HOLLYWOOD — The second floor has monitors on all the desks now, and Priyanka Sundaram has spent the month finding out whether her theory about them survives contact with actual apprentices.
The theory, stated against the advice of a board member who wanted the floor filled by September, is that junior artists learn by sitting near senior ones, and that a senior artist can absorb two apprentices — perhaps three — before the mentoring becomes an unpaid second job. Foxglove Animation hired its first wave of fourteen accordingly, seated each junior within rolling distance of a mentor, and waited to see which half of the arrangement broke first.
A month in, Ms. Sundaram’s audit is characteristically unwilling to declare victory. “The juniors are thriving. That was never the risk,” she said. “The risk is the seniors, and the seniors are fine, and ‘fine’ is a word I have learned to hear as a fire alarm with a long fuse. Two of my leads are giving away their lunch hours. I have started assigning lunch. I am aware of how that sounds.”
The month produced one milestone the floor has decided to treat as founding lore. A junior character animator, four months out of school, had a shot approved on the European co-production — a character crossing a rain-slicked street, seven seconds, approved by the co-producer in Antwerp with a single note, and the note was about the umbrella. The studio’s leads, by tradition and within earshot, described the shot as adequate. The junior has reportedly watched the approval email fail to change for three weeks.
“Seven seconds of somebody’s first real scene,” Ms. Sundaram said. “That is what the desks are for. You cannot teach an umbrella note over video chat. You can, but it takes four times as long and nobody learns why.”
The board member who wanted the floor filled fast has, she confirmed, partially relented — “he has moved from ‘faster’ to ‘don’t slow down,’ which in board terms is a bouquet.”
The second wave of fifteen posts next week: six junior seats, five mid-level, two effects artists and two production coordinators. The studio expects the application count to exceed the first wave’s twelve hundred, and its paid-test-work policy — every applicant asked to do exercise work is paid for it — will again appear in every posting. That policy has started to travel. Two other studios in the corridor have adopted paid tests this summer, one of them citing Foxglove’s postings directly, a development Ms. Sundaram declines to take credit for and clearly enjoys.
“It costs us real money and it is the best money we spend,” she said. “If it becomes a thing studios do to look respectable, wonderful. Respectability is a fine reason to stop taking free labor from the least employed people in the industry.”
The market underneath all of it has not improved, and she remains allergic to the congratulations that keep arriving on that account. Twelve hundred applications for eight junior jobs was one fact, not two, she said in August, and she repeated the formulation this week in advance of receiving the next batch.
“People keep telling me we are a bright spot,” she said, looking out at the fourteen occupied desks and the sixteen empty ones. “We are fifteen jobs at a time in a town that is short thousands. Be a bright spot anyway — but count.”