Sunday Mailbag- Art Contests?

Q: Have you seen the “Shaqtoons” thing? What’s your opinion about art contests like this?

A: The “Shaqtoons thing” Richard is referring to is this:

Multimillionaire Shaquille O’Neal “needs our help”! He wants animators to produce animated shorts for free and submit them for his new “Shaq Life” show. If they pick your video, they will pay you a whopping $500!!!* But it’s not just about the Benjamins. As Shaq says at the end of the video (with a wink) “That’s right animators, I’m going to make you famous.” The small print says they own the rights to any videos you submit whether they pick yours or not.

Just to put things in perspective, Shaq earned $292,198,377 playing pro basketball (that’s just his NBA salary, not including endorsements, etc) over a 19 year career. He played in 1207 games averaging 34.7 minutes per game, which means he earned $6,976.55 per minute. That means it took him 4.3 seconds to earn $500 as a pro basketball player.

That’s how much he and TBS/TNT value the talent and hard work of animators. 4.3 seconds of Shaq’s time. Remember, that’s only for the person they PICK. The rest get nothing and give up the rights to their work in the bargain. That’s really the problem here… asking people to create animations they can then use for content and pay them nothing.

I’m think you can see what my opinion of this kind of thing is.

This is hardly new. It’s called working “on spec” and it’s something creatives have been having to fight against forever. Far too many content producers devalue the skills and contributions of writers and artists by asking them to produce work with no guarantee of payment, but only the “chance” the work will be used and payment made. Spec work is bad for creatives. It devalues what we do. It lowers how much we get paid for it. It reduces our rights to the work we do. It’s the lowest form of creative work, and something that should be avoided at all costs because it only encourages producers to do this sort of thing when they should know better.

These predatory “contests” have become a lot more prevalent lately due to the rise of social media online. The offenders think they will not only get a ton of free work to use for content and only have to pay peanuts for the “winner”, but that the contest itself will generate a lot of social media sharing and buzz, giving them free viral promotion.

The most troubling thing is that many of these kinds of “projects” are being initiated by big companies with deep pockets that would have no problem paying real world rates for professional work. The “Shaqtoons” fiasco is backed by TNT/TBS, a division of Warnermedia. These are the same people who own Warner Bros Animation, the Cartoon Network and other legitimate animation studios. They know what this kind of work is worth and how much talent and effort it takes… a lot more than 4.3 seconds.

So if this is a bad thing, why do people keep doing it?

That’s the really sad part. You keep seeing this because creatives keep falling for it. Young writers and artists just want to break into the business, and they allow publishers and producers to take advantage of them by doing this type of spec work. Until that stops, you will keep seeing people like Shaq stealing the time, talent and hard work of others to line their own pockets. If you are a writer, artist, animator, designer or some other type of creator, don’t fall for this. Value your talents, and others will too.

*Note- They just upped the prize to $10,000. That’s 1.4 minutes of Shaq-time!

Thanks to Richard Griffin for the question. If you have a question you want answered about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!