It’s important to contextualize that the majority of Viv’s artists are contract, which means they are not salaried employees, have no benefits, and get paid on a task by task basis, and they aren’t exactly getting paid crazy well.
While working on Season 1 of HB, a coworker confided in me that Viv basically had them on standby as far as new assignments, despite their open availability and high quality of work output.
That same employee went looking for work to supplement their income—as they had rent and bills to pay—and was told by an indie creator whom Viv had already approached that they could not be hired, despite their qualifications, because Viv “won’t allow it.”
I had a similar problem where I’d gone a while with no assignments due to the pipeline bottlenecking and being generally disorganized. I took on some extra small jobs, then got a huge assignment dropped on me that I was initially given no deadline for.
We didn’t get a lot of deadlines in the beginning. It was sort of “get it done when you can.” At that time we’re also working on stuff much further out in the pipeline. For example, I was given backgrounds to complete for the Spring Break episode well before Episode 1 was completed.
Then once Murder Family went live, the pace accelerated greatly. We were being given work to complete for a given episode up until the final hour. One of the assignments that nearly broke me was a bunch of background posters for LooLoo Land. I was initially given no deadline and a very loose idea of the scale for this assignment. There were points when time got wasted because I was still waiting for Viv to give me feedback on process work she’d been sent days earlier—yes she was still giving out assignments and feedback on pretty much everything herself at this point.
At some point I was handed off to Sam Miller. She wasn’t officially a lead at this point but had been taking on the responsibilities of one more and more as production ramped up. It finally occurred to me to ask Sam for a deadline and was given about a week to complete all 7 posters and because I loved the show and idolized Viv, I didn’t dispute that deadline despite knowing I’d have to pull all nighters to get it done.
Evidently the episode they were for was going live at the end if that month, which I hadn’t been made aware of prior to this. I ended up completing the line art pretty much the night before the episode launch, with someone else stepping in to colorize them. As far as I know based on what my friends in the animation department told me, that episode was uploaded pretty much as soon as it was finished. And I believe that was the case with all of season 1. We had no backlog, stuff just got posted as soon as it was finished, and as much as it might seem impressive to crank out new episodes every other month that sort of pace just isn’t sustainable for a any kind of production, let alone an indie.
There’s a reason networks finish the entire season before airing it.
