animation industry Archives - Jared Kuvent

Showing Up: Most People Didn’t

Jared Kuvent — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 05:53:39 +0000

Showing Up: Most People Didn't

The Electronic Theatre is SIGGRAPH’s animation festival — the centerpiece screening of the year, two hours of the best animated shorts in the world, in the biggest room the conference has. Monday night it was full. The four awards were announced at the top of the night: Best in Show, Jury’s Choice, Student Film, Community Choice. Then the lights went down and we watched.

The Jury’s Choice belonged to a film about a man who finds an abandoned baby in a box — and the couple who fights to keep him. An hour into the program, it took me apart. It hit closer to my own life than the filmmakers could have known. I’ll get to that.

When the last film ended and the lights came up, the room did what rooms do: a thousand people stood, gathered their bags, and drained toward the exits at the back. I was working — photographing the crowd as it left, then slipping backstage for a few last frames. When I came back out, the theater was nearly empty. And at the front of the room, in almost exactly the spot the whole night had been pointed at, stood the couple who made that film — holding their award, talking with the Electronic Theatre chair and a few members of the crew. Their young son sat in the front row with an iPad.

A thousand people had just watched their film. The room had emptied in the other direction. Almost nobody came forward.

I walked up.

I congratulated Mikki Rose, the Electronic Theatre chair, on an outstanding show — because it was one, and because she made it. Then I turned to the couple, and I didn’t have a plan. I told them their film was extraordinary and what it had meant to me, and that I was glad they made it. We talked. I took their photograph — the two of them holding the award. I gave them my card and promised to send the picture. They invited me to coffee before the week ends.

None of it would have happened if I hadn’t walked up. Most people didn’t.

This dispatch is about networking. I know — the word makes people’s skin crawl. It conjures elevator pitches and business cards thrust into palms, the person at the mixer scanning over your shoulder for someone more useful. Here is what a week at SIGGRAPH has been teaching me: none of the connections that mattered came from anything that looked like that. Not one. What worked, every time, was something that wouldn’t be called networking by anyone watching it happen.

This is the second dispatch in a four-part series written from inside this trip. The first — about how one message to an old friend became an archive role, a photographer credential, and a drive across the country — went out the night before the conference opened. Since then, more than two thousand people have read it, and something has been happening that I didn’t anticipate: people at the conference keep stopping me in the halls to tell me they read it, and what it meant to them. I wrote an essay about walking up to people. Now people are walking up to me.

Which is, it turns out, exactly how this works.

Let me show you the week.

The film

The film deserves more than the one line I gave it. A man discovers a baby abandoned in an alleyway, in a box. He brings the child home to his partner. They are a same-sex couple, and the film follows what it costs them to keep the child — the ridicule over the baby having no mother, and eventually a courtroom: a judge rendered larger than life behind a massive gavel, and a jury of whispering silhouettes, strange forms leaning into each other like the room is keeping a secret. In the end, the couple wins custody. It is based on the true story of a real couple. It was made in a blend of CG and stop motion, in an art style unlike anything else in the program.

I was adopted. I watched that courtroom decide whether a child gets to keep his family, in a room of a thousand people, and felt it somewhere most of the room could not have. So when I stood in front of the filmmakers an hour later, that is what I led with — not who I was, not what I do at the conference. What their film meant to me. It happened to be the truth, and they could tell.

They are from Brazil and live in Portugal. This is their first SIGGRAPH. When I asked how they found their way here, the husband told me he had never heard of the conference — someone mentioned it, he looked into it, and thought their film might be a fit. They submitted to a festival they didn’t know. Now they were holding a jury award from a conference accredited by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — the kind of place where the Best in Show winner becomes eligible for Oscar consideration. They arrived not knowing what SIGGRAPH was. They are leaving as award-winning filmmakers.

Notice what actually happened at the front of that theater, because it is this essay in miniature. The conversation opened with their work, not mine. The card came at the end, attached to a promise — the photograph I owed them. The coffee invitation came from them. Nothing about it resembled what people picture when they hear the word networking. And it worked better than anything that does.

The handshake

Tuesday morning, walking into the building, I passed a legend walking out.

An older gentleman with a long white beard — slightly like a wizard, in the best possible way. I read the badge. Jim Blinn. If you know computer graphics, you know the name; a remarkable share of what makes rendered images possible traces through his work. I was starstruck, and he noticed me looking.

I stopped and kept it simple. I called him “Mr. Blinn” — a formality I don’t normally reach for, and it felt right for someone so central to the field. I told him it was a pleasure, that we had crossed paths once at the 2008 conference, and that I hoped he enjoyed the week. He shook my hand. He looked me in the eye. I thanked him, and we went our separate ways.

Nothing in particular will come of it — and that’s fine. It was never for something. Not every introduction is an investment. Some are just gratitude: a thank-you to someone who helped build the road everyone in this building walks on. If I see him again in the halls, I’ll wave. Maybe that becomes a conversation. Maybe it doesn’t.

If networking only counts when it leads somewhere, that handshake was worthless. It was one of the best moments of my week.

The long way

Some walk-ups take thirty seconds. Some take weeks.

Chris Redmann is the conference chair of SIGGRAPH 2026 — the person at the top of the volunteer structure that makes this entire event happen. I met him this week, and he told me he’d love to sit down for a chat. I intend to take him up on it.

From the outside, that could look like access. It wasn’t. It was the end of a long, slow introduction. I connected with Chris on LinkedIn weeks before the conference. On Saturday, he stood in the group photo I was honored to take of the conference chairs and committees. He has seen me all week — camera up, working, everywhere. By the time I introduced myself, most of the introduction had already happened. Chris wasn’t responding to what I said. He was responding to what he’d seen.

