Three Things, Ten Jobs: Storyboard Internship at Sony Pictures Animation
Attention recruits! Welcome to CartoonRecruit.com’s blog, where I reflect on the past week in the animation industry and highlight job posts that might otherwise get overlooked.
This past week’s theme seems to have been inevitability. Warner Bros. became the third major studio to file lawsuits against Midjourney, following lawsuits from Disney and Universal. PBS let go of 15% of its staff after the Trump administration cut $1.1 billion of funding from public broadcasting. And Nelvana, Canada’s oldest animation studio, will no longer produce animation as of this week.
On the bright side, we added 85 new jobs to our directory last week, including a paid storyboarding internship at Sony Pictures Animation.
Three Things:
Warner Bros: That’s not all, folks!
Animation Magazine reports that Warner Bros. filed a lawsuit against Midjourney, becoming the third major studio to seek damages against the text-to-image generative AI service. Their claim alleges that Midjourney creates ‘high quality, downloadable images” of their characters even when users do not directly mention the studio’s intellectual property within prompts. The company is seeking $150,000 per infringed work.
A Public Broadcasting Disservice
Over the past several months, PBS eliminated nearly 100 jobs including 34 employees from the most recent round of job cuts according to Axios. This matters for our industry because PBS is a significant buyer of high quality children’s programming, including animated shows like Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum, City Island and Carl the Collector.
Mostly dead is slightly alive?
A spokesperson from Corus Entertainment went on the record with The Globe and Mail to clarify that while its subsidiary Nelvana will no longer produce animation the brand will still exist, “focusing on distribution, merchandising, and managing existing properties.” That may be cold comfort to the artists who completed production on the studio’s final series last week. Nelvana was founded in 1971, making it Canada’s oldest animation studio, best known for their work on Rock & Rule, The Adventures of Tintin, and Beetlejuice’s animated series.
Ten Jobs:
Background Paint Lead (Family Series) at Disney Television Animation (On-Site from Glendale) “This is a key leadership role that partners with the Executive Producer, Art Director and Line Producer to execute the creative vision of the series.”
Story Apprentice (Feature) at Sony Pictures Animation (On-Site from Los Angeles, California) “The Story Apprentice closely partners with the Head of Story and Lead Story Artist(s) on the production to explore options when working on storyboard cleanup and revisions, thumbnails, rough drawings, and completed panels on a feature in production.”
Lead Character Designer at Flying Bark Productions (Hybrid from Glendale, California) “Our LA studio is seeking a highly creative and skilled Lead Character Designer to bring unique, expressive, and stylized characters to life for our upcoming CG animated series.”
CG Environment Artist at Laika (On-Site from Hillsboro, Oregon) “The CG Environment Artist constructs CG environments that are cohesive with the film's look and blend with other elements from plate photography.”
Technical Artist (World) at Blizzard (Hybrid from Albany, New York) “As a key member of the development team, you will be responsible for supporting and optimizing art production through technical and artistic expertise.”
Production Assistant at ICON Creative Studio (On-Site from Vancouver, British Columbia) “As a Production Assistant, you will be a vital support figure in our animated TV show production. Contribute to daily operations, gaining hands-on experience in the animation industry.”
CG Senior FX Artist (Unreal) at WildBrain (Hybrid from Vancouver, British Columbia) “In this role you create high-calibre dynamic and riveting visual effects while meeting production deadlines.”
Lighting Artist (Feature Animation) at Bardel Entertainment (Hybrid from Montreal, Quebec) “You will be responsible for lighting and shading scenes, characters, and environments to achieve the desired visual aesthetic, mood, and storytelling impact of our animated project.”
2D Animator (Multiple Roles) at Wild Child (Hybrid from Stirling, Scotland) “Wild Child Animation is looking to expand our 2D Animation team ahead of a new production, Captain Onion’s Buoyant Academy for Wayward Youth.”
After Effects Compositing Artist at A Productions (On-Site from Bristol, England) “A Productions are looking for 2 After Effects Compositors to work with us for a few weeks on a new 2D pre-school series in our Bristol based studio.”
Didn’t find the opportunity you were looking for? In the past week, we added 85 new jobs to CartoonRecruit.com! That’s 16 more than last week.
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Signing off for now
That’s all for this week, recruits! Have thoughts or feedback about our project? Feel free to message me by email at mike@cartoonrecruit.com, or send a DM to our LinkedIn page or @cartoonrecruit.com on Bluesky. I will do my best to reply to every non-spam message I receive.
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