Sony Pictures Imageworks Reviews

-Everything seems very corporate, cold and cliquey. -The new young animators have become entitled and immature and it ends up feeling like you're in high school again. Who gets hired is based on who they know rather than pure skill. It's not about how well you perform either because they don't care about that they just care about bringing in and keeping cheap artists and those who get chummy with the leads and higher ups. Prepare your social game if you want to survive in this competitive studio and don't expect to be given chances at better shots as some of the leads have favorites when casting shots. -There's not much room for growth as an artist as people don't talk to each other much and therefore it's harder to build that relationship enough to be able to ask for feedback casually. The artists are also micromanaged and there's not a lot of room for creative freedom. -Little communication between artists. You don't end up knowing everyone in your team or even talk to them sometimes, everyone just focuses on their own work in their own desk slaving away. -Despite little communication, gossip still spreads around within the studio. -Everything is very political and if you are way down in the chain you will be on the chopping block when it comes to decide whether you stay or not. Most artists get so desperate they end up doing ghost hours to make themselves look good. -Be prepared to get biased performance reviews that don't necessarily reflect your true performance due to biased leads. -Rigs are very poor even though this is feature film, even the rigs from online schools are way better or from other studios. Instead of making animators suffer why not fix it in rigging first, invest more in that before making animators fix all the model issues. -Artist management is terrible at managing the artists and they let go of talented seniors and give the reason that there are no spots but then shortly they hire new juniors from outside. -Overtime can be really stressful although that's a given.

After the brutal decimation of the senior talent that defined the Osher era and the rising costs and increasingly difficult ability to deliver that followed... you would have thought this place would have learned its lesson. Instead they've hired numerous new executives from companies with renowned bad practices who, despite claiming to come to Imageworks for the culture, seem set in their old ways. Together Randy Lake and the executive team operate under a singular mantra: cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. The problem is that, save for a few, the entire executive team lacks the artistic and technical understanding to recognize that with the rapidly decaying remnants of a once legendary pipeline, at this point the only way to actually make things cheaper is to focus on making things better. For the few executive level people who should know better, they lack the courage and conviction to speak up for what's right and fight for it, instead preferring to cower in the comfort of the cozy office they'll very soon be too expensive to occupy, like everyone else. Their focus is forever fixed on achieving cost-efficiency through staffing, and because of this they are sentencing the company to a dull and boring death at the bottom of a lake of their own rusted technology, crippled by their inability to deliver the amenities clients come to expect elsewhere - too expensive to win work and too cheap and blind to see what they need to do to remedy that.