Remote Working- A New Normal for Animation Industry?

Animation and VFX Industry is moving to remote collaborative work as new normal. Is it completely new to the industry? No, some form of remote working with independent contractors, freelancers and clients outside one’s own office has existed, so there is not so much of difference. If you think about it, it beats a meeting room in a boring office building any day. I think this could be a starting point for a bigger experiment and the future of working as such.

“Usually you have everyone working together in a studio with the director and review and revisions go from Person A to Person B quite quickly,” a top animation producer explained to us. “With the way things are now, that is taking a lot longer and we’ve lost some of the ability to screen together, which also slows things down.”

When it comes to work from home infrastructure, Indian animation industry is lacking far behind in terms of high configuration workstations/Laptops for individual employees, Central Server, File Storage, Security, Confidentiality, Collaborative tools, Internet bandwidth etc.. Speed, another major obstacle for animated series producers working during the outbreak and lockdown orders has been residential Internet connection. Since, the industry has not been prepared for a change, the new reality has come as a time to review their strategy for remote working and invest on it. This would definitely strain the industry which is reeling under tremendous cost pressure.

Industry Veterans feel that, Pre-production works like, story board, asset development and animation can be done smoothly in a remote work environment, however post production work still requires a studio to process and give finishing touches. Some post houses are having their artists log in to the company server from home using their own hardware, which might work in the short-term, provided they have very capable machines of their own. Besides the overall strain on internet providers and broadband lines that is occurring with millions of Indians now at home for the foreseeable future, the blunt reality is your home Internet was constructed largely for relatively less home usage not for heavy usage.

Some Studio owners have adopted to new normal by employing cost effective short term technology solutions, Dropbox for cloud storage, Installation of system surveillance software for monitoring of individual working, Google Suite of products for multiple usage, Zoom for virtual team meeting and rented laptops/moving office system to homes with safeguard. In the long term a much better solution has to evolve along the open source with seamless workflow integration.

Lock down has come as a blessing in disguise for web streaming companies, e-learning companies, gaming and whole lot of companies which work on the consumer internet business. Two thirds of world population under some form of lock down for varying periods, has given scope for large spike in internet viewership/screen space time leading to increased demand for content.

In fact, as animated Hollywood settles into the new normal of stay-at-home in this time of corona virus concerns, we hear some shows are talking to networks about shifting from new episodes every week to every two weeks in an effort to ease the newly emerging and unforeseen strains on their systems and schedules.

As a matter of fact a new reality has dawn on all the industry in general, animation & Vfx in particular. Let's accept the change and move forward.