keithlango wrote:

Pixar doesn't pay that great, generally- especially when you factor in the cost of living in the Bay Area. Last I knew animators there do between $60 to $85k, depending on experience..

Jeezs animators are such suckers for there art. Seriously, if you invest the amount of time and passion it takes to get really good at animation into most other forms of art you would make a packet! If you spent a few hours every day for 6 years learning to play the guitar you would be outstanding. Maybe not Jimmy Hendrixs but at least up there with Eric Clapton :)

keithlango wrote:

Framestore in UK pays OK as well, but again they seem to be unique.

Can you attach a numerical figure in £'s to that 'OK'. London costs an absolute fortune to live in at any reasonable level of comfort.

keithlango wrote:

When I see people take an online course for animation for 18 months and then talk about giving up because they can't get a job right away I just shake my head. They'd never have made it back in the 90's. Making it in this business takes a lot of time, a lot of sweat, a lot of patience and most of all- a lot of perseverance. There are very few overnight wonders in animation. The rest of us take the long way.

You seriously comparing what it was like in the 90's to how learning animation is now?! Lets get real. Back in the day, you couldn't get training or find decent information on how to create good character animation for love nor money. Even when you did it was through some serious scavenging around. I'm talking like being fed bread crumbs from a table where there is a mighty feast going on. Im sure a lot of those pro animators were pissed that all there 'secrets' are now being given away.  Of course all that has changed to the extent that we are now at the other end of the spectrum. There seems to be a glut of schools promising you will be taught by feature film animators and in 18 months you too could be working along people just like them. And hey, if that doesn't work out, no worries. Just give us some more of your hard earned cash and we will try and help you some more. Its certainly not how I remember mentoring to be but that's what happens when busine$$ gets involved.

So how much did you earn at Rhythm & Hues and then Weta? King Kong broke boxs office records so I imagine you were handsomely remunerated?

I know you probably won't answer the former question but I live in hope since you seem to shoot from the hip and maybe I could get a straight answer without having to read a dissertation sized post

KennyRoy wrote:

Keith your post is informative and helpful. 

To add, I think that most of the animators here have a while before they would work at Diz/DW/Pixar and will most likely be working somewhere in the much larger feature VFX, TV VFX, or commercial industries.   This is not a bad thing! Most smaller shops pay better than features!!

The absolute worst salaries are in startups, especially game startups, and especially mobile/iphone.  The best salaries are in small to medium commercial vfx houses that work with major ad agencies.  By working your way up till you are the 'go-to' animator on all their projects, you can command a very respectable rate.  Zoic was this place for me until I started my own shop.  $2k a week is easy to get, and though you'll never work a year straight at these places, that would be $104k/yr if you could string a year together (don't forget about OT).  The important distinction is that the studio works with agencies.  Working with agencies means that the client has so much money to spend that they can actually afford to hire a team of people who (in all of my experience) do nothing but eat 40% of the budget for taking credit for all of your creativity and dumping all client blame on to you.  It means that the client has typically $250k-$1,000,000 for their campaign, which might be three :60's and three derivative :30's.  The animator supervising that work has a huge budget on their shoulders, and those places will pay well to make sure it goes smoothly.  The project was short but the best salary I ever earned was on a small-studio agency-awarded commercial-vfx job @ $4k/week.

I don't know if you anyone has posted this, or seen this, but here's an article from vfx soldier about pay.  It was pretty informative  http://vfxsoldier.wordpress.com/2010/08 … -industry/

I think avoiding oppacity on the employees salaries is a good thing.
Hiding the salaries benifits the employer since knowledge is power and he's the only one to have the knowledge.

If the salary distribution is fair (more experienced person gets more) in a given departement (cross departementwise is more complicated, but there's no point in comparing the salary of a screen righter and of an animator, it's not the same job...), then there should be no need for secrecy nor jealousy.
Now of course that is in an ideal situation with mature employees and employer, but you can always hope

aja wrote:

Shopkeeper, I'd like to point out that the people sharing numbers in this thread are doing so because they don't feel goaded or attacked, which is unusual in forum threads discussing pay.  I don't really see any need to call out specific people to give their personal salary histories; it's up to them to decide what they want to share.

Yes of course. I'm not exatcly there twisting there arm. Entirely obvious that no one has to reply to my questions. I'd be more surprised if they did since I am quite direct and to the point

aja wrote:

shopkeeper wrote:

aja wrote:

There are literally studios where animators sitting next to each other, doing basically the same work, will range in pay from $25 a day to $350 a day, from $15 an hour to $40 an hour.

Which studios can you expect to earn up to $350 a day doing charatcer animation?

Boutique high-end TV commercial studios.  The kind that do Super Bowl commercials.  It's not unusual to earn more than $350/day doing that sort of work.

Freelance day rates for commercial 3D work in New York City range from $350 to $750 depending on skill set and experience. You make considerably less money when hired on as staff, but you get benefits and no longer need to be constantly on the look-out for work. They probably even out if you factor in all the variables, but I've never felt up to doing the math.