There’s an old line about digging your well before you’re thirsty. This is what it looks like in practice. Not a pitch delivered at the right moment — a body of evidence, accumulated before any moment arrives. And the evidence has to be real. I am not holding a camera this week as a networking tactic. I’m holding it because this work matters to me and I wanted to do it well. That’s what makes it work. People can tell the difference between someone building a reputation and someone performing one.

The well

The oldest relationships in this story never started as asks either.

Dana Plepys and I found each other in the art gallery this week. We hadn’t seen each other in about ten years, and it was such a treat — she is a dear friend and has done so much for me, including vouching for me with the History and Archive team. It was Dana I messaged back in the spring, a catching-up note with an honest question inside it. That note is the reason any of this exists.

Bonnie, who leads the archive team, made it official this week in the way institutions do: a flag for my badge, and a stack of printed business cards. ACM SIGGRAPH History Archive. My name on the back. I keep looking at them.

Bonnie, I’ve learned, is retired — and spends more than sixty hours a week on the archive. Read that again. Sixty hours, retired, keeping a field’s memory alive. That is not a budget line or a job description. That is a person who decided the past matters and shows up for it every single week.

Ernest is here too — my friend and former Nickelodeon boss, now at DreamWorks. We’ve been trading messages on WhatsApp all week and meeting up wherever the schedule allows. Twenty years of friendship, still compounding.

And then there are these dispatches. I wrote the first one as an essay, not an outreach strategy. But two thousand readers later, with people stopping me in the halls to talk about it, I’ve realized the writing belongs in this story too. Sharing what you’ve learned, publicly, is digging the well while giving back — you offer something real, and some of the people it reaches decide to walk up to you.

Why most people don’t

So why did a thousand people file past two award winners on Monday night?

Not rudeness. Not even shyness, exactly. I think most people believe walking up requires something they don’t have — a reason, a pitch, a status, an opening line worthy of the moment. They’re waiting until they have something to say. But the couple at the front of that room didn’t need anyone’s pitch. A single true sentence — your film meant something to me — was worth more than every elevator speech in the building.

The other thing that stops people is the opposite problem: they see the status instead of the person. A fan leads with someone’s fame — and fame is a wall, because the famous person has heard every version of it. When you idolize someone, you’re actually talking about yourself: your awe, your nerves, your need for the moment to go well. The alternative is to find the person inside the role. Listen to their story. Find what’s actually shared between you — not “what inspires you,” not “how did you get your start,” but the real thing, the specific thing. Lead with that.

And never lead with the ask. The moment you open with what you want — a job, an introduction, a favor — you’ve changed the context of the entire conversation. It stops being an introduction and becomes a transaction, and people feel the shift instantly. The line between networking and desperation is exactly there.

Here is the permission slip most people never realize they’re holding: a conference is the one room where walking up is the entire point. Chris Redmann comes to be met. So does Jim Blinn. So does everyone with a badge, from the students checking yours at the door to the legends George Lucas used to wander these halls among. Nobody here thinks a stranger saying something true is an interruption. It’s what the building is for.

The cost

I want to be honest about what this week takes, because leaving it out would make all of this sound easier than it is.

Monday ran seventeen hours by the time the evening’s photos were processed. I went to bed at two and got up at six. I’ve been at the convention center since Saturday, and I am running on fumes — and not only because of the schedule. My body makes weeks like this cost more than they look like they should. I would not trade this week for anything. Both of those things are true at once.

Every walk-up in this dispatch happened tired. That’s worth saying, because showing up isn’t a mood that arrives when you’re rested and confident. Some days it’s just a decision.

The other side of the table

The student volunteers are the backbone of this conference. Some of the brightest students in the world apply for the program — they check badges, direct traffic, answer questions, and hold the whole event together, the way they have for decades. I was one of them here, nineteen years ago.

This week, one of them walked up to me.

He was curious about archiving and CG pipeline work — genuinely curious, the real kind. I told him about the Discovery project I developed in Australia: the data structures, the way the system held a community’s cultural material. I showed him screenshots. He was in awe — and I made sure to tell him the part that matters: nothing about that work is out of his reach. There is no credential wall between him and building things like it. He has my card. He says he’ll be in touch, and I believe him.

Notice: his approach worked on me exactly the way mine worked on the filmmakers. No pitch. No angle. Just real interest, plainly expressed. The method is symmetrical — it works at every level, in both directions, on students and legends and everyone in between.

And somewhere in that conversation I understood that my role here has quietly flipped. Nineteen years ago, people at this conference welcomed me, encouraged me, told me I belonged in rooms that felt too big. Now I’m the one saying it — to a student volunteer with his whole career ahead of him, to two filmmakers holding their first award at a conference they’d never heard of a year ago. The welcome I got is mine to give now.

Two more days

The conference ends Thursday. The room that filled on Sunday will empty for good, and everyone in it will scatter back across the world.

What a week like this leaves behind isn’t the sessions. It’s the sentences said to strangers — the thank-you at the doorway, the compliment at the front of an emptied theater, the true thing offered with no ask attached. Some of those sentences go nowhere, and were still worth saying. Some of them turn into coffee, or a sit-down with a conference chair, or a student’s email that arrives months from now. You don’t get to know which is which in advance. You only get to decide whether to walk up.

Most people didn’t.

Tonight, before I sleep, I owe two filmmakers a photograph. That’s the other half of walking up that nobody talks about — the small promise you made in the moment, kept afterward, when you’re exhausted and it would be easy to let it slide. The picture goes out tonight.

