The Malaysian animation industry is celebrating its latest success with the announcement that 3D animated series Origanimals has nabbed the Best Planning Award at the Seoul Promotion Plan 2012 Project Competition, which is held in conjunction with the Seoul Int’l Cartoon and Animation Festival. The project stood out from 109 entries from 19 countries and was one of 20 features, series and shorts selected as finalists for the final pitch sessions.
Origanimals is being developed by Giggle Garage Sdn Bhd, an MSC Malaysia Status Company. The 52 x 11 3D HD series aimed at kids 4-8 follows four Origanimal (origami + animal) friends known as the Awesome Four as they go on adventures and help other Origanimals in trouble. The show is currently in pre-production with the first 26-episode season scheduled to be ready for broadcast in December 2013. An interactive version for the web is in planning.
The winner announcement was made by head judge Linda Simensky (VP of Children’s Programming, PBS Kids, USA). The other finalist pitching judges at SPP 2012 were Orion Ross (VP – Original Series, Disney Channels EMEA, UK), Nils Stokke (Head of NRK Children’s, NRK Super, Norway), Min Park (Exec Producer, EBS Korea) and Dong-woo Lee (CEO, ROI VISUAL, Korea).
Fantastic!
Wow that was 2012. It’s 2016 now, things are so different!
Giggle Garage still comes up in the local news often for winning awards. But behind all that are things that you don’t see in the news.
Low pay, very high workload, passionless working environment. They also use outdated software, insecure network. Very lacking in the IT department. Technical problems etc… As an animation company, we lack in-house software, using only some scripts for Autodesk Maya.
The employers like to get contracts from other companies and are very secretive about everything they do. Being an animation company having its own IP, but instead of growing our own IP ourselves it is outsourced to other companies (Origanimals, a kids show). All that while we’re often made to work excessively on other companies’ IPs.
More often than not, the employers don’t even know what we’re doing or are going through (to be fair we don’t know what they’re doing either as they are very secretive about company-related stuff). We, regular employees, don’t get anything for working excessively. Even our salaries often come in late. I’m just glad they don’t postpone our pay day for a month or more.
Then, there’s the delayed contract renewal issue. Exactly as described in the other review here.
We don’t even talk to the clients directly, always having to go through some middle-man. As such, we don’t know exactly what do the clients want, and even when it’s clearly the clients’ fault for being indecisive, inconsiderate and ignorant. The employers and higher-ups wouldn’t know, or understand and don’t even care to ask any employee.
Most of the time, we can’t help but wonder if our clients know anything about animation at all. Their workflow order is all wrong, and most of the time we’re forced to abide by them and as such the incompetency of those clients actually affect our work. Our clients are suppose to be animation companies too, outsourcing their IPs, just like us.
The higher-ups are happy to point their fingers at employees all the time no matter how hard we try, instead of cancelling contracts with incompetent clients. We’re akin to a “factory” that “manufactures” animation using “cheap labour”.
As a result, regular employees have no love and loyalty towards the company and everyone will leave when some other opportunity comes. Everybody just wants to “get it done”. Everyody does things just to get by. So, often, if there’s any resignation, it’s done in groups.
The employees also have huge network in the relatively small local animation industry. If you offend them you might never be able to work in the local animation industry ever again as they will back-stab you to employers of other local animation companies. Since the industry is really small everyone knows each other and words spread almost instantly.
Rumour has it that the company doesn’t make any money but relies on funds from the Malaysian government (through some agency like MDeC, MSC…). Like every other MSC-endorsed company, there’s probably some “dirty money” flowing behind the scenes. So yeah, there’s possibly corruption. Hence why the higher-ups are so secretive about everything they do when it comes to the company.
The way they hire new employees might be a bit problematic too. There was a case of a relatively attractive lady applying for a job but didn’t get it, then some other guy relatively big in size was accepted even though he hasn’t been doing his job well or at all, as he is always seen watching YouTube videos during working hours. Possibly sexism here.
Please be more transparent, talk to your employees and listen to what your employees have to say.
Please accept only knowledgeable and competent clients or else pay more heed to your own employees when they suffer the consequences of working with such clients.
And we would have more love and passion for our work if we’re actually working on our own intellectual properties. Employee’s love for their work is key to company growth. Where is the love?