The markets favor generalists, though. Commercial shops are smaller than feature studios, so artists are expected to wear many hats. The place I'm at now has two full-time 3D generalists and hires freelancers as needed. When running this lean, you need to be comfortable jumping from animation to dynamics to compositing throughout the scope of a project.

keithlango wrote:

It's been a while since I've really had to find out all the wages, but here's a brain dump of my understandings based on personal experiences, conversations with friends and co-workers through out the biz over the years. I'm sure that people could find cause to quibble, and some numbers may have shifted a bit here and there- but in general I think these assessments are in the ballpark. These numbers are for 'just animators', not supervisors or hybrid TD/animators. Those folks make more and are, in my opinion, a different breed of staffer. Anyhow, onward...

Dreamworks in the Bay Area often makes a standard offer in the $70k range for character animators. If you want more you pretty much need to negotiate for it, even if you have previous experience. The good thing is experienced people often are able to successfully negotiate some more. DW in LA is a union shop and they pay union scale, plus more for experienced people. DW in La is generally considered to be a good paying shop. For info on the union wage scale do a search for "Local 839 wage survey". Journeyman animator wages for union studios is low to mid $70's last I knew. However if you're younger you won't get offered a journeyman position, but a junior offer instead. That's somewhere in the $60's. If you have previous film experience and work for Sony in Culver City you can expect to make about $80-90k, more with OT (and you will work OT). Senior level people can do better than $110k. However if you're fresh out of school the same Sony will start you in the high $30k's or low $40k's. SPI's New Mexico unit will generally pay about $10k less than their LA studio for the same person, unless they are senior, in which case they might pay more to lure you to that one horse town in the desert. Now that's not a knock on Albuquerque- I think it's a great place to live. I love visiting there. But there's only one studio ('horse') there- Sony. If they go under or the project ends and you get laid off then you need to move. Moving costs money- lots of money. Even if your new job pays some relocation costs, nobody ever pays 100%. Moving eats into your wages more than you can imagine. Ok, back to the original point... Rule of thumb says that R&H and Digital Domain in LA are usually a little under Sony, but still competitive. Disney is under the same union deal as DW in Glendale and their wages are pretty similar, maybe a tiny bit lower. They used to overpay for talent, but not so much anymore. They still have a very few superstar big money guys like Andreas Dejas (who makes several hundreds of thousands per year), but they don't do that for normal folks like you and I. Pixar doesn't pay that great, generally- especially when you factor in the cost of living in the Bay Area. Last I knew animators there do between $60 to $85k, depending on experience. Key people get more, but that's true everywhere. The hard part is being one of those 'key people' at a given studio. Typically it means you've been there forever, are supervising, are a major superstar talent, or have other core skills they don't want to do without (ex: you can also do TD or story work). Haven't heard in ages about ILM, but the general word on the street is Bay Area studios don't pay as well as LA studios. This may or may not be absolutely true, but it's the conventional wisdom. I'm sure exceptions abound. ILM is also a union shop, but it has a different contract than LA area union shops. Smaller LA studios have a harder time competing with the big ticket studios for experienced talent, so they get younger guys on the rise or folks from overseas. Blur used to have folks from the $40's up through the $70's for the more experienced guys. Probably more by now due to inflation and whatnot. Other small to mid-sized boutique shops will have similar wage scales. ReelFX (in Dallas) was similar. When I was there as anim director I was generally given a budget to hire experienced animators in the $60's. I had to really push the book-keepers to get the money to pay anybody $70k. Young guys out of school typically were offered high $30k's to the low $40's. They may have loosened that up a bit since I left since they seem to have some higher profile work the last few years. When DNA was still alive and doing the Jimmy Neutron TV shows they paid in the $40's to $50's for animators, but when they did Ant Bully feature film they bumped people up to $80's-$100's. To recruit more experienced people they had to pay even more. As noted above in my thoughts on Sony in NM, studios outside the main industry centers like LA or SF will usually have to offer more to lure senior level talent. $115+ normally. But those positions rarely last very long. Blue Sky used to start people in the low to mid $50k's, but for experience would pay in the 70's. Fresh out of school they'd offer in the $40's. Those numbers have probably gone up a bit since then (this was some time back). Wages overseas in Asia are generally less than half that of the US it seems (some places like Australia seem to be a little better- but still not on par with the US). WETA in NZ pays well, but they're pretty unique over there. Framestore in UK pays OK as well, but again they seem to be unique. Film studios in Europe seem to pay along the lines of the lower end LA shops from what I can gather. Globally film animation has transitioned to the point where pretty much all jobs are temporary. So the wages in the bigger shops have settled up a little bit in order to attract experienced people, but the typical person will have to offset those numbers with regular periods of unemployment and moving costs. $7000/month doesn't add up to as much when you factor in being out of work for 2 months of the year and you need to spend $3000 or so in miscellaneous moving costs to get your family to the next town. On the lower end it's pretty ravenous and wages are pressuring downward. The schools are pumping out a lot of candidates and it's a buyer's market for junior talent.