Two more days. The room is still full.

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Showing Up: Miles to SIGGRAPH

Jared Kuvent — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:08:42 +0000

Showing Up: Miles to SIGGRAPH

The day before

The convention center is ready. I spent part of today walking through it with a camera — up the escalators under a giant screen welcoming me to Los Angeles, past registration counters that are lit and staffed and waiting for no one, past rows of chairs lined up in front of empty stages. Out on the exhibition floor, the last booths are still going up around the crews building them. Tomorrow morning, SIGGRAPH — the biggest computer graphics conference in the world — opens its doors, and this building fills with thousands of people from every corner of the field. Today it is quiet.

Today, the whole place is potential energy.

I was here today because I had work to do. This morning I photographed the conference chairs and committees — the volunteer leadership of the entire event, gathered in one place for an inaugural group portrait. My first frames of the week. I am one of the conference photographers this year, and this is the biggest event I have ever photographed. And this afternoon, several boxes that have been riding in my car since Ohio finally came out of the back seat and found their home here.

Four months ago, none of this existed. No assignment. No boxes. No badge with my name on it. I had not been to SIGGRAPH in eighteen years.

The whole thing started with a message.

The message

In the spring, I wrote to an old friend. Dana Plepys ran the SIGGRAPH Video Review for years, spent a four-decade career at a notable visualization lab, and now consults for SIGGRAPH on its history and archives. We had fallen out of touch, so most of the message was the ordinary kind of catching up — how have you been, what are you up to. Then the part I actually wanted to ask: what is SIGGRAPH doing with its archive, especially the animation collection, and how could that material reach more people?

The question had been sitting with me for months. While researching an essay earlier this year, I ended up deep in the history section of SIGGRAPH’s website and was struck by how much is there — decades of records, carefully kept, rich with metadata. My master’s work focused on digital archives and making cultural material accessible. Reading through it all, I kept thinking: more people should be able to find this. It felt like a place I could be useful.

So I asked.

Dana wrote back. The catching up turned into a conversation, and the conversation turned into an introduction to Bonnie, who leads the history and archives team. I offered what I could bring. Bonnie said yes.

That yes grew. A few weeks later I was planning a cross-country drive with a stop in Ohio, at Bowling Green State University, where much of the physical archive lives. I stood in the room that holds it — shelves of a field’s institutional memory, older than my whole career. Then boxes of it were loaded into my car, and I drove them west.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, a second chain started. MK Haley, a longtime conference chair, mentioned that SIGGRAPH was looking for photographers this year and pointed me toward the person who had put out the call. I sent my portfolio. He passed me to Morgan, who coordinates the photography team. A few days of correspondence later, I was on it.

Which is how, this morning, I found myself standing in front of the assembled leadership of the conference, camera raised, asking them to look at me.

None of the steps felt big while they were happening. A message. A reply. An introduction. A portfolio. Each one was small enough to skip — and each one, on its own, would have amounted to nothing. Stacked together, they became a role on the archive team, a media credential, and a car full of a field’s history delivered to its biggest annual gathering. That is the part I keep turning over. The asks were small. What they became was not.

San Diego, 2007

Standing in the empty halls today, I kept having the feeling that I had been in this exact moment before. Not this building — this evening. The one right before.

The first time I attended SIGGRAPH, I was twenty-one. San Diego, 2007. I was a student volunteer — a program that trades a conference pass for working shifts, with hundreds of volunteers from around the world. It was a well-run machine even then: forums where we met before the conference, an orientation, mixers. I had every reason to feel prepared. I still spent my first hours on the floor certain there had been an administrative error, that everyone around me knew something I didn’t.

They didn’t. Everyone in that building was feeling some version of the same thing at different volumes.

That week rearranged my life. The career that followed — Nickelodeon, eventually, and everything after — traces back to it, along with friendships that are still active nearly two decades later. And the thing is, the application to that program had been its own small ask. A form, filled out by a twenty-one-year-old, with no idea what it would become. You never know at the time. That is what makes the pattern hard to trust and worth trusting anyway.

Tomorrow morning, somewhere in the lines at those counters, there will be students picking up their first badge — walking into a building that feels too big for them, carrying some version of the administrative-error feeling. Some of the small asks they make this week will still be unfolding in 2045. None of us will know which ones.

About this series

A note on where this piece sits. This blog began as a travel blog, became the record of building a life in Maine, and this year turned into essays about the animation industry — a series called Losing Each Other, about generative AI and the people it is dividing. That series is on pause; two more essays are drafted and will land after this trip. Showing Up is something different: dispatches written from inside events as they happen, before I know what they mean. This is the first. The next ones will come as the week allows — during the conference if I can manage it, from the road home, and from Maine once the photographs are delivered and the dust has settled.

Tomorrow

When I left the building today, the big SIGGRAPH sign was standing in the middle of the empty lobby, lit and waiting. That is the picture at the top of this post.

Tomorrow the doors open. The counters get their lines. The stages get their speakers. The quiet I photographed today disappears under thousands of conversations and does not come back until Thursday. Somewhere inside all of it is everything this week is going to turn into — the people I have not met yet, the pictures I have not taken, the outcomes I cannot see from here. All of it is already in the building, the same way the conference was already in those empty rooms today.

Every big thing in this building started small. A message. An application. A question somebody almost didn’t ask.

Tomorrow the room fills.

