Navisca aggregates public job postings from creative-tech studios - VFX, games, motion, tech art, arch viz -
and turns the raw text into queryable signals: skills, roles, salaries, AI-tool mentions, geographic mix.
We don't infer anything we can't show. If the parsers can't extract a salary band, the cell stays blank. If a category has fewer than
5 postings in the window, the chart is hidden, not estimated. The whole approach is "read what's there, never invent."
01 · Where the data comes from
Sources
We collect only from public sources - studios' own careers pages and the public job boards they post to.
Nothing behind a login wall, no bought or leaked lists, no re-resale. Every page we read is one the studio has chosen to
make publicly visible.
We collect respectfully: we honour robots.txt, keep our request rate well below ordinary human browsing, and
stop immediately if a studio asks us to. No leverage, no negotiation.
02 · How often the data refreshes
Update cadence
The data refreshes weekly. Every Monday an automated run:
- Collects fresh postings from every source.
- Re-reads new and updated postings (see parsing below).
- Recomputes the weekly snapshots (skill demand, role mix, salary aggregates).
- Rebuilds every page on the site.
- Sends the weekly digest email to subscribers on Monday.
The "this week" labels you see across the site always refer to the calendar ISO week of the latest pipeline run.
Postings older than 6 months drop out of trend windows; they're still in the per-studio dossiers as historical context.
03 · Turning text into structured data
Parsing pipeline
Each posting is read by rules-based parsers, not AI guesswork - the only AI step is translating non-English
postings (see below). We pull out:
- Skills: named tools and techniques (Houdini, Maya, Unreal, Substance, Python, real-time, etc.) and their common variants.
- Salary: pay figures - currency, range and unit.
- Dates: posting publication, last update, application deadline.
- Disciplines: art / tech / mixed, from the mix of skills a posting asks for.
- Roles: normalised to a hand-curated set of canonical titles ("VFX Artist", "Look Dev TD", "Tech Art Lead").
Every value is tied back to the exact words in the original posting, so any number on the site can be traced to its source.
When something is mis-read we fix the rules, not the individual number - so the logic stays consistent.
04 · One posting counted once
Deduplication
Studios often post the same opening in several places at once (their own careers page and a job board).
Counting that as three postings would inflate every chart, so we match duplicates and count each opening once - by the
board's own job id where there is one, otherwise by a fingerprint of the studio, role, date and description. Studio name
variants ("Industrial Light & Magic", "ILM", "ILM (Lucasfilm)") all resolve to one studio.
Trade-off: we err on the side of under-merging - in rare edge cases we'd rather count one posting
twice than collapse two genuinely different roles at the same studio into one. The drift is small and we re-check it regularly.
05 · Apples to apples on pay
Salary normalisation
All salaries are converted to USD per year for cross-country comparison:
- FX rate: the official daily rate from the posting's publication date (not today's rate) - keeps historical bands stable as currencies move.
- Hourly → annual: hourly rates scaled to 40 hours / 52 weeks. Marked "freelance" in the per-posting view so a contract day-rate isn't compared 1:1 with a salaried role.
- Range → point: for aggregates (P25 / P50 / P75) we use the band midpoint when only a range is published. Distribution charts show the full range when the posting provided it.
Caveat: these are advertised salaries, not paid salaries. Many markets systematically under-report - Tokyo posts "Negotiable", London posts "Competitive", a lot of US states still don't require disclosure. We surface what was published; treat the matrix as a directional signal, not a contract.
06 · Reading non-English postings
Translation (Japanese / Chinese / Korean)
CJK postings are machine-translated to English before parsing. We translate only
the job-description text - never invent or paraphrase responsibilities the posting didn't include.
The original-language source is preserved on each posting record (toggle the flag in the per-posting popover to swap between
the English translation and the source). Skill / role parsers run against the English text but match a multilingual alias
dictionary, so a posting that says "Houdini経験者歓迎" still resolves to Houdini even if the
translator phrased it slightly differently each run.
Translation runs only on postings new to that week's batch; nothing is re-translated unless the source text changed.
07 · When we stay quiet
Statistical thresholds
Stats are hidden rather than shown small when the sample is too thin to be meaningful:
- Salary cells: hidden when fewer than 5 postings in the window. The cell shows a dash + posting count instead.
- Trend lines: a category needs activity in at least 3 of the last 12 weeks to render a trend; otherwise we show the raw counts and skip the line.
- "Hot" / "Cooling" labels: require a week-over-week change of at least 30% AND an absolute count of 3+ postings. Headlines like "Houdini demand +500% this week" because someone posted 3 jobs vs 1 last week don't help anyone.
- Country / city rollups: need at least 5 distinct studios in the cell to surface as a separate row.
These thresholds are tuned conservatively and only loosened as data volume grows.
08 · What you should NOT read into this
What we don't claim
- Not the whole job market. We track studios that post publicly. A lot of senior / specialist hiring happens via recruiter networks that never touch a public board. Treat Navisca as the visible tip - useful, not exhaustive.
- Not predictive. Trends are descriptive (e.g. "demand for a skill rose over the last few weeks"). We don't extrapolate or forecast. If you see a directional signal you like, validate it against the underlying posting list.
- Not a quality review of tools. Traction Score measures market adoption / signal density. It is not a verdict on which AI tool produces nicer output - that's a creative judgement we don't try to make.
- Not real-time. Weekly cadence. If a studio posts on Tuesday, it appears in the following Monday's update.