Professor Tom Sito, who teaches animation but has also animated, written, directed, and storyboarded cartoon features, shorts and commercials, imparts this:
One thing about reaching your Sixties, is that you now seriously begin to review the fruition of the plans you made at the beginning of your career. To see if all the nuts you squirreled away over the years were going to last you through the Autumn of your life.
I never seriously imagined I'd be the next Walt Disney and have theme parks in my name, or be Seth McFarlane and make millions. But I did buy into the Frank & Ollie model. That when you became an elder statesman animator, you would be more sought after then when a young man. That cherished ideal, unfortunately, has gone the way of the rotary phone.
So be it. As Ovid said "Omnias Mutantor" All things change.
I have my union pension, my USC pension, 401K, IAP, investments, and my tenure. And I love to teach and write. So God willing, as long as I am vertical, I will continue to do both.
I confess, I do think back to when I was Guild President, of all the non-union animators who thundered against me because I wanted their jobs to be unionized. I wanted all animation to be covered by union contracts across North America. For that I got such hateful e-mails, and passionate outrage. I was threatened with lawsuits, and I even got a death threat. Now Klasky Csupo, Saban and DIC are but footnotes in a TV history book. Those artists who are my age, many are now my friends. I can only hope they had set aside enough nuts for their own autumns.
You who are young and newly entering your professional life, If I can teach you anything, it is this. If you can't join a union, set aside something while you are in your key earning years, a retirement plan against the time you no longer are able to earn. It will creep up on you, unexpectedly. And don't rely on any one company to "reward" your years of loyalty. As they say in the Book of Elijah " Put not your trust in the word of Princes..."
Good Luck to you all.
When you jump into a career, you sometimes think that the trajectory will be ever upward. Unfortunately, sometimes it shoots sideways ... and occasionally (ach!) plummets. But the building blocks for job sustainability are straightforward:
Constantly train. Constantly strive for your best. Play well with others. (Because like it or not, studio politics are a constant. Take it from one who argued and shot his mouth off WAY too much.) When somebody tells you: "I don't play politics, nod amiably and remember that everyone plays ... whether they want to or not. It's like breathing air.
And when good times arrive, keep in mind that they are Tran. Si. Tory.
An old writer said to me a long time ago: "You sweat and struggle to make it, and then one day you have a job, future and a sustainable income, and you think: 'Ha! THIS is the way it was meant to be, and THIS is the way it's going to be!' Except it isn't. You're on top one day and then not on top three years later. And you take to heart the old maxim, 'Be nice to people on the way up because you'll meet them again on the way down.'"
When employees in the animation business hit their middle fifties, employment gets tougher. (Yes, there are exceptions and outliers). But I saw it happen to lots of folks - they hit fifty-six and suddenly they're unemployed for long stretches of time. I got lots of calls that went, "I worked steadily for thirty years and now I can't find work! What's up with that?"
What's up is high competition and the studios never-ending quest to keep wages as low as possible. In TV work, un-comped overtime is rampant. The supply of talent is higher than it's been in forever and, though the industry is bigger than it's ever been, thousands are clawing to get into it. Studio managers hire new college grads and many veterans suffer.
But quality and experience still win out much of the time. Veterans who bring a lot to the table get called after the project has blown up in the company's face and they need qualified people to pick up the pieces and glue the whole enterprise back together. Still, it's frustrating.
