Saint John Walker, image courtesy of Saint John Walker

Skillset is currently “building up the most comprehensive profile of working life in the UK’s creative industries”, gathering evidence to submit to Government about the animation industry’s skills issues and training priorities. We talked to their man with a mission, Saint John Walker.

Well Saint, what is Skillset and what’s your job?

We’re the Sector Skills Council for the digital media industries – which probably doesn’t say too much to a lot of people. What we’re really about is trying to get the right talent at the right time into the industry – so that’s a nice broad and more cuddly phrase we like to use!

That involves, for instance, assisting higher education to perform at the best of its ability in order to get the best talent into the industry. But it’s also to help employers and employees in the industry to get re-tooled or re-skilled. So it’s all about skills.

Skillset looks after ten sectors, and I’m the Animation, Computer Games and Facilities Manager. Facilities covers stuff like outside broadcasting, film services and visual effects.

How’s the animation industry doing nowadays? What is the animation industry now?

Well I think that’s a good question – it’s open to debate whether there actually is an ‘animation industry’. One of the things that Skillset is looking at more and more is how far talking in such silos is helpful. Animation is one of those things where it’s part of a Venn diagram between interactive media, animation, visual effects and computer games.

In terms of the health of the animation industry – we’re still quite a world leader in some of the activities that involve animation. Our computer games industry is still fourth in the World Table, which is incredible considering size of country we are. There’s still a powerful advertising animation block – the likes of Studio AKA, Passion Pictures etc. And we’ve got Europe’s biggest visual effects (VFX) industry in London. Double Negative have around 650 people for instance. So we are quite strong, but it’s just not thought of as an animation industry in the same way it used to be.

On the other side of the scales, there’s obviously the lack of broadcast commissions, the lack of TV advertising because of the current economic situation, the lack of children’s TV commissioning etc. So it’s swings and roundabouts. But we see it as still a very positive and very strong industry, made up of around 5,000 people. Two thirds of that are micro-companies and sole traders.

As such, there are new skills that need to be added to even the most talented animators skill set.

With that blurring of things and the kind of multi-disciplinary production teams… traditional animation studios transforming and not necessarily calling themselves animation studios… that new landscape must need new kinds of skills?

Yes. There’s all sorts of talk about super-producers – people who are producers across a range of disciplines rather than just working on in film or animation or TV. Skillset are starting to address this through a lot of cross-platform funding and activities where we’re looking at people who need skills to take their ideas through a whole range of ‘screens’ or platforms, they need to bring in a whole range of different disciplines to exploit their talent.

You’ll find something which has originated as an animation may migrate through web episodes but also it’ll have a TV component, and might even have a manufacturing component through toys. It might even have a film or a print component. Intellectual Property (IP) exploitation and cross-platform business skills are needed more and more – rather than just the individual media silos, the ten sectors that Skillset and the government like to still think of.

Even the simplest, straightforward independent films have websites now – isn’t almost everything multi-platform?

I think there’s a difference between multi-platform and cross-platform. Maybe we should start referring to hyper-platform or something, like hypermedia instead of multimedia.

There’s a kind of a horrible – maybe you’ll like it! – a horrible phrase that’s creeping in which is called ‘T skills’. And that’s where if you imagine the capital T, what you have is the bar as being the breadth of skills, and yet the individual needs to have a depth of focus which is represented by the vertical bar. So you need both generalist skills but also you need a level of specialism. Technology has lead to an increasing specialism in the animation workplace, but those who succeed need to understand the breadth of the ‘pipeline’ and their role in it.

Animation in a way has always been slightly different I think to film – for example, in that animation directors have tended to come through an art school, which is very different to film school training. How does that pan out nowadays?

Animation relies on novelty and stylistic innovation to a great degree and you see different styles being taken up as flavour of the month in both pop promos and also in advertising and that’s always been the way and that’s great. And that’s a really powerful driver of animation within the UK.
I think also the other thing is that animation relies more than ever before on technologies, not just your animation software but also the ways of disseminating and organising it as well. So more and more the art school needs to be complemented with a technical side as well – asset management, specialist software, IP awareness, virtual networked teams.

