Newscape Studios reviews

At first, working at Newscape was okay until crunch culture became an issue. Myself and other employees would work well into the AM, myself working until 4am just to meet weekly deadlines (multiple 10-minute episodes would be posted weekly for several YouTube channels). Management would be approached about issues within the animation pipeline (which they had very little knowledge of despite the majority of their employees being animators) and would give several excuses as to why it couldn't be improved or that there wasn't time/money to improve. After management found attempts in a private discord server to unionize (as well as statements made out of frustration due to the conditions), Newscape cut the majority of their animation team under the reason that the "employee handbook was violated". It wasn't until after everyone was terminated that more specific reasons were given when several employees tried to file for unemployment and were ultimately denied. Several other employees quit after the office was locked down for 3 hours, with management saying that "the police were on their way", when it was actually private security, essentially saying that if we left the premises we were resigning. The entire situation was horribly mishandled; no corrective action, no one-on-one meetings, no office-wide meetings to discuss anything that was said that was taken out of context, or to discuss how to resolve any of the problems brought up. I get that Texas is an at-will state, but human decency was completely thrown out the window when many employees sacrificed a lot for this company. Several had moved to completely new cities just to work in-person, which management encouraged so strongly that they wouldn't allow remote/at-home work for certain employees that couldn't drop everything and move. Turns out it was all for nothing given that the office we were stationed at was closed after mass-termination and everyone still working at the company is indefinitely working from home. In short, poor management led to mass-termination of full-time animators within 2 days with no warning. I'm just disappointed at this point with the lack of compassion from the management team. Instead of communicating with employees, they punished 17 people by putting them out of work before the holidays.

I'm sure you can guess from the sudden wave of 5-star reviews after 1 and 2 star reviews, but management attempted to cover up several reasonable complaints after employees were wrongfully fired/quit before they were fired. There was a lot of potential in this position and I was frequently strung along by the promise of exciting new projects, but ultimately supervisors were too unorganized and incompetent to actually follow through. Newscape saw some success in YouTube animations and immediately over hired, expanding the department until it was split into multiple teams working on various channels. Management has no experience running an animation company and it shows, with insane turnaround times (120+ shots in a week) and unrealistic expectations for 8-minute shorts made by overworked employees. These issues were repeatedly brought up to management and they dismissed concerns, only to later claim that they would have fixed them if someone spoke up about it. I kept hoping they would improve but I think they're caught in a cycle of self-destruction and will end up running themselves into the ground. After the employees were fired from animation, management actively worked to turn the gaming department against them by reading private messages to them out of context. This is defamation that could hurt the chances of fired employees to get a job in the future. It makes me extremely sad that current employees were led to believe that their former coworkers are dangerous and created a toxic office environment of paranoia and victim-blaming. I hope that current employees will be able to move on and find a work environment where they will be valued and compensated fairly. Many of them are very talented and deserve better. Miscellaneous: -Management promised holiday breaks only to turn around and state that employees would have to crunch and work weekends to get time off -No onboarding or training for new employees, they were set up for failure -Employees were forced to relocate with no assistance to high-cost cities (Denver and Austin) and many were fired before the office in Denver even opened In conclusion, I wouldn’t recommend working for Newscape.