I was thinking at some point in the near future there is going to be a big empty hole were no new content will be available thanks to Covid.
I was wondering if animated shows would still be able to press on with their schedules on time?
Don’t see why not as long as they can use a PC/Mac that has all the necessary software.
I once knew a woman who did it the old-fashioned way, making drawings by hand. She worked from home.
Digital animators can work anywhere they want, really, with the caveat that it may be a bit dependent on how creative they need to be, and how much interaction they need to summon that creativity. Going from an environment like Pixar studios to your dining room might be challenging, but a lot of animation tasks are becoming automated, such as tweening, where you draw a start key frame and an end key frame and tell the software to move the foot, car, whatever, from point to point in x number of frames.
They certainly can for modern animation done almost entirely on computers. Even in the olden days of hand animation the studios didn’t always employ large numbers of people, most of the people could work independently most of the time. Occasionally studios pulled in large numbers of animators for faster production but going far back the animation business was based on the ‘stock system’ of reusing cels. The biggest problem would have been in the voice overs which are often done with the entire voice cast together in a room, but that isn’t really necessary.
There is a long lead time on most animation so new animated shows and movies should keep appearing well after live action productions have run out of finished material.
A bunch of movies that were scheduled for release during this time when the theaters are closed will now be released in coming months (or even next year). So other movies that had their production schedule interrupted will have their release delayed. In the end, things will settle down. (For example, I think the two big movies expected when theaters re-open in July are the live-action remake of Mulan and Christopher Nolan’s Tenet.)
Actually, many movie animators (and VFX artists) who work in movies *already *work from home. I’ve interviewed several artists who’re trying to get out of movies and into game development who’ve worked on movies as contractors.