Family and Animation
This is a question for all you veteran animators.
With your career choice, it clearly takes a lot of time out of your schedule. How do you feel about where your family situation is at right now? Is it better to be an animator for Films or is it better to be an animator for games? Which one allows you more time for your family?
With your career choice, it clearly takes a lot of time out of your schedule. How do you feel about where your family situation is at right now? Is it better to be an animator for Films or is it better to be an animator for games? Which one allows you more time for your family?
Replies
The company has managed to hang on through some pretty rough times and we've had to let some people go, as well as go without raises, but the company has been well managed and if it wasn't for that management everyone would have been out looking for work. That doesn't mean it hasn't effected my family a bit, we've had to adjust our plans for the future. We didn't plan on staying in our condo as long as we have, but because there is another person in the house who has my back through thick and thin we're pretty agile and can scale our lifestyle a lot more than someone who is living the broke college kid lifestyle and downgrading to that person would be moving in with mom and dad or living in a van.
Without my wife it would be much more difficult and I probably would have quit and become a nomad animator wondering from project to project chasing bigger and better names to put on my resume, while at the same time constantly preparing to live out of my car... if not for finances then just for convince, if you live at work you might as well live at work hahaha, jk don't do that.
We have a 4 year old daughter and because my job has flexible hours I'm home at 3:30-4pm which is what enables my wife to work a few hours in the evenings during the week. When we had Layne she never really quit just massively scaled back her hours after maternity, she knew she wanted to go back to work after Layne was in school full time so she kept her foot in the door. Without that flexibility it would have been harder. So not only am I thankful for the flexibility at my job but hers also. Even if we didn't have that flexibility we would find a way to make it work, that's just what people do...
I don't want to make my life sound like a sob story because I really like it I build computers in my spare time, I play games, I work on personal projects and even though I spend less time on those projects now than I did when I was younger, I've just scaled back their scope of the projects to things I can manage in the time I have. I work a few hours in the morning on personal stuff and a few hours at night but not every night.
We're also redoing my daughters room so she has the bedroom we always wanted as kids (she's very tom-boy ish loves rough housing and being outside in nature, but loves pink so she's tons of fun).
I feel my life is better than average even after the industry imploded and the global economy melted down. There are still a lot of areas we could cut back on, but we really don't need to. We still hit the movies and museums pretty regularly throughout the month. We're saving for retirement, we just bought a new car and we'll probably buy another one soon.
When I hear about other people and their struggles I think I pretty much live a unique scenario and I'm not sure I would stay in the industry if it was going to be a constant slog of mismanaged projects that where about to end and really needed me to work 80hrs for 40hrs worth of pay. There are plenty of 9-5 jobs out there that I wouldn't mind doing as long as I had the stability and the freedom to do what I love in my spare time.