Monday, June 25, 2012

Tartakosvky's New Assignment

You can't keep a fine animation talent down.

... Genddy Tartakovsky is attached to develop and direct Sony Pictures Animation's upcoming 3D Popeye movie, about the good ole spinach-eatin' sailor.

Genndy, as the article notes, is finishing up the feature Hotel Transylvania, and Sony Pictures is well-pleased with the result. Recently an artist who's been working on HT told me:

Genddy's really delivered a solid picture. Adam Sandler [one of the voices] had a lot of ideas, and some of them didn't work with Genddy's, but Genddy threaded a a bunch of needles and ended up with something good.

Sony management, on the other hand, is inept. They started moving jobs up to Vancouver to take advantage of the tax rebates, and they announced this to the Culver City crew like they thought people would embrace it. Then they started walking the announcement back when the reaction was bad: "Well, we haven't decided what's going up and what's staying... "

And they're not paying people in Vancouver particularly well, often worse than in Southern California, and Vancouver is the most expensive city in North America. On top of that, they're not guaranteeing people that they ask to move up to Canada long-term employment. No three-year contracts, no big moving bonuses, just vague promises. People worry about they're next job after Hotel Transylvania wraps. ...

He went on to tell me that morale is not particularly high among some staffers at Sony Vancouver (Gee, I wonder why?) and that there is a lot of competition for jobs there in the north country, so the Imageworks employee isn't exactly sure what Sony thinks it's doing.

But then, we seem to live in a time of low morale, so what's new?

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