David B. Levy is a development and production executive and the author of best selling books about the animation industry, including Your Career in Animation: How to Survive and Thrive. David’s current role is Head of Studio at Pinkfong USA. Among his many qualifications, he has lectured and taught at Parsons, SVA, NYU, RISD and Pratt, and served as the president of the New York chapter of ASIFA. In June 2022, David participated in Toon Boom Animation’s livestream to discuss his book, Your Career in Animation, as well as your career in animation. Our conversation covers work cultures within animation studios, the process of applying for your first job in animation, how to find mentors throughout your journey, as well as exploring changes in the animation industry since the release of his book’s first edition in 2004. You can watch the original interview in its entirety and find transcribed excerpts from our discussion below. David B. Levy participated in a livestream interview on ‘Your Career In Animation’ in June 2022. For more interviews, panel discussions and live art streams, visit Toon Boom Animation’s channels on YouTube and Twitch.I enjoyed that your book spends time discussing your own early career experiences, as well as those of your colleagues. How often do you think about your experiences when hiring and working with new talent? David: It’s important to remember when you were starting out, full of all the unknowns about what your future would be, where your first break might be and what you even could do on your first job. That’s a lot that’s going through someone’s mind as they’re applying for things or doing interviews. I really feel like no matter where you go, and what phase of your career you’re at, you can’t forget where you come from. That responsibility of being able to look at new talent that didn’t necessarily do the exact thing you need them to do — they don’t have on their resume that they’ve been an animator on a 2D preschool show with four legged characters, which you need them to animate now. But they might have a reel that had a student film where they did that beautifully. Or they might have great designs, and that’s how they like to draw naturally. There’s so many other things to look at that can make up who that person is, and the sum of their experiences. So I think that’s a really good thing to keep in mind. Especially as we’re trying to build more diverse, more inclusive workplaces. When you do that you’re opening a much wider community of candidates that didn’t get in the kingdom yet. Or aren’t the most intuitive choices. I really try as a hiring manager to live by that.
For those who haven’t picked up Your Career in Animation: How to Survive, who is the book for? David: I think, at a glance, it could be easy to think it’s for the newcomer: the student, the about-to-graduate animation artists. It’s absolutely for them. But it’s not exclusively for them. It’s also for folks like me, that are deep in their careers — I’m not gonna say how deep — but who have different choices to make and have different opportunities based on our careers up to this point. I didn’t want that group, which is a very important part of the industry, to be underserved in a book like this. It was up to me to make sure, through the interview process, through collecting all the stories, that there are people at all different stages of a career. You have people who are in supervising roles that have done that for thirty years, there are people who have been recruiting for ten years, animators that are two years into their careers, designers, art directors. Everyone’s at a different point. You can research them and learn more about them on their own social handles. I encourage readers to do that. So you’re getting a wide range of perspectives, because I certainly wouldn’t want it to only be my point-of-view or my career to-date. That helped, I think, get a much wider snapshot of the industry today. What led to you writing Your Career in Animation, and what was that process like? David: I have to go back to the first edition, which I started writing in 2004. That’s kind of a fun story, too, because it’s really a career story. I had just gotten the opportunity to teach at the School of Visual Arts for a 15-week class for seniors. It was the class they get at the end of their four years at SVA that teaches them how to get a job in the industry. I got the opportunity to teach it. It was one of my favourite classes as a student, so I was excited. And the first thing you get to do as an adjunct professor is write the syllabus. You always throw away the previous syllabus: “They didn’t know what they were doing.” You start over, or at least you look at what they did, and you try to improve it. I made my 15-week lecture topics. And I kind of thought, “Oh, this is a chapter list too. This feels like a book. Why don’t we have this book?” And it was a eureka moment. And I had already gotten involved with a publisher in New York. I had promoted a few books that were printed locally, just down the block by a small press. I took their publicist to lunch with what I wrote up as a chapter list and a little cover letter. Because it felt like something they would print. They had done a lot of art industry books. And she said, “Wow, I think we’re gonna want this book,” The publisher called me and said, “Okay, this is great, but we need to see a sample chapter.” So I just wrote up a sample chapter, for spec. I did it in a couple of weeks and sent it in. I got an email back that had three questions. It said, “Well, how many pages will it be? Are you willing to change the title? And how long will it take you to write?” When I read that email I literally turned white, because you do not ask those three questions if you don’t want the book. So I answered the questions. And then I got an email back: “Check your fax machine. Your book contract is in the fax. Please sign and return.” I’m telling you that long story, because that’s how I approach my career. It’s about making those connections. Nothing happens in a vacuum. That’s the hustle that I found really helpful throughout my career in animation. You make your own opportunities, you make your own luck, and you make your own connections.
Work in the animation industry is very often production-to-production. David: Absolutely, yeah. That sounds very destabilizing and chaotic. But when you look back you realize you are the consistency in that story. You are the one on this journey. You look backwards, and you go, “Okay, so I was here for three years. And I did that. And then that led to this next opportunity.” There’s actually an order to it when you turn around. It doesn’t necessarily always feel that way. But it’s very much there if you take those moments to appreciate it.
The first edition of your book came out in 2004, when Netflix was still mailing DVDs. How has the animation industry changed since the first and second editions? David: One of the first opportunities I was really grateful to have was to try again, to show that change. Some of the stuff is embarrassing that it had to take so long to happen, like the #MeToo movement and D&I initiatives. Those were not top-of-mind as they should have always been. But we’ve all gotten the message, I hope at this point. And it’s all our collective responsibility to build a better, more diverse industry every single day. I wanted to make sure that, as I did another set of 100 interviews for the new book, that diversity and inclusion was the mission. Who are the most amazing people I can find, from all backgrounds, that are working in animation? Not just the people I happen to have coffee with and am already working alongside. That was a tremendous opportunity. Other changes, like streaming platforms, and the fact that there’s all these niche audiences that didn’t have shows serving them before. And that they’re in season arcs because of the way the content is distributed on platforms where you might binge watch it. You can have episodes that connect and are going to be played in a certain order intuitive to that story. That was never part of the average animation series proposal, and now it’s an expected one for certain audience ages. That’s such a cool thing! Then there’s the taboo that used to be around like self-publishing. It used to feel like a stigma. “Oh, I self-published. I tried to get it printed but I went the self-publishing route.” Now self-publishing means self-distribution. Think of all the great comic artists and cartoonists and illustrators and designers and animators that are publishing content themselves, distributing content. They’re incubating their brand, their stories, their storytelling, without any gatekeepers. Without anyone to say no. And with a huge reach. Platforms and the traditional world are watching and learning from that, and trying to pull those people into the mainstream. I think it was an exciting time to refresh the book.
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