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Main Crew: An Animator’s Letter on Who Counts in Animation

Jared Kuvent — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 03:02:16 +0000

Main Crew: An Animator's Letter on Who Counts in Animation

The lanyard

I still have my Nickelodeon lanyard. It sits in a box at the back of a closet in Maine, with other things from those years that I keep meaning to do something with and never do — a McDonald’s Happy Meal toy of El Tigre, a foam sign of CatDog that used to hang above the main conference table at the studio, and a hat, really more of a visor, with a plush raccoon mascot from Lotte World fixed to the front.

The lanyard meant I worked there. The other things in the box are from a different kind of being-there — the kind where you went to a partner studio overseas, or worked with one, and something came back in a suitcase, and you kept it because it stood in for the relationship even when nothing inside the relationship was ever exactly named.

This essay is about the difference between the lanyard and the other things in the box.

The trips

My supervisor at Nick Digital was Ernest. Ernest went to Saerom in Seoul — the South Korean studio that animated Hey Arnold! after season one, and CatDog, and a long stretch of other Nickelodeon shows. He went there for work. There was tooling and pipeline work to handle between the New York office and the Seoul studio.

He came back with the hat from Lotte World, which I described to anyone who asked as kind of like the Korean Disneyland. I had never been there. I do not remember most of what he said about the trip. I remember he liked the food. The hat sat on my desk for years after he gave it to me, and people asked about it, and I told them where it was from, and we all went back to whatever we were doing.

A few years later — by then I had helped found Digital Operations, after a couple of years in Nick Digital — my colleague Kim went on the same kind of trip, to a partner studio in India that did CG pipeline and database work. She came back with a dupatta. I do not remember if she had bought it for herself or if it had been a gift. She said she had loved being there. She said the food was good.

Neither of those trips had a moment, that I can find, where something went visibly wrong. They were good trips. The partner studios were excellent hosts. The work got better afterwards. By any local measure, both visits were successes.

What I think about now, twenty years on, is the shape of how we talked about those studios when our colleagues were not on a trip there. I do not remember many conversations, in our part of the building, where an overseas animator was named individually. The reference was almost always the studio. Saerom is on the next season. Bardel is doing the layout. I am sure people in production, in schedules and reviews, knew individual names. From where I sat in Nick Digital, and later in Digital Operations, we talked about the studio. We did not talk about the people inside it. That is the shape this essay is for. It is the shape that decided the work, and the shape that is about to decide it again.

Where this sits

It is also the shape, I have come to think, that the rest of Losing Each Other has been circling without naming directly. The series got its name from a rupture — the way the AI argument has opened up new kinds of distance between artists and former friends, mentors and protégés, peers who used to agree on what was happening and now do not. That rupture was the first essay’s subject. The second essay took the argument itself head on: the artist coalition calling for an end to scraping, the ethical companies proposing alternatives, the precedents from earlier technological waves about what survives such moments and what does not. I argued there that the coalition is right about the harm and possibly wrong about the answer.

The first essay asked who was in the room. The second asked what we were doing inside our own room. This one asks who our room includes — and, therefore, who our room is deciding for.

Both essays were inside-the-room essays. They were written from within the US animation conversation, by someone inside it, addressed mostly to others inside it. This one is not. This one starts with Ernest’s trip to Seoul and Kim’s trip to India, with the shape of how we talked about Saerom and the Indian studios when our colleagues were not on a trip there, with the lanyards and the boxes and the things in the closet. It works outward from there because I have come to think the conversation inside the room has been missing most of what is happening outside it.

The workforce doing the work the AI conversation is about is mostly outside that room. The credit blocks knew it. The last sixty years of American animation knew it. The numbers the inside-the-room conversation measures with do not — and the numbers being kept by the workers themselves, in their own trade press, in their own language, are telling a story the inside-the-room conversation has not heard.

Before any of that, here is the question I want to offer.

When we say the workforce, who do we mean? When we say us in this conversation, who is in the room? When we say the AI conversation is about us, whose buildings are deciding?

The lanyard is in the box. The hat is in the box. The question this essay is for sits between them.

The credits

Start with the credit block at the end of each show. Sae Rom Productions Co., Ltd. appeared in white text on black, late in the scroll. The Indian studios appeared in the same place, lower. The Vancouver studios came in later in the history of the credit block. The block scrolled past in the few seconds it takes to scroll a block of credits.

The kind of person who reads credit blocks is, usually, an animator. The names at the top of the card — under created by and executive producer — were people the audience might know, who could turn up on a panel. The names in the overseas-services block were names. They were known to one another in the buildings where they worked. To most of the audience, and to most people inside our part of the studio, they were below the line.

They were on the credit block. They were not on the lanyards. They were not in the meetings.

I want to be careful here. The credit block was not malicious. The block was the standard mechanism by which a US production identified its overseas service providers. The structure of it was inherited, not designed, and it was the shape the industry had been using since people in Los Angeles started sending boards to Tokyo in the 1960s.

But the inheritance is not innocent for being old.

Sixty years

Tom Sito, the animator and labor historian who was president of the Animation Guild for fifteen years, has written the only book I know of that traces this history end to end. Drawing the Line, from 2006, is the chronicle of how American animation studios have, since the late 1950s, sent work overseas to bring costs down. [1] Rankin/Bass started outsourcing to Japan in the 1960s. Hanna-Barbera followed in the 1970s — first to Australia, then to South Korea. The Korean industry consolidated around television-animation subcontracting through the 1980s and 1990s; Animation World Magazine called it the Korean animation explosion in 1997, in a piece that read at the time like a celebration and reads now like a description of a system. [2] India’s animation and VFX sector came in next — first as roto, paint, and matchmove work in the 1990s, then as full CG pipeline work in the 2000s. [3] Vancouver came after that.

