Fairy Liquid wrote: ↑Tue Oct 20, 2026 4:43 pm
Sir Bustalot wrote: ↑Tue Oct 20, 2026 2:37 pm
Right up until last year we got a measely 5 days vacation per contract. And theres no carrying over or extra weeks lol.
At least I havent had to work TOO MUCH unpaid OT like most people in my industry. But early on in my career over the first few years i probably did 1500-2000 hrs of unpaid overtime(over the first 3-4 years)
This is low number for most artists who last 5+ yrs
this is wild, even after so many unpaid hours and multiple years at a company
it's almost like you are doing them a favour or something
absolutely, but its very well known this is how our industry functions. Talk to anyone anywhere who works at a big studio, and they will have horror stories of conditions and untold amounts of unpaid OT. I havent had to do unpaid OT in at least 8 yrs. Pretty much since the crazy stories of employee abuse came out from the making of that movie sausage party. It was nuts, but not uncommon.
I think at least part of the problem is in my industry, this job is a persons only skill and youre generally well paid after you move out of jr position. They all also have massive student loans or LOC's to pay off, most young folks who go to school for this job have line of credit for 80-90k to pay for tuition and living expense. So people feel like leaving the job for an entire diff career is a bad choice due to having no other employable skills where they can make as much money AND they need to keep making payments on their loans. Add that to some of the people who come into this do it for the name in the credits and bragging rights to say "i did those super cool fx on batman, or i made that cartoon". Those things together make people susceptible to being taken advantage of. Of course theres also passionate folks who love it and dont WANT to do anything else. But it all makes it easy for studios to be toxic places, or places where they can take advantage of you and make you do OT for free.
One of the things they do is they will say "you dont HAVE to work this weekend if you dont WANT to" but imply that it may effect future contracts if youre known to always go home and let everyone else do the work. And as i said before, our industry is already very uncertain. 95% of all artists have to apply for a new contract every year for their entire career, and hope they get one. Many good artists havent got that next contract, and because of timing, werent able to find another and having to pay their huge loans they end up having to commit to any other job like serving food and find themselves completely out of the industry ... the fear of having to go push shopping carts, or shovel gravel instead and try to make ends meet doing that is sometimes a hard thing to convince people to risk. This all contributes to this environment in our industry
luckily my studio has been very good and cut out the unpaid OT a long time ago. But they do still expect you to meet quotas.
