took me way too long to find the "post" button on this thang on the desktop version. grandpaification is real and I'm a boomer now

Please help one of the most relentlessly positive people I know and hardest workers for animation power rebuild!!!

are you in Burbank? @kristengish.bsky.social 's bae is in BTU I believe

Who’s had a really good pretzel in LA? I’m building a tier list and I wanna try your recommendations

I'm ever-so-slowly getting ramped up here, sorry if I missed following you!!

Marcyyyyy!!! 💕💕

Tysm SEANNNNN 😭😭

awwww GEEEENE!!!

If you wanna see some of my stuff click on over Nosfera-TO my portfolio:

www.norameek.com/storyboards

HEY!!!! If you've got a killer animation project that needs boarding, writing, directing, or even animating, I'm available now!

Union work preferred - hit me up at norameek (at) gmail to see my NDA work too (🔗 in the comments)! And thanks for sharing :)

Yeah! Imagine the confidence you’d feel as a member if it was fellow members documenting a problem like that and deciding to stand up together, instead of being siloed alone and not knowing who shares your issue. Organizing doesn’t happen in an intake form - it happens with each other!

This being social media, I'm not going to go into "what's the plan?!" but rest assured that no matter which way the vote goes, myself and your fellow negotiators have your back. Happy to chat with any member who has Q's. The only wrong choice for animation workers is not to vote.

Additionally, story artists who write have a 15% bump in the Nick contract and the AMPTP should follow suit. This is another item I believe we're more than strong enough to secure back at the table.

artists on streaming shows work on (two 11 minutes packaged into 22's).

To me, this means that instead of classifying board artists as the higher-paid Production Board, producers now have a written excuse to classify new hires as ASP, effectively giving them an 8% paycut with little recourse.

Regarding my craft, story: It's great that we brought the Animation Story Person classification up with a significant pay raise, but it comes with the AMPTP's added language that ASP applies to streaming projects 20-30 minutes in length, which is what basically all storyboard -

These are two provisions I believe that we're strong enough to go back to the table for. I've seen our strength firsthand as I was planning and executing the actions we took and I don't have to enumerate it here - we have strength in spades.

We can't eradicate AI, but 2 big gaps in the dam are missing from what I consider good guardrails: protection from refusing AI tools as a condition of employment, & that designers, boarders, etc. cannot be given an AI asset to work off that will affect their credit and compensation.

With tech-related clauses like AI, we're not looking at 3 years of impact. It's more like 10 or 20, since contract language historically doesn't change much after new implementation (just take a look at our New Media/Streaming clauses that are still giving corporate discounts after 10+ years).

3 years of no protections here means 3 years of companies figuring out how to perfect the outsource pipelines. We know they haven't - and couldn't - outsource them all tomorrow, though.

Staffing minimums are vital enough that getting them into the contract for crafts other than writers is going to make the difference between completely outsourced or AI-driven projects and retaining jobs stateside.

We're at a crossroads that feels existential because it is. Over the last 3 years, I watched us reach a point where companies could simply revoke job protections without strong contract language. I have to consider if we can afford another 3 years in the same trend.

While negotiating, I considered the contract could have enough gains in other locations to make up for this lack. But the two issues are so existential that the gains we got in craft-specific areas and return to office protections are not cutting it or protecting jobs.

We heard, in record numbers from Animation Guild members surpassing even the WGA's survey return rate, what was vitally important to members this cycle: saving jobs, via outsourcing and AI protections. These are precisely the two things that our contract lacks a great deal of.

I put some quick thoughts together to join in with other fellow negotiators who have put it more succinctly than I have. Here is why I'm voting NO on the TAG agreement this cycle. 🧵