It’s easy to get confuse when searching a job position without understand what is currently need in the industry. Pre-production jobs are always considered as “highly competitive”, which probroboly because it’s characteristic. Most film will have much lesser visual development artists compare to animators. However it still important to research how many position and program are going & which are you interested in.

In this post, I will try to make a brief summery of the numbers of pre-production and other positions are hiring right now in Chinese 2D animation industry. This research will be highly personal and based on the films / program I’m interested in.

For the first step, I collected 80 hiring positions from Weibo, Boss hiring and made a list. 22 out of 80 jobs are related to pre-production( Concept design, Character design and storyboard artist).

At the same time, 32 positions are related to animation. Which include animation supervisor, animator, in-between animator, clean up, coloring and color check.

Surprisingly, there are much more pre-production positions there in the market. Most of these position have slightly higher salary than animator / in between artist, around 6-8k per month.

This might because we have a lot new film and small studio are starting this year. The example below is a new child cartoon series Lele store is hiring. Sharefun Studio is working on a Netflix series Scissor Seven at the same time.

Meanwhile, looking “pre-production” jobs from game industry is also available. A great number of 2d storyboard artist position is hiring. However due to higher application number, these position might be harder to get in. This lead to another aspect of today’s topic: Salary differences.

For most of animation pre-production position (take storyboard artist as example), their salary is about 5-6K per month. However the same position in game industry will be paid at least 10K per month on average.

A lot of animation students move to game industry because of that. Although game industry is more and more reported as ” intense labor, highly overwork”, compares to some in-between animators are still paid depends on cut numbers, overwork still seems a lot more acceptable.

Commercial might be another way to keep making sweet shorts while making a life. Here is a good example of cross over from industry as studio: Whale Dream Studio was funned in 2016. They started with making music video for a virtual music band called whale island. Then years later, they successfully turn whale dream into a 2D animation series (come up in spring 2025).

After all, no matter what industry we are working in, as long we keep learning in the work, making exciting film might be the ultimate goal for all animators.