None of this happened by accident. Each step was a decision made by US studios about where the work would cost less. The decisions all came from one side of the relationship. Each step was met on the receiving end with real growth — buildings, careers, training programs, schools, a generation of artists who built lives in animation. Saerom in 1987. Bardel the same year, in Vancouver. Titmouse in 2000 in Los Angeles, opening a Vancouver branch that, in October 2020, became the first animation studio in Canada to unionize — ninety-eight percent in favor, joining IATSE Local 938. [4]

The system is not new. The workforce is not small. The Indian AVGC sector — animation, visual effects, gaming, and comics — employs more than three hundred thousand professionals. South Korea has over five hundred animation studios. The Philippines has tens of thousands of animation-services workers. The global animation industry employs over a million people.

The credit block was, all that time, what most American viewers knew about any of this. When the next wave hits, whose names will we know?

The number

The CVL Economics report — Future Unscripted, commissioned by the Animation Guild and three other US arts organizations and released in early 2024 — is the number most people in the AI-and-animation conversation are working from. Approximately 118,500 US film, television, and animation jobs are likely to be consolidated, replaced, or eliminated by generative AI by 2026. Twenty-one percent of the sector. [5] It comes from a survey of three hundred US-based studio executives and managers, asked directly what they expect of AI’s impact on the jobs they oversee.

It is a credible number. The methodology is, for what it is, sound. The Harvard Business Review noted in early 2026 that most of the AI-driven layoff wave so far has been speculative. Companies are acting on what they expect AI will do, not on what AI has done. [6] The CVL number sits inside that frame. It is what US studio leaders believed in late 2023 would happen. It has largely been treated as forecast ever since.

What I notice about it now is what it does not measure. The survey is, by design, US.

The missing number

The animators at Saerom are not in the survey. The animators in India are not in the survey. The animators in the Philippines, in Vietnam, in Vancouver, are not in the survey. The methodology does not include them. The reporting does not include them. The trade-press headlines that quote the 118,500 figure do not include them.

I do not say this as a criticism of CVL. They were hired by US guilds to count US jobs. That is exactly what they did. I say it as a point about what becomes legible in the conversation and what does not. The 118,500 is what Hollywood is forecasting will be lost in Hollywood. The receiving end of sixty years of outsourcing is not in the frame.

If you want to read what the receiving end is documenting, you have to read the trade press there. The FICCI-EY 2025 report — the annual Indian media-and-entertainment industry survey produced by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Ernst & Young — found that the Indian animation and VFX segment had contracted by nine percent in 2024. The animation sector specifically saw a nineteen percent decline. Indian VFX revenue fell fourteen percent. The reasons given are familiar: the Hollywood writers’ strike, US cost-cutting, the global commissioning slowdown for TV and streaming. But buried inside the same report is a sentence that, when I read it, made me sit up: adoption of AI in areas such as cleaning, colouring, compositing, and other currently manual areas can have a significant impact on outsourcing to India, which could impact jobs. [7]

That sentence is in their own report, in their own language, naming their own workers. It is not in the US discourse around AI in animation in any sustained way. It is in the discourse over there because over there, the wave is already at the building.

The AI conversation has been a US-versus-the-future conversation. The workforce that has done most of the world’s animation labor for thirty years has been treated as a piece of the past whose situation is not the subject. Whose situation has been the subject?

Whose industry

Meanwhile, the next round is being announced. In March of this year, the company Bria — an AI image-and-video startup whose pitch is that its model is trained only on licensed material and that creators receive attribution and compensation for the use of their work — announced at the Hollywood Professional Association’s annual Tech Retreat that it was launching an initiative with major studios and entertainment industry bodies to build a jointly owned AI model. Hollywood would govern the asset. Bria would provide the technology and the attribution infrastructure. Participating studios and organizations would be announced in the coming months. [8] That announcement happened in March. As of this writing, the participating studios and organizations have not been announced.

I want to be clear that the framing of this initiative is exactly what I would have asked for two years ago. Jointly owned. Industry-governed. Licensed material only. Attribution and creator credit. It is, as a frame, the opposite of every legitimate objection the Animation Guild has raised about how the big foundation models were trained. [9] If it works, and if it is genuinely industry-governed by anyone other than the same six US studios that decide everything else in Hollywood, it could be the first real proposal for an ethical generative model that is not just an unenforceable promise.

But.

When I read the Bria announcement and the trade press around it, the industry in question is, again, US. Hollywood would govern the asset. The word Hollywood is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. Hollywood here means roughly six studios — the same six that have made most of the decisions about American animation labor for the last sixty years. Saerom is not Hollywood. Bardel is not Hollywood, even though Vancouver is now where a meaningful share of Hollywood’s actual production happens. The Indian VFX houses that did the cleanup on a hundred US features are not Hollywood. They will not, on the current shape of the announcement, be among the studios governing the asset. They will not be in the room. They will be the workforce the room is deciding for.

A jointly owned AI model trained on Hollywood’s licensed content, governed by Hollywood, attributing Hollywood’s creators, paying Hollywood’s residuals, is a real and important step from the model we have. It is also the next round of the same dynamic, if you read it from the receiving end of the wave the last system put in motion.

Another model would put more people in the room. I do not know what that model looks like, and I do not think anyone yet does. What I know is that the question of whether six US studios get to decide what AI does in animation is a question we have not been asking out loud — and it is the question that will set the precedent for everything that comes after.

Main crew

We had a term at the studio. Main crew. It meant the people who worked at the studio. The full-time staff. The ones who got the lanyards, the holiday parties, the all-hands. There was a credit category for main crew on some of the shows. The main crew was small. The work was made by many more people than that.

