Features vs Family

Just to gather my thoughts on family and features, cuz I've tracked these parts down multiple times:


Brandon Beckstead who's awesome came across a similar bump(bittersweet), he graduated from AM and got job offers from Dreamworks & Sony. "I realized that my dream job was more about my family than about my career." and he let the big fishes he had hooked go.

Then a year later "My family is in a much better situation to move this time and I just wanted to test the waters and ended up with a job at Dreamworks!"

"This is my first foray into feature film animation and it's even better than I thought it would be!"
and then another year and it looks like he's returned to games. I plan on dropping him an email when I get a chance

*he replied to my email Dreamworks was great, not crazy hours and felt stable for supporting a family but LA was terrible, traffic landlocked all the time, lot more money, just not a good situation for his family everyone was miserable so he left (and you have to respect someone who cares so much for his family)


I had dropped Victor Navone an email about balancing family and work and he came back that he usually works 9-5:30 but he's been at Pixar forever so is fast and has proven himself.

Also asked Jean Denis Haas about it, he said he does "9-6 when he can", and he also has been in the biz for a long while now. Later he wrote that he puts 200%effort in during the 9 hours a day he's at work, then zips home.

An old post by Ken Music says the schedule at Tippet was 9-7 with an hour and a half off.

Cameron Fielding came from games to ILM but was only offered a 2 month contract, which could have really screwed things up for him (fortunately he hooked up with dreamworks) short term project hire seems really hard for families.

I had asked Shawn Kelly about animators as migrant workers and he said: "
It's very common in the industry right now to offer "project positions," which end after the project ends. Often, these can evolve into full-time staff positions, but more often than not, the end when the contract was scheduled to end.




*7-19-11 got a reply from Beckstead