Visiting Lecturer: Margaux from Moth Studios

We’ve had another visiting lecturer called Margaux, who works at Moth Studios in London. It was a really fascinating talk, which covered a case study of one of the projects in collaboration with the New York Times, but also her experience of working in the industry.

Margaux spoke about her work with the New York Times in an animation called Conception, a series about motherhood, made by female animators and artists. It was interesting to hear some of the behind-the-scenes about the project’s conception. Apparently, the project would have been unsustainable to Moth if they had to animate the entire series for a year, and so Moth encouraged NYT to reach out to other studios in a collaborative effort. NYT were hesitant, largely because with more studios to manage, the process seemed more complex, but it worked in the end, and it was fascinating hearing a little bit of how studios can collaborate in the industry.

In regards to industry work, Margaux spoke about finding a balance between commercial work and personal work, and how the two can go hand-in-hand. Some might assume that it’s all commercial work, and you might jump from one commercial project to the next. However, Margaux found that she sometimes would work with a big animation studio that pays well, but then finds nothing turn up and that she might find some time to work on a lower-paid job for someone’s own personal project. And of course, vice versa, in that you might fancy working on a personal project and ask others to help out at slightly lower rates (Margaux doesn’t like to ask for lower rates, but sometimes the budget doesn’t stretch out far enough). She also talked about the idea of collaboration and supporting rather than being competitive in the industry. In a previous post (something about resolve), I saw examples of people competing with one another to get noticed by studios, but Margaux spoke of supporting the people you work with – recommend them to studios or projects and see if you can lend a hand, and they might do the same in the future. It’s essentially networking, but I guess having read a lot about a competitive industry, it sort of slipped my mind. She elaborates on this in project wrap parties – send emails, say thank you, share where the final films can be found and make everyone feel connected.

Margaux also talked about budgets in general – to make sure you’re paying staff, composers, sound designers and anyone else involved in the project. It may sound obvious, but for studios, you always want to make a profit, otherwise it’s just unsustainable. She spoke about a previous job where they made a loss despite working on a fun project, so finding a balance is important, as is with the previously mentioned balance between commercial and personal work.

This doesn’t have as much relevance to working in the industry, but this is more of a personal note for how I want to improve my own work in the future. Something Margaux said during part of the presentation covering film development was the idea of being too literal. Now I’m currently working on a short film called “Carefree”, adapted from a script written by a performance student, and this idea of literal has been cropping up a lot in my feedback sessions. My work likes to be literal, I find myself showing what’s been written in the script on screen, and I’ve gotten feedback to try and diverse myself from that. It’s not that it’s wrong, but that there are other ways of expressing a script, and Margaux touched upon that this is something very common in student films. She mentions symbolism, finding things that relate but aren’t the literal description. I couldn’t find an answer to how to fix that before I started animating, but it’s something I want to work on in the future.

When asked about how Moth Animation hires freelancers, Margaux mentions that they look for people whose skill set are balanced – not insanely perfect animators that are refined that you might find at the Golden Wolf, often they like to use animators who can create motion graphics, that can be simplified but clean. She also mentioned they look for what software people can use and their availability, but are happy to work with anyone around the world. Moth Animation don’t usually however call out for freelance animators – they normally find their talent on Instagram. However, they do call outs for producers.