I was main crew. Ernest was main crew. Kim was main crew. The animators at Saerom were not main crew. The animators in India were not main crew. The animators at Bardel, when they came in later, were not main crew. They were on the credit blocks. They were not on the lanyards.

What I want to say, and what this whole Losing Each Other series is trying to say, is that the language we use to organize the conversation about who is being hurt by AI is the language inherited from the system that made the show. Main crew. Hollywood. Industry. The 118,500. Each of those words has, built into it, an idea of who counts. Each of them has been, for a long time, accepted by the people inside the line and ignored by the people outside it, because the people outside it were not, in the normal course of things, in the room.

The argument I am making is not that we should expand main crew to include everyone. I do not know what it would mean for the Animation Guild, an American union, to organize Indian VFX workers. I do not think it would be honest to say that the answer is for US-based labor to speak for the offshore workforce.

To be clear, this is not a critique of the Animation Guild. The Guild does important work for the workers it represents, and it has been pushing back on AI for the workers in its bargaining unit longer than most US institutions have. I am not asking it to lead a conversation it was not built to lead. I am saying the conversation has to be larger than any single national union can hold. The Guild is part of it. AnimationXpress is part of it. The workers in every country where the work actually happens are part of it. Right now we are having a US conversation, loudly, while the rest of the conversation is happening elsewhere.

I think the answer is closer to this: when we talk about what AI is going to do to us, the us has to be the workforce that actually does the work. Not the workforce that fits inside the country the union is based in. Not the workforce that fits inside the credit-block hierarchy. The workforce. The full count.

Otherwise the next industry-owned AI model is owned by the same industry that owned the last one, and the next conversation about who has been replaced is the same conversation as the last one. We lose each other again, on an arc that is older and longer than the one we have been arguing about.

The lanyard is still in the box. It is creased where I used to fold it into my pocket. It says my name. It says Nickelodeon. It does not say Saerom. It does not say the names of the people in India. It does not say Bardel.

That is the question this essay is about. Not whose name is on the lanyard. Whose name is in the room.

Bibliography

[1] Sito, Tom. Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006.

[2] Vallas, Brian. “The Korean Animation Explosion.” Animation World Magazine, no. 2.6 (September 1997). https://www.awn.com/mag/issue2.6/2.6pages/2.6vallaskorea.html.

[3] “Today All Roads Lead to India: The Rise of VFX and Animation in India.” Adobe Substance 3D Magazine, 2023. https://magazine.substance3d.com/today-all-roads-lead-to-india-the-rise-of-vfx-and-animation-in-india/.

[4] International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. “Animation Workers at Titmouse Vancouver Vote to Join IATSE! Historic Moment for Animators in Canada.” IATSE press release, October 8, 2020. https://iatse.net/animation-workers-at-titmouse-vancouver-vote-to-join-iatse-historic-moment-for-animators-in-canada/.

[5] CVL Economics. Future Unscripted: The Impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence on Entertainment Industry Jobs. Burbank, CA: CVL Economics, 2024. https://animationguild.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Future-Unscripted-The-Impact-of-Generative-Artificial-Intelligence-on-Entertainment-Industry-Jobs-pages.pdf.

[6] Hatzius, Jan, and Aatif Sumar. “Companies Are Laying Off Workers Because of AI’s Potential — Not Its Performance.” Harvard Business Review, January 2026. https://hbr.org/2026/01/companies-are-laying-off-workers-because-of-ais-potential-not-its-performance.

[7] AnimationXpress Team. “FICCI EY Report 2025: Indian Animation Sector Sees 19 Per Cent Decline.” AnimationXpress, March 2025. https://animationxpress.com/latest-news/ficci-ey-report-2025-indian-animation-sector-sees-19-per-cent-decline/.

[8] Bria AI. “Bria AI Receives Two HPA Awards Recognizing Ethical Innovation and Transformative Impact on the Entertainment Industry.” Bria.ai blog, March 2026. https://blog.bria.ai/bria-ai-receives-two-hpa-awards-recognizing-ethical-innovation-and-transformative-impact-on-the-entertainment-industry.

[9] The Animation Guild. “AI and Animation.” The Animation Guild, IATSE Local 839, 2025. https://animationguild.org/ai-and-animation/.

Additional Sources

Ferguson, Matt. “Once Upon a Time in Korea.” Life in the Machine (Substack), 2024. https://lifeinthemachine.substack.com/p/once-upon-a-time-in-korea.

Hipes, Patrick. “Animators at Titmouse Vancouver Join IATSE to Become First Canadian Animation Studio to Unionize.” Deadline, October 8, 2020. https://deadline.com/2020/10/titmouse-vancouver-animation-studio-iatse-union-vote-first-canadian-studio-1234600790/.

AnimationXpress Team. “Animation Industry in Flux: How India’s Leading Studios Navigated a Tumultuous 2025 and Prepare for a Transformative 2026.” AnimationXpress, January 2026. https://www.animationxpress.com/latest-news/animation-industry-in-flux-how-indias-leading-studios-navigated-a-tumultuous-2025-and-prepare-for-a-transformative-2026/.

AnimationXpress Team. “FICCI EY Report 2026: Indian VFX Segment Recalibrates to Reach Rs 48 Billion Revenue.” AnimationXpress, March 2026. https://www.animationxpress.com/latest-news/ficci-ey-report-2026-indian-vfx-segment-recalibrates-to-reach-rs-48-billion-revenue/.

Bardel Entertainment. “About.” Bardel Entertainment corporate website, 2025. https://bardel.ca/about/.

