How Jobs in the Film Industry are Changing
In past articles I have used data to measure changes in film production departments over time, observing the rise of departments like visual effects, and noting that relatively few departments have seen decline. A great deal more change must have been happening within these departments though. After some effort, I have figured out a way to measure how specific jobs titles have changed. I took the 15 films with the top budgets on IMDB from each year and used IMDB’s API to get the full credits from the following departments: Animation, Art, Camera, Costume, Sound, Special Effects, and Visual Effects. With that information I was able to graph the rise and fall of the most popular job titles.
You can access interactive versions of all the follow graphs can by clicking the link below the image.
Findings
This is a graph of the top 100 job titles, with a few similar titles grouped together. As you can see, most jobs have risen over time, but certain new ones (most visibly compositor) have far outpaced the others.
Digital Jobs Began to Supersede Traditional Ones After 2000
Visual effects and animation jobs like animator, compositor, and digital artist were relatively uncommon in the early 1990s but grew extremely rapidly thereafter. Stereoscopic 3D jobs also exploded in popularity in 2009. In an parallel study on animation production I found that these jobs are already in clear decline, but they seem to have had a reprieve in live-action. The line for compositors is removed in the following graphs so that I can zoom in closer.
Very Few Job Titles Saw Significant Decline After 2000
A handful of studio jobs that have been around for decades, such as model maker, and sound editor, have seen decline in the past few decades. Editing related jobs are likely victims of software automation while model makers are more likely suffering from the rise of digital alternatives that can be composited in post-production.
The digital visual effects job matchmove artist grew immensely in the 2000s, peaking in 2012, but has been since shrunk, perhaps due to more sophisticated software automating labour. This is a bad sign for the similar job compositor, which has become the most common title in the database.
The Majority of Traditional Jobs Grew After 2000
Many positions that have long histories in the industry did not see decline, and in fact grew through the 2000s and after.
Towards the end of the 1980s the number of total jobs and the diversity of types of positions both began to rise. In the early 2000s the count of total jobs per film began to grow exponentially, ignoring the effects of the 2008 financial crisis. This explains why most traditional jobs were still growing: there was more work in general.
Conclusion
These data show that there have been some profound changes in the types of jobs on the largest film productions. On-set production roles have been eclipsed by work mostly done on computers relating to animation, visual effects, or post-production. This is not to say that those old jobs are all in decline though. The data did reveal certain specific roles that are seeing downward trends, but the majority are stable or growing. This is likely due to the general increase in the number of people employed on a given film. One unexpected finding in these data is that certain visual effects and animation jobs that were growing significantly early on have themselves become victims of automation, likely due to improvements in software. This dataset and the one I studied on animation both show a rise in software and programming titles oriented toward building the tools that automate those jobs.
I should note that these data do not tell us anything about the nature of employment in this industry. Wages, union membership, and job security may well be down, despite the general increase in the number of jobs.
Data Sources and Methods
This project used a list of 45,000 movies from movielens.org and sorted live-action from animated films using their genre tags. Rather than showing what percentage of movies credit particular job titles, I wanted to count the absolute number of credits for specific jobs. In order to avoid creating an imbalance between years with more and less movie titles, I limited the number of movies per year to 15. I filtered the movies for English language and chose the top 15 budgets for each year. With this list of movies is used Davide Alberani’s IMDBPy to pull production credits from IMDB’s API. As with the other production studies I have done, I needed to limit my request to 2–3000 a day to avoid getting cut off by IMDB’s server. I removed extra information in the credits that appeared in parenthesis or behind a colon, which usually referred to a specific sequence the worker was credit for, or their alternate name. One of the weaknesses of counting job credits is that the same job is often called different things. Pruning the data in this way helped with this, but I also grouped together related jobs in the graph (which you can see in the key of the interactive graphs).
This article is part of a series on the special effects, visual effects, and animation industries. It is based on research supported by:
Le Fonds de Recherche Québécois sur la Société et la Culture Postdoctoral Fellowship
The University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Film & Media
Title Image by Ahmet Yalçınkaya
