Essentially, I work in animation/content production. The most oversimplified description of what I do is, well, draw pictures. I make art, come up with concept/character designs, storyboard/plan scenes, and do basic animation/motion design. I goddamn love this shit. I love my job to pieces. I get to literally draw every day, it's the best.
What's not the best is the general expectation to constantly work unpaid overtime (its a 10-6 Mon-Fri job but to hit my goals I'd have to work 2hours extra every day or on weekends), the workload, the pressure to constantly be making more videos faster with only a small team. Apparently my quality is great, but my quantity is lacking.
For a while I worried I wasn't trying hard enough, but then my coworker – who routinely works til 10-11pm every night AND most weekends – was told HE wasn't working hard enough!
Our team of 5 people can only make three or five 8min videos a week, and that's considered not good enough – our boss wants seven videos a week. For me personally, that means I need to make two videos a week. It's a lot, and lately she's been giving us longer and longer scripts that amount to 12-15 min videos – nearly double what they used to be. So, the goalposts of her expectations have shifted too.
But, high pressure and tough deadlines is super normalised in the creative industry in general. Think about the stories of crunch and burnout in triple A games studios, big name animation studios. No matter what studio, you're frequently expected to work overtime, and for not very much money.
I can't be sure that jumping ship and applying to a different studio is going to guarantee a better work life balance, because it's pretty much expected that if you draw for a living, you must LOVE it and therefore will happily bust your ass for pennies. Some studios might be slightly less terrible, but I won't know until I'm in the job, you know?
I don't know what to do. I don't really have skills in other areas, nor am I really interested in other career fields. I like drawing for a living, but to do that I have to put up with a high pressure fast paced industry that doesn't pay well. Meanwhile, I have friends in other industries that are much more relaxed and do pay well – but they're not fields I want to work in.
My boss doesn't really want to negotiate less hours (I was given a “sure you can have more time/more leave…. IF you hit my targets” spiel earlier this year, which at this rate is looking impossible) so I don't really see a way to convince her to let me have more of a balance.
This is really just a rant – I'm feeling stuck in a rut and demotivated. I can't see myself doing this forever, but I don't even know what I'd do instead.