Laika post correction, sort of
Friday, October 9, 2009
In a post the other day, I reported that the Laika studio had shut down its CGI department and laid off 128 employees. An anonymous commenter responded that I was wrong, that it was only 63 employees and the CGI department is still in operation. Doing some digging online, I see more than one source reporting that the CGI department has shut down, and some confusing numbers regarding how many employees were laid off. In this story, they phrase it thusly:
Laika recently cut their computer animation division (128 employees), deciding to focus strictly on stop-motion animation for future projects.
So basically I'm not certain of what the situation at Laika is... And I'm too lazy to dig any deeper into the subject. When I was working as a print journalist, we had to follow up on things like this and try to keep all of our facts straight. But as a blogger I can just say to heck with it and go to Ben and Jerry's instead. Hooray for "e-journalism"!
4 comments:
I don't know if you're curious at all. I probably should have been more detailed in my comment about it.
The total of 128 comes from the recent layoff of 63 plus the layoff of 65 last december. Sorry, 128 is technically accurate, I should have been more clear.
"Shutting down the cgi department" is not accurate, but it's like playing the game of telephone, "cut their computer animation division" could mean two things. It means, "reduce," some went with "shut down." LAIKA's publicist says, "It’s not accurate to say that the studio is abandoning CG altogether. They will continue to use CG opportunistically in stop motion films and will continue to develop CG projects in house for further down the road." http://www.cartoonbrew.com/stop-motion/laika-cuts-computer-animation-staff.html
"The eliminated positions were not practical to keep on payroll until the company begins pre-production on another feature, said LAIKA spokeswoman Maggie Begley. ... There are about nine projects in various stages of development at the moment in the company, including stop-motion and CG features." http://www.tigardtimes.com/news/story.php?story_id=125383284368122800
As a former print journalist, wouldn't you know better than to use sites like Slashfilm.com for your information? But then, I don't know if you're getting paid to write these.
In my print journalism days I would've been much more stringent about keep my facts straight, but this blog is sort of a glorified personal project and as such I pass along the occasional bit of gossip when I hear it and then debunk it if I hear otherwise. I tried making this more of a regular news site early on, but quickly figured out that I got more hits when I just wrote about whatever I thought was interesting. So I'm certainly not out to harm anybody's reputation, but I'm also not going to bother to do some of the heavy lifting of a serious journalist.
Oh, and thanks for the info!
I don't want to creep you out and make you think I was spying on you. Your entries just kept showing up on Google. My second visit was as accidental as the first and I was really surprised something had happened after I left my first comment.
Also, you're welcome.
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