I’ve recently been talking to animation companies – of different sizes – and all of them said they have a lack of technical directors, people who can marry the creative process but also invent efficient technical workflows for that process to go through. And that’s a big shortage at the moment. I’d also argue this is a new form of creativity that the UK’s education system is currently resistant to.

And that’s partly to do with the fact that animation has always come out of that art school side and has never really engaged deeply with the techie side. It’s always been seen as a very exclusively and narrowly defined creative process and I think that’s now problematic. It’s where, incidentally, the European Schools do so well – Gobelins, Supinfocom, Film Akademie etc – they have that techie side as well, and they favour specialism and teamwork. Our obsession with the single auteur means thousands of students leave courses with the wrong skills.

Is it that studios need to populate themselves with teams rather than divisions?

It’s often said by HR people in the animation industry that the reason why they tend to look to European schools is that students come out of there going, “I want to be a Technical Director (TD)” or “I want to be a Rigger.” They have an idea of where they fit within a food chain, within a team, and they know how to work in teams. It’s those T skills! Over here we’ve tended to have the tradition of the animation auteur, the person who does the piece of work and does everything – creates the diagesis, creates the whole vision – which has been fantastic, but is just servicing a thin slice of the industry .

It’s often seen that Skillset is trying to clamp down on the artist, but it’s not a binary thing, there has to be both. And the problem at the moment is that students are leaving without an awareness that now there is a sophisticated delineation, almost a Ford-ist division of labour. And they need to have a passion for one particular part and avoid the kind of the generalist ‘jack or jill of all animation trades’ that you can fall into.

Everybody in the industry… and remember Skillset is about the industry – says how they see so much student work which may have really fantastic animation but the lighting’s crap or the texturing’s poor or the script is bland. And that’s because one person has tried to do everything. And really, there’s got to be a change of mindset in education – to approach teamwork. It can still be incredibly experimental and creative but the notion of the team has to be engaged with more by education.

Education over here focusses on the auteur. It’s a traditional thing. And it has done us great and we’ve had great animation directors through that approach. And we still will. Everybody wants to be Nick Park, very few people know enough to want to be an Owen Revell or a David Brooks who’s a Compositor and CG Rigger at Aardman. There are only so many animation directors who can go into the marketplace. And we need people to create different facets of the animation product.

What about the marketplace for those auteurs…you mentioned the lack of sort of commissioning support?

It’s not looking healthy at the moment but whether there’ll be a renaissance as we come out of the economic mire we’re in, I don’t know. It’s ironic that with more screens than ever before and more places to see animation, at the same time, animation directors are not finding the work out there. That’s where they need more business and IP exploitation skills, to set up on their own.

But at the same time there are some studios who seem to be much more supportive – where a studio will nurture a director’s independent project…obviously not in a selfless way.

Yes, totally. Hugo Sands, Managing Director at Passion Pictures, has a great attitude of trusting the creative spirit of their directors, and Studio AKA’s Marc Craste exemplifies the commercial and experimental rubbing shoulders. To make both the Lloyds TSB commercials and Varmints, to get that balance right and have the commercial work being informed by art. They’re in an environment where they can do that and that’s great. But from a Skillset point of view, we’ve got a hell of a lot of people graduating from animation courses every year and those people need to have certain skills which can feed the industry in other ways.

There’s only room for so many Passion Pictures and Studio AKAs and Th1ngs or whoever. We’ve got to start diversifying and making sure that skilled animation people move into other industries as well, and are more aware of those industries. People do tend to think only of Marc Craste as their idea of what an animator is; they don’t tend to think of somebody programming dynamics or flocking in a VFX feature or somebody doing the fight moves in Assasin’s Creed 2. There’s got to be a mind change where we start thinking of animators in a totally different way; because that is the reality.

Arguably the best animators in our culture are unknown – they work in teams at games companies, film companies and interactive design companies. I think it would really help if we fostered a cult of celebrity about such people. And also, if we could get across the idea that programming is a creative art.