PRO THOUGHTS: TOM BOX
What are the difficulties facing the VFX industry today?
“Awareness is Another issue: the bigger we can cast the net And make people know About career opportunities, the more raw talent can be nurtured” Tom Box, founder/managing director, Blue Zoo
The nature of the animation and VFX business is studios taking on big projects, then having to crew up and hire people with contracts that last the duration of the project. As much as studios try and retain talent across projects, it’s not always viable, so artists frequently move from studio to studio working on a variety of big projects. This creates constant vacancies at studios and huge opportunity for artists.
When we post these vacancies, it’s not uncommon to get hundreds of applications. Unfortunately, over 90 per cent of the applicant’s showreels do not demonstrate the skills we need to create work to the standard required by our studio and our clients; I hear similar figures from other recruiters at world-class studios in London.
About 98 per cent of the total applicants have been educated via the university route. There are some superb universities who are developing incredibly talented artists and animators, and the quality of graduates is increasing every year. But that still leaves a huge portion who are now £40K in debt and unable to attain the job they trained for. So something is going wrong somewhere.
What could this be? Perhaps part of it is institutional. Learning is spread out over years and tailored to academia, but purposeful practice makes perfect, not writing dissertations. Animation is far more vocational than it is academic. Academia also requires students to make a short animation over many months as part of their qualification. The problem with this is you get to make a mistake once and quickly forget the lessons learnt. Surely a better option is to do lots of small exercises so you have a constant, iterative learning and improvement cycle. This is the main contributing factor as to how our animators at Blue Zoo go from good to great.
There is also a problem with teachers, or lack of. Universities find it incredibly hard to find skilled lecturers with recent industry experience, who also have a natural ability for teaching and nurturing talent. Having a passion for both animation and teaching does not always equate to being a great teacher who inspires students with contagious enthusiasm. A common suggestion of improvement is to emulate their French counterparts, but those courses are four or five years long (great if you are lucky enough to afford it!) and cull students from the course who don’t meet the quality expected. Why sacrifice your reputation when you can sacrifice a student! Hardly a progressive way forward.
What’s more frustrating is there is a huge skills shortage in the industry. There’s an abundance of vacancies and no shortage of applicants, but the recruiters are struggling to recruit. There has never been so much VFX and animation work flowing into the UK, with a non-stop flow of Marvel and Star Wars films and the new breed of online content platforms such as Netflix and Amazon pumping hundreds of millions into the system. We are in a new golden age of film and TV production. Why is this work coming to the UK? It’s a combination of the world-class workforce located here and the reputation of the studios they work in, and probably biggest of all: the UK tax incentives. This makes it a very costeffective place to get the work made, and works well for the government, generating £5 in taxes for every £1 in subsidy.
The big elephant in the room is Brexit. At the moment around 35 per cent of artists from most studios are from mainland Europe. If Brexit limits freedom of movement, studios will be of no choice but to shift the projects to countries that have