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “Vancouver Animation Workers Unionize After Precedent-Setting Vote.” CBC News, October 8, 2020. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-animation-workers-unionize-after-precedent-setting-vote-1.5772783.

McClintock, Pamela, et al. “Hollywood Animation, VFX Unions Fight AI Job Cut Threat.” Context News / Thomson Reuters Foundation, 2025. https://www.context.news/ai/hollywood-animation-vfx-unions-fight-ai-job-cut-threat.

Tung, Sam, et al. Artificial Intelligence and Animation: A Survey of the Animation Guild Membership. Burbank: The Animation Guild, IATSE Local 839, 2025. https://animationguild.org/ai-and-animation/.

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The post Main Crew: An Animator’s Letter on Who Counts in Animation appeared first on Jared Kuvent.

Losing Each Other: An Animator’s Letter on AI in Animation

Jared Kuvent — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 03:18:26 +0000

Losing Each Other: An Animator's Letter on AI in Animation

What we built then

It was 10:31pm on a Tuesday at the Nickelodeon Animation Studio in 2007, and the After Effects file open in front of me looked less like a creative program than the dashboard of a starship. I was key-framing a camera tracking shot for El Tigre. I had sent the footage to the supervisor on its fifth iteration. He had sent it back for revision six. Something in the tracking was jittering against the animation and I could not yet isolate where. Frame by frame, pixel by pixel, I was rebuilding the motion path.

Air’s Talkie Walkie was playing through the studio’s shared iTunes — the kind of album you played at hours like that. There was no click-to-fix in 2007. There was patience, trial, error, and the frustration of being the one who hadn’t yet figured it out. That was the work. We were inventing it as we maintained it.

Nick Digital was a small effects department inside the studio’s post-production pipeline — five desks in what used to be a souvenir shop back when the studio did public tours in the nineties. Dim light, steady hum, the sound of typing. From the recording studio next door, a voice doing a zany character would occasionally bleed through the wall. The ceiling fixtures above our desks were enormous cartoon-face cutouts hanging from wires, with lightbulbs where the eyes should be. I sat under one for two years and never quite stopped picturing what it would do to my head in an earthquake. We worked across every show at the studio — Flash, 2D, CG, last-minute correction passes — and I built or maintained whatever pipeline the next show needed.

But that night I was on El Tigre, which was Jorge Gutierrez’s first show, and the pipeline he had built it on was unlike anything else I would touch at the studio. Jorge worked in the Flash files himself — builds that behaved less like animation than like small operating systems with timelines — and the rest of us worked downstream of him. Review sessions with Jorge ran past their allotted blocks. The supervisor would make changes in After Effects on the fly. I would take notes I could not afford to miss, because the thing I missed was the thing that did not ship. The whole project felt, even then, like the medium itself was being rebuilt one layer at a time, while we worked inside it.

That was its own evolution. Nick Digital had been built because Nickelodeon’s hand-drawn pipeline was bridging into a digital one, and every studio I would work in for the next two decades sat at a different point on the same line. Technology in this medium has always moved like that, and the people inside it have always had to figure out their relationship to what came next.

I have been thinking about those nights a lot this past week. On Friday Jorge Gutierrez withdrew from a project at Amazon called Punky Duck after a wave of online hostility around his use of AI in animation. The response is one I had been watching unfold for months — around him, around any maker who has touched these new tools, around makers I have never met. I have spent the days since trying to understand why the discourse around AI in animation has gotten to where it is, and why the response from people like me has been so much less useful than it should be. Here is what I have come to think.

The alarm is real

The discourse around AI in animation has been moving faster than I had been keeping up with, and what I have been learning this past week has been mostly that I had been giving the resistance too little credit. Some of it is information I had not had. Some of it is information I had not given enough weight to. The news on Friday made the slow conversation suddenly fast.

The Cupcake & Friends case is the one I had been moving past too quickly. Buzzfeed Studios got a greenlight from Amazon MGM in the same GenAI fund as Jorge’s. The character at the center — Cupcake — was originally created years earlier by the artist Loryn Brantz, who has said publicly that she was “repeatedly assured in good faith” by Buzzfeed that her character would not be handed to an AI platform. It was. She called for a Buzzfeed boycott.

The case is messier than some of the discourse around it sounds. Buzzfeed owns the character now. What her original contracts permitted is a question for lawyers, and the same arguments that frame AI as just another tool — the way digital replaced cel, the way CG followed 2D — cut both ways here. The cleaner version of the story is not the whole story. But the breach of trust Brantz names is real, and the injury of being told something in good faith and watching it be undone anyway is a grievance the artist holds even when the legal status is complicated. It is not bandwagon. It is exact.

The international animation unions held a protest at Annecy last June with the slogan generative AI does not support artists, it destroys them. This was not a Twitter movement. It was a coalition of organized labor — the Animation Guild in the US among them — planting a flag at the field’s most important industry gathering. The phrase they used is not careful diplomacy. It is the position of the people who do this work for a living, said out loud at the place where the field looks at itself.

The Animation Guild’s own commissioned report estimates roughly twenty-one percent of film, television, and animation jobs in the US — about one hundred and eighteen thousand of them — at material displacement risk by next year. Entry-level workers most exposed. Sound editors, 3D modelers, compositors, graphic designers, effects artists, animators. These are not speculative numbers. They are the union’s read of its own field, written by the people whose careers are on the line.

The concerns are not bandwagon. They are organized, sourced, and they come from people whose craft and livelihoods are genuinely at stake. I share that fear. I have spent nineteen years in this industry, and I know what it feels like to watch a medium change underneath you. The first piece of being honest about this moment is naming that the alarm is real, and that the people sounding it have earned the right to be heard.

