot more money to work for free if they want those jobs to stay in North America.

Keep reading for the full text of Textor’s email sent to Digital Domain employees.
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