There are certain job skills in the Canadian animation industry that are always in short supply and high demand. Voice talent? No, ‘lots of that.’ Animation writers? ‘Thanks, there are enough.’

The people writing their own tickets in animation these days are in the senior creative posts which require the kind of experience and training that even Sheridan College, the ‘Harvard of animation,’ can’t provide. Seasoned talent positions such as character designers, storyboard artists, compositers, senior animators and timing directors are tough to fill. It’s the recruiter’s job to find the people who can do these jobs. Not an easy task.

Faced with fierce competition from other companies, the fear of losing staff to corporate raiding and headhunting, and the ever-present temptation for animation talent to head south and cash in on the California gold rush, Deborah Fallows has a lot to deal with when she comes to work every day as the recruiter at Toronto’s Nelvana.

‘What are we desperately seeking all the time?’ she says. ‘Senior character designers, senior timing directors, storyboard artists and overseas supervisors.’

Fallows contends that each of these positions has its own reason for being tough to fill. ‘For years the people with potential to do senior character design have been scooped by the u.s. studios and gone to the States,’ she says.

As for timing directors (the people who calculate how long each action will take), Fallows says ‘there haven’t been enough people trained as animators to keep up with the demand. You have to know how to animate, but you also have to learn this new skill, which is completing the note on the exposure sheets. When you’re in a market where there aren’t enough animators to go around, it’s very difficult to find people that can do this in addition to animating.’

So where d’es Fallows look to find the scarce talent to fill these high-demand creative positions? ‘Not out of the schools because these positions are too senior,’ she says. ‘Generally we find people by networking and going to festivals such as Annecy, Ottawa and the international festivals.’

But in the competitive world of animation simply networking and doing the festival circuit is never enough, there are always positions that need to be filled. The easiest but perhaps least popular method would be for a company to look to other local animation houses to patch its own sparse talent roster.

‘We don’t raid people from other companies,’ Fallows insists. ‘If they approach us, or if they hear through word of mouth that we have a position open, then that’s different. The industry is too small and we respect the fact that people working for Cinar, Lacewood or Disney are under contract for a specific period of time and we hope that they extend us the same courtesy.’

Not surprisingly, even within the small community of Canadian animation, some headhunting and raiding d’es occur. Fallows says Nelvana has lost some staff to persuasive outsiders. ‘Disney has raided our staff, I can’t lie about it, they have. They’ve tried, but they certainly weren’t as successful as they thought they would be.’

Lenora Hume, senior vp of international production for Walt Disney Television animation, says when Disney entered Canada ‘we tried very hard to not have a substantial negative impact on any one company. When you are starting up a business from scratch obviously you need a lot of talent. But there is a huge amount of talent in Canada that works on a freelance basis and some of them were tired of that because it’s sort of feast or famine, so we have been able to offer some kind of security.’

Size, location Mainframe’s selling point

Tammy Neske, director, human resources at Vancouver’s 3D computer animation house Mainframe Entertainment (ReBoot, Beastwars), says she’d like to headhunt but hasn’t yet. ‘That’s something we’d like to do. In Vancouver there aren’t a lot of other companies so we’d be looking for people down south. I don’t have a full-time recruiter working for me, but if I did, they’d be down in l.a. hanging out.’

Neske prefers to use Mainframe’s size and location as her main selling point. ‘I’m more than interested in talking to someone who is working for another company who is interested in moving to Vancouver, I’ll always spend time with that person.

‘We’re pretty lucky here,’ says Neske, ‘we have a low turnover. Some people go to the u.s. but working here is good. We’re still relatively small, we’re growing, and when an animator comes to work here they go into a suite with a group of animators and they take an episode of ReBoot or Beasties from start to finish.

‘The same group of people animate the entire show until it’s complete, it’s not so much the factory-line thing. If you go work for ilm (Industrial Light and Magic) in the explosion department, all you do for the next three years is make things go bang.’

Seasoned 3D talent virtually nonexistent

Like her classical animation counterpart at Nelvana, there are certain skills that Neske and Mainframe are always looking for: ‘people who are familiar with 3D concepts and are able to manipulate the software (sgi, Softimage), but also people who have a creative background, who have studied traditional animation and have the basic concepts and fundamental principles. These people really come in handy.’

Yet while Nelvana demands experience to fill its senior positions, Mainframe can’t appeal for seasoned 3D computer animators ­ there really aren’t any. ‘Five years? In this business you can’t even say five years,’ says Neske. ‘We’re always looking for talented individuals, whether it’s a topnotch software programmer, animator or technical director. The well-rounded animator, even if they’ve got one year experience, we’d be amazed.’

Lure of L.A.

One animator with lots of experience is Harry Rasmussen. Rasmussen has been with Toronto’s Yowza since February as a senior animator doing cleanup work for video game titles such as Hercules and Nightmare Ned. He confirms that headhunting is a big part of the business: ‘Oh yeah. There’s quite a network of people and they know if somebody is available or looking to move. They get called pretty quickly, so if you’re any good you’ll get called.’

When Rasmussen left The Animation House in Toronto after six years he says he wasn’t scrambling to find work. ‘I wasn’t promoting myself too hard, I did the festivals and dropped my card off to people. I got lots of phone calls, people mostly came to me.’

For Rasmussen, like all other animators with a wealth of experience, the prospect of going south is always there.

‘Every once in a while I’ll get a call and somebody will say, ‘Hey, we’re looking for people,’ and it becomes a question of do I really want to move? I haven’t even thought about the money so much, I’m making a good living here. The big u.s. studios have a little more money and sometimes more interesting projects. I’ve lived in l.a. before, working for Hanna-Barbera for a year, and it’s okay, but the thought of moving everything in the apartmentŠI’m putting it on the back burner but I’m not ruling it out.’

Perks of freelance

Not all senior animation talent has to sign with a Canadian or u.s. studio to make a comfortable living. Jim Caswell is a storyboard artist (a very high in-demand position) who works freelance. ‘I’ve been picking and choosing projects,’ he says. ‘This one company phoned me up in February and I said I wasn’t available until the middle of April, and they said okay and booked me for three weeks. Now they’re talking about booking me for the rest of the summer.’

Caswell feels that freelance frees him from the constraints of company politics and allows him to work with a broad range of projects and companies. ‘I like to work for a diversity of people,’ he says.

He also says it’s more lucrative for high-demand talent to work freelance. A major u.s. studio with offices in Canada recently offered Caswell a position but he declined. ‘They talked to me but they didn’t have any money, at least they said they didn’t have any money. I had asked for the amount that I was making as a storyboard artist freelance and they just said no way.’

More typically money is the major factor that is keeping Canada’s senior animation talent from remaining here. Caswell agrees that short of ‘doing something to the San Andreas Fault’ Canada will continue to lose animators to California. He points out that Dreamworks is spending $400 million a year and its first show won’t be out until late 1998.

‘It’s a money thing.’ he says. ‘There’s not enough money up here. Animation is like working with platinum, it takes a lot of time and a lot of money.’