Big Buckstar's Blog

First art piece of the year!! Decided to have some fun and design my new Starfinder pc Neeri!! 👾🪸🫧

LMAOOOO how much time do you have?

ANIMATION TAKES A LONG TIME. One 11 minute episode of animation on average takes about 9-12 months and most episodes are written, locked and done MONTHS sometimes even a year before they air. When people online think they have any bearing on what happens from one episode to the next, or even within a season, they don't.

"Western animators" aren't unskilled. I feel like there's a lot of shows and artists doing independently made projects that disproves that. You can often see it in the concept art as well! The reason some shows might look bad to you is because the tightening of deadlines and corporations trying to get a product as cheaply and quickly as possible. It's not from a lack of caring, we also want stuff to look pretty and good but we're often not given the opportunity to. And when stuff does look really good it's often at the expense of artists who do absurd amounts of overtime without getting paid.

Disney dgaf about the work you make while you're employed by them. They don't try to take and own everything you make in your personal time. It's a clause in our contracts that people on the outside frequently misinterpret to mean "Disney owns everything this artist makes". They use it defensively and it's mostly there to protect themselves.

In TV, when you're employed by a studio, you're not reaaaaally employed by the studio. We're more like contract workers for the specific show we're on. For example, if Big City Greens ever ends, I'm not guaranteed to stay at Disney, it's purely up to me to find a job elsewhere, Disney or otherwise. Whenever I say I work at DTVA everyone automatically assumes I've worked on like Amphibia or The Owl House or Moon Girl or other shows. I'm strictly contracted for BCG. Moving to other shows within the company while your contracted on another could be considered poaching and while not illegal, it's usually not allowed.

I've noticed this thing in the past decade where people get parasocial with showrunners and board artists specifically. We're like weirdly put on a pedestal and are seen as the people making the biggest decisions in a story. Animation is a HIGHLY collaborative industry and every production is built differently. Some showrunners literally just come up with the idea and are very uninvolved in production, some board artists have a say in the writing, some board artists just execute the script they're given, some writing decisions are quickly made in the final hour by a director and post-editor. It's rare that there is one person solely responsible for something and it's weird to me whenever ONE person is either praised or blamed for something in a show. There's too many moving parts for anything to be one person's doing.

Despite working at a large studio, we don't make that much money. We sometimes make enough to live comfortably but are by no means rich which a lot of people seem to think (especially for in LA). Even showrunners! I feel like a lot of folks think every showrunner is a homeowner and can live off the royalties of their shows forever.

Kinda to the money thing, even if our weekly paychecks look nice, unpaid hiatuses are common practice and even if you work full time, there's sometimes 2-6 months you straight up don't have work. It's quite unstable and a lot of artists dread hiatuses (especially right now)