Pixel fucked: Inside Hollywood's VFX crisis
gq-magazine.co.uk
gq-magazine.co.uk
This feels like working for a video game company. People overworked, underpaid, and doing it for the love of the creative arts and working on a name brand project. Similar things have happened at Electronic Arts.
It's one of those things you can't tell people either, they have to experience it unfortunately, so the cycle continues.
Not sure how you fix that beyond regulation / protection for those folks.
That's the delusion right there, young naive folks thinking their suffering will pay off.
Because while you say everyone knows, the truth is that discussion is not equal to understanding / internal feeling.
It's only after being chewed up by the machine with no actual payoff do folks come to an understanding, unfortunately.
But until then it's lip service, and folks silently thinking their situation is special / different.
I'm not knocking these folks by the way, I think it's part of the human spirit / condition. That's why I advocate regulation / protections.
Union movements are on the rise because the status quo is a result of a power imbalance, not from necessity. If there are less movies with better VFX made by healthy staff, then so be it.
> I admire them for it, tbh.
Why? It's just rolling the dice. I don't see how it deserves admiration (nor does it deserve condemnation).
In general be cautious about getting into any industry where people are there more for love than for money. That tends to create exploitive situations.
Some more stuff from vfx subreddit:
https://old.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/14jyllh/from_3_potenti...
https://old.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/13zf3hd/vfx_a_little_r...
https://old.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/144mv2b/more_studio_cr...
On and on... I work in vfx but on the software side, and am very sad to hear about this happening :(
Get ready for some truly terrible scripted television acted out by the catering crews.
The whole of DS9 season 7 was subpar, including the war plots and the musical stuff. The Pah Wraith stuff was, if anything, the interesting part.
It is a documentary short about the vfx studio Rhythm&Hues which went bankrupt two weeks before winning an academy award.
Is there an overproduction of artist hopefuls compared to the movies being made?
I would also guess differentiation is low. Any VFX studio is as good as the other, so every studio is paranoid about losing a movie deal, over not accommodating the directors whims?
this is one of the places I feel generative AI can do a lot of good. It can get rid of the routine VFX like changing an actors pant etc that VFX artists are inundated with and leave only the artistic work for VFX artists which is hopefully not as taxing and not as requiring of crunch
What are you basing any of this on? I have seen demos that would be incredible for previs and animatics but nothing that would pass for final quality.
Computer graphics research, software and hardware continues to march forward, that's a reason visual effects have progressed so much in the last 20 years.
My friends who work in animation describe a constant back and forth between the union and the studios over demands for more work for the same pay. Generative AI will just make it easier for directors to ask for even more ludicrous tasks.
What are you basing this on and why would this be the case?
And, in fact, this one of the reasons why VFX gets so heavily overused for stuff that you could do in-camera.
Is the actor wearing the wrong pants? Well, reshooting that requires paying union actors, gaffers, camera operators, etc. to shoot it again. Fixing it in post means you pay a couple of ununionized VFX artists.
It doesn’t happen with the actual costume department quite like that, but properly lit sets have definitely been widely replaced by expanses of greenscreen awash in nondescript lighting that hopes to vaguely match whatever the rendered surroundings turn out to be.
You could just assemble a cast, bring them into a greenscreen studio, and shoot a complete matrix of poses and angles and lighting variations. Then synthesize the film from that when someone decides what it should be about.
Some of the reason they gave for that at the time wasn't just saving on real world costume designers by outsourcing it to "cheap" VFX teams, but also for added "security" to avoid "spoilers" leaking to the press in tabloid photos.
(Spoilers of a sort: My favorite meta-joke on all this was Spider-Man: Far From Home's "primary" Mysterio costume which had tabloids and fans doing all sorts of speculation what the CG composited costume on top of it would look like, given the Avengers situation, only to find out that was actually the outfit for many of Mysterio's scenes because it very well fit the character in that medium.)
This is why game developers have some of the worst working conditions in the the software industry.
And the last decades' exponential increases in productivity could have lead to keynes' famous 15 hour workweek - except they didn't.
Instead, productivity got directed to more output and more profit and working hours stayed the same if not increased.
As such, I'm more predicting this will simply lead to less VFX artists being employed by the studios than for there being a substantial improvement in working conditions.
However some of the larger vfx houses like ILM and some of the feature animation houses like Dreamworks are are union. (ILM is IATSE...not sure about others)
In my experience, whether or a vfx shop is union or not has little impact on salary and job stability.
