Is It Worth It To Try And Build An Animation Industry In New Orleans?

Different entities have spent years on developing strategies to get New Orleans to be a successful city that doesn’t just rely on one industry. The major industries have been tourism, food and oil & gas. In an effort to attract more young professionals and better jobs, there has been expansion into healthcare, arts & entertainment, ed tech and more. While digital media has been highlighted by Prosperity NOLA and other plans, I’ve noticed that software development is the niche that is always getting pushed to the forefront of this category.
I’ve been doing animation presentations for several years and workshops for the past two years. Last year, I took it into overdrive and that resulted in going up to north Louisiana to do a Saturday workshop for the anime club at Louisiana Delta Community College, my first stint as an adjunct professor this Spring 2017 and getting to do a presentation and workshop at the NOLA Mini Maker Faire. After doing a two-day workshop with KID smART where they helped us craft better lesson plans, I had an epiphany moment during a discussion where I really questioned whether it would be worth it to try and make animation a big thing in New Orleans. Mostly, from thinking if it was even possible.

Animation and Video Game Companies Moving to Louisiana

• There are video game companies that have been either moving to Louisiana or putting additional locations here, but they’re not bringing tons of jobs, which makes sense because Louisiana is not prepared to fill these jobs if there were a lot of them. Mostly transplants would have to be shipped in to fill the jobs.
• Depending on the company, some are not even offering artistic positions
  

People From Louisiana Don’t Tend to Leave

• Everyone knows that if you’re going to try and be successful in animation, California is your go-to location. Canada, New York, Washington and some other states are also front runners.
• However, I’ve noticed that people from Louisiana tend to stay in Louisiana. Even the people who have moved away tend to come back eventually. So if I create all of these animators that don’t have jobs to fill, will I be doing them a disservice?
  

Educational Bureaucracy

• In trying to work with schools to get animation to be a part of their curriculum, one question that comes up is certification. Louisiana has a college preparatory diploma and Jump Start diploma. From my understanding, my fit would be in the Jump Start educational pathway. While there are 3D programs that offer certification, anyone in animation knows that a certification doesn’t matter when trying to get a job in the industry. It’s all about your portfolio.
• Autodesk has certifications for a lot of their CAD and 3D programs, but programs like Cinema 4D (motion graphics) and Blender (free, open-source) don’t. For Blender, since it’s an open-source program, it makes sense that they don’t have a certification for users because it would go against the whole concept of open-source typically meaning free.
  

Networking Woes

• Everyone knows how important networking is, but in New Orleans/Louisiana it’s maybe 500x more important. You’re not as likely to have ONLY your work ethic or degree do the talking for you here. Relationships are the ultimate currency.
• Saying that, it’s hard to be in an industry where most of the people are guys who have no desire to talk to you. I’ve reached out to various companies to get informational meetings or to network with no response. When I attend different events, no one is going to walk up to me after hearing what I do and when I put forth the effort to connect with others and get the business card, it’s crickets on the return emails.
• It’s funny when people mention the same names to me over and over again and I’m like, yep, I know that person. They know who I am and what I do. Or I think to myself, yep, I’ve tried reaching out to that person to no avail.
  

The reason I started pursuing animation education was because animation is awesome and people should be introduced to it, but also because no one was really concentrating on it when I first start speaking in 2013. I thought it would be cool to try to pursue in New Orleans, but as you can see; I’m having my doubts.

- BlkWmnAnimator