JAM Media Reviews

Over time the nice feel and energy declined to high demands, tight deadlines and little support beyond technical. Easily argued mis-management made this bottle-necks (bad choices in pre-production with overly ambitious ideas that didn't produce word class results, under staffing/ lack of resources for this, bad rigs etc etc) and the tone taken with production workers was at times severe to demand over-time, with implied threats regarding pay, where the vast majority of staff were giving it as much as they could. It was rare to have much in the way of guidance or a 'learning' environment- it became very much about crunching scenes to the point of only the (many) technical (issues with rigs) in scenes were flagged, so very little room for personal growth as an animator, which was particularly disappointing when the animation supervisor who was present for most projects was a highly skilled and effective animator who was able to set animators on the right path if they were stumped with a particular bit of animation in very occasional moments and give valuable, long term advice. I get having support all the time isn't possible for a lot of emplyees were quotas exist but at least having some sense of there being a climb upwards in skills and scope for employees might encourage keener, better work not in future but present also, instead of hard-assness when your scheduling fails. Which leads to; Massive conflict of interests that saw a graduate 'junior director' direct shorts, review the work of far more experienced animators, animate preferable scenes in particular productions (not skilled animator), while other keen, production level workers who had shorts funded externally by actual schemes had their projects pushed entirely to over time and much less attention given. In essence, one employee had all the space to develop and learn, the rest did not.