Games I know less about. EA used to pay experienced senior level film people absolutely crazy money to get them to come over. That was in the early 2000's. Not sure they still do that or not. Typically a game studio will pay in the $40's to $50's for animation talent, $60's, sometimes even $70's and higher for experienced talent. Like film, some game studios are cheaper, some more generous. I don't pretend to know who is cheap or not, though. I've heard Bungie pays well- typically on par with film. Seems UK game shops pay on the lower end of the game scale, while Australian game studios seem to be right in the middle of the range. I get these notions from my previous attempts to recruit animators and riggers out of those regions, so I had a decent idea what they were making. Outside of that I don't know as much about games. The rule of the land in both film & games though seems to be ramp up and ramp down. Animators are interchangeable cogs in the machinery of content creation, so the typical business approach of trying to get that commodity at the lowest possible price rules the day. To break outside of that cycle you need to find a studio that thinks about and assesses the value of their staff from a more long term return on investment approach. Honestly there just aren't very many of those kinds of places around.

On a personal note, my first ever full time job in Cg animation was supposed to pay me $24,000, but because it was a start up I was only paid $12,000 per year until the company hit some sales milestones. I had to bring my own computer to work. No kidding. Of course we never hit those and the company went under. I worked the last two months without pay. Welcome to the industry, kid. That was 1994 and I was 25 years old. From '95 to '97 I did mostly freelance CG generalist work and a lot of other non-animation industry jobs. Animation was not something that I could support my family on, but I kept working at it, getting better. My next fulltime job in CG animation paid me $28,000 (for real) in '97, but they quickly gave me a raise to $33k after 6 months of seeing my work. By the way, my daily commute for that job was 72 miles. One way. No kidding. When I went to Big Idea in early 1999 they paid me $50k to start as a Cg artist/animator. That was the first time I didn't need a second job and my wife did not need to work fulltime for us to make it as a young family of 4. I had been doing CG art and animation for 6 years by then- all self taught. 6 years from deciding "This is what I want to do for a living." until the point where I could actually really make a living doing it. ** Let that sink in. ** And the funny thing, my path was not unique. I know a LOT of other people who had to walk similarly long roads to get to be where they are today. I remember when I worked with Aaron Hartline back at Big Idea. He had drive and perseverance way more than he had skill back then. Didn't matter. He stuck with it, did whatever he needed to do and ended up where he wanted to be. Mark Behm struggled with developing his skills on crappy low end work for years just like I did before he came to Big Idea (which, by the way, was definitely not the 'big time'), and then after that went to Blue Sky. The names and the stories could go on. When I see people take an online course for animation for 18 months and then talk about giving up because they can't get a job right away I just shake my head. They'd never have made it back in the 90's. Making it in this business takes a lot of time, a lot of sweat, a lot of patience and most of all- a lot of perseverance. There are very few overnight wonders in animation. The rest of us take the long way.

Thank you Keith for sharing your journey and your life experience in this biz.

Stina wrote:

Please , if you're going to quote a long post, shorten it down. No need to keep the wall of text when it's already been posted once.

It makes my brain to num. The poster could go back and edit but that is not likely to happen.

See I did an edit.

Last edited by Crayon10 (01-02-2011 10:11 pm)

Moving costs money- lots of money. Even if your new job pays some relocation costs, nobody ever pays 100%. Moving eats into your wages more than you can imagine. Ok, back to the original point...

Wrong, Moving cost lots of money if you have lots of stuff to move.  Everything I own I can pack into my car and be on my way.  I only have to pay for gas.

But, honestly, I know its not a good lifestyle and there is no way I can have a family with this style of living.  But It gets me where I want to be regardless.  Right now, I'm focused on getting the job I want, or getting some to some goal, what ever that may be.  Hopefully, one day I will settle down and find a women, while raising the little ones that are running around.


....hopefully....

Last edited by PeterJCasey (01-03-2011 5:08 am)

http://www.archdaily.com/101316/how-muc … -per-hour/

Just as a comparion to show how much more open other professions are about how much they earn.

Right now, I'm working for a small, new iPhone game company for £7.11GBP an hour (roughly $11-$12)... not bad considering I'm 19 and haven't yet got any rent or life stuff to pay for I can only hope that once I go to University, study animation and come out, I can be as lucky again, but on a bigger scale.

When I first started as a junior animator straight out of school I made $10.25 (minimum wage). This was a little over a year ago, in Ontario, Canada. Small studio, everyone was a junior. Only took it for the experience, but I, like many others, were told 40k a year straight outta school. So getting half that was a kick in the balls. But, sometimes experience is what you need.

Basically, it all depends. Where you live, what your experience is, what studio get you in with, how good you are at negotiation, etc.

Seems like many companies are starting to take advantage of all the schools pumping out animators and paying them as little as possible to save money.

never use it but you can try http://youanimator.com/