Seth Rogen set out to achieve the right work-life balance for animators on “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.”
The Paramount animated film‘s director Jeff Rowe recalled speaking with producers Rogen and Evan Goldberg, whose Point Gray production company was behind the feature.
“That was the thing that was really important to us on this film, and I learned it from Seth and Evan because in getting to know Seth, I’m like, ‘He has a really good work-life balance and everyone at Point Gray does,’” Rowe told Insider. “And I asked him about that and he is like, ‘Well, we’re like when you’re doing live-action, sometimes you’re on a set for 40 days in a row and it is exhausting and tiring. And we want to make sure that our people have time away from that and that it doesn’t become their entire lives.’”
Rowe continued, “I really took that to heart and wanted to make sure that when we made this film, we did it ethically.”
Animators opted to work three days a week, with some working from home in Scotland, according to Rowe.
“We’d be like, ‘Great, let’s figure that out, and let’s accommodate that because that’s your process and that’s what leads you to make your best art,’” Rowe said. “And we would often do that with most of the team and just try to make sure everyone always felt supported.”
He added, “I never want the team to be suffering more than I am. And I also hopefully am suffering more than the team because I’m the captain and I’m paid to absorb that, and they’re not. It’s important to preserve that. People just do better work when they’re rested and have home lives.”
In contrast, Marvel VFX artists and animators have spoken out about allegedly toxic work environments leading to unrealistic deadlines and burnout due to being overworked. VFX artists on Disney+ series “She-Hulk” and the film “Ant-Man: Quantumania” have pointed to the alleged unfair pay disparity and last-minute edits.
Allegedly, around 100 animators parted ways with Sony’s “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” after working more than 11 hours a day, seven days a week, per a Vulture report.
“Mutant Mayhem” producer Rogen recently spoke out about not wanting to join the MCU due to differing approaches to filmmaking.
“We really have a pretty specific way we work; me and Evan [Goldberg] have been writers for 20 years at this point,” Rogen said. “It’s a fear of the process, honestly. And I say that knowing nothing about the process. There are a lot of Marvel things I love. It’s mostly a fear of how would we plug into the system they have in place, which seems like a very good system, and a system that serves them very well. But is it a system that we would ultimately get really frustrated with? What’s nice about [‘Mutant Mayhem’] is that we’re the producers of this. So we dictated the system, and we dictated the process in a lot of ways. We are creating the infrastructure and process for them, not plugging into someone else’s infrastructure and process.”