Why I am writing this

That night at Nick Digital was the beginning of a career I am still in. Several studios, several roles, several shows. Some of those years were on the production-infrastructure side at Nickelodeon, deep enough into the operational mechanics to learn how the global animation pipeline actually moves — not the version on the credits, the version on the ground. What that taught me is the foundation of the next piece in this series.

I also spent years inside the archive of the previous technological wave in this medium. The long story of computer graphics, from its first experiments in the late seventies through its full absorption into the industry — two thousand films, mostly. Grad-student experiments. Advertisements. The blockbuster moments everyone in the industry watched at once. The curation work was for SIGGRAPH, the conference where the computer-graphics field has been gathering and chronicling itself since 1974. I sat next to Jim Blinn at a screening once. He did not introduce himself. The history I came out of that work knowing is the reason the historical argument gets its own essay in this series.

And I am, at the moment, also building independent software with AI tools as part of my workflow. The fuller version of what that means in practice belongs in a later piece. What matters here is that I am inside several frames of this story at once: the worker who came up in the studios, the historian who has looked carefully at the last wave, and the maker who is using the new tools right now. That is the position I am writing from. If that disqualifies my read for some readers, I understand it. I am writing this anyway.

Who the response protects

The response to Jorge’s announcement was not measured. By the time he posted his withdrawal on Friday, his Wikipedia page had been edited to call him a sellout — a word both severe and undeserved. His mentions were full of insults from animators whose work he had hired, paid, championed, brought into rooms they would not otherwise have been in. He posted publicly that he was reporting threats made against his wife and son.

That was the visible part. The invisible part is what I have been watching for months.

The animator who was about to try AI-assisted storyboarding on a personal project and decided not to. The small studio that had been quietly experimenting with an AI-assisted pre-visualization pipeline and shelved it. The Discord servers where conversations about tooling used to happen — those have gone quieter on this topic, because the cost of saying you were curious about a tool is too high. The voice actor friend who had been thinking about a project using their own voice clones, on their own terms, and pulled the post they had drafted about it. None of these are people I am going to name. None of them are public. All of them are real. The chilling effect has a count, and the count is large enough to matter.

What we have managed to do — the part of the animation community that has organized around the resistance — is not stop the corporations from building these tools. The corporations are still building. Amazon is still building. OpenAI is still building. Adobe is still building. What we have managed to do, instead, is drive out of the conversation the makers who would have asked the corporations the hardest questions. The animators who would have refused certain dataset choices. The directors who would have insisted on consent processes. The studios that would have built protective contracts. The voice artists who would have negotiated their own licensing terms.

The response is not protecting artists. It is protecting the corporations from artist critique. There is a difference, and we are paying for not naming it. Every maker we drive out of the conversation is a critic the corporations no longer have to answer.

What they built without us

The version of these tools that gets built when the people who care about craft are not in the room is not hypothetical. It is what we already have.

Sora launched in late 2024 to fanfare from OpenAI’s marketing department and contempt from anyone who actually had to watch its output for more than thirty seconds. By late 2025 it was the canonical reference for AI slop — a product whose own users could not point to anything it did well, killed less by competition than by a market refusing to look at what it produced. Sora was not what artists would have built if they had been at the table. It was what engineers built when artists had decided the table was not their place.

Coca-Cola released an AI-generated Christmas advertisement the same season. Alex Hirsch, the creator of Disney’s Gravity Falls, posted that Coca-Cola is red because it is made from the blood of out-of-work artists. The line traveled because it was the only thing anyone had to say about the ad. The work was forgettable. The brand spent a global ad budget on something that demonstrated, mostly, that you can spend a global ad budget on something forgettable. Coca-Cola did not make this ad over the objections of the artists they consulted. They made it without consulting any.

The training-data lawsuits against the major AI image and video model companies are working their way through courts now because the models were built on work the model-builders did not pay for and could not have afforded if they had tried. The artists named on those suits did not choose to be the foundation of this generation of tools. They are the foundation anyway, because the people building the tools did not have a single artist whose opinion they needed to respect.

This is the version of these tools we got when we were not in the rooms where they got built. Sora, the Coca-Cola spot, the scraped training data. We can see it. We are looking at it. The choice in front of every maker reading this is whether we let this be the texture of the next round of tools, or whether we decide that the cost of being inside the conversation — including the cost of being attacked for it — is lower than the cost of the conversation happening without us.

Who builds what comes next

The choice is not whether to be for or against AI. The corporations are not asking us to vote on whether they should build these tools; they are building them. The choice is whether the people who care most about craft are in the room while they get built, or whether the rooms get filled by the people who build the Sora-shaped products and the Coca-Cola-shaped commercials. That choice is being made every day, in dozens of decisions across this field. By the makers who quietly decide not to try the experiment they were thinking about. By the voices that might have asked the hard questions inside the building and walked away. By the conversations that did not happen because they would have cost too much.

The next piece in this series goes back to the history of the previous wave in this medium — what it actually did to the labor in our field, including the part of the labor we do not talk about. The one after that goes inside the practice of building with these tools as a maker who cares about craft, and the cost of being visible about it. Neither piece will tell you what to think.

What I am asking, for now, is this. When you see a maker like Jorge experiment with a tool you do not yet trust, do not make them an enemy. Make them the question. Ask what they are doing, what they think the tool is for, what they will not let it do, what they are protecting, what they are giving up. Their answer will tell you more than the next round of takes. It may also keep them in the room. That is the room where the tools we are all about to live with get decided.

We should not be losing each other this fast.

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