Without unionization across the industry, that makes sense.
1) Viewers can tell the difference between good and bad VFX and have a lot of complaints about the quality of VFX on a lot of projects. 2) Studios don't seem to care. They care about price and about tight deadlines.
Marvel is getting criticized a lot for the quality of its VFX, which has been poor at times in recent years, and a bit culprit of that is that release dates are set with schedules for work. But rewrites and reshoots happen, which push back when VFX can do their work, but the release dates don't move. So this leads to a lot of rushed work.
Yes.
Hollywood in the general sense is also an industry packed to the brim with ego and wishful thinking. Nobody wants to rock the boat because, heaven forbid, an artist may never be allowed to live their dream working on the next Avatar or the next Toy Story for crossing the wrong person.
For better or worse, most young artists I've known are wishful thinkers. They each had a dream of working on the next Jurassic Park or the next equivalent to 2001 A Space Odyssey, or the next Frozen or whatever. Although the software industry is filled with aspirations of working at The Google or Meta, unlike programmers, artists in entertainment are willing to work for peanuts because they can't have their grand vision shattered.
The fantasy of being important is what fuels the entertainment industry. It's numerically infeasible for every artist to work on The Next Big Hit, but everyone is required to believe they can in order for there to be enough fresh artists to be chewed up and spat out.
I'm so glad I left animation and became a programmer. The worst coworkers in software pale in comparison to the giant throbbing dicks that exist everywhere in the entertainment industry. I can refuse to work weekends or, even more drastic, quit my job when the deal gets bad, and it's unlikely to permanently damage my career if it even does at all. My career isn't founded on a combination of free work and brown-nosing.
> this is one of the places I feel generative AI can do a lot of good.
I seriously think that studios aren't far from having their lunch totally eaten by small groups of individuals using various forms of AI. No doubt that GPT has been used in Hollywood already, but VFX and animation are stuck in the past in many ways. These studios are afraid to experiment, which is why they resort to using old school methods that are outclassed by individuals with deepfake tech.
Screenwriters and VFX artists, not so much. There are more people wanting to do these jobs than there are positions to be filled. That means anyone who isn't willing to put up with being used and abused can be easily replaced. It's why nearly every skilled trade in Hollywood has a union, because collective bargaining is often the only way to guarantee any sort of stability or fair treatment. VFX artist unfortunately don't have a useful union, so they get to experience firsthand what Hollywood was like for everyone else 90 years ago.
FAANG is pretty much US focus, although they happen to have a couple of sites outside.
So by definition programmers have to work elsewhere anyway.
Also not every culture sees programming as a worthy job, rather as kind of low level stuff that one has to endure for the real job, being a manager.
Naturally one can say since this is about Hollywood, outside US doesn't matter, even though the cinema working conditions is pretty much the same everywhere.
Yes, this is true literally everywhere in the arts: there are far more aspiring artists in any given field than there is money to support as full-time artists, and the way the market for art works you end up with a very small number of artists making lots of money, a modest number of artists making barely-adequate money, and a whole lot of people making occasional incidental money but unable to devote themselves exclusively to the field because of lack of funds unless they have unrelated support, where the skill/quality differences between being in the top category and the bottom may be very narrow for individuals, even if they are notable on average, because there is so much volume that a lot of the filtering mechanisms that exist in practice are rough.
Its so bad, it allows (and requires) 600 ppl to sit together and produce a few seconds worth of mindless forgettable sensory over stimulation, to keep a 14 year old glued to his seat. I mean Bill Waterson does a better job with just a pencil.
On top of it, there arent enough over stimulation requiring eyeballs on the planet to sustain such a mindless mega machine(see Odlyzko Content is not King), that the trash software enables. Its natural the whole thing keeps breaking down regularly.
It will only change when people step back from keeping the ship afloat and ask where the ship should be heading.
The studio I worked at lost a ton of money on films but did them for prestige, then tried to break even on grueling commercial and episodic work, all while pinching every penny imaginable--like firing a staff artist when his twins were born and bringing him back as a contractor to avoid paying his health insurance.
Around Superbowl time artists were forbidden (not physically, but by threat of e.g. "leave and you're fired") from leaving the studio for the weekend until all the Superbowl commercials were finished and rendering.
Williams did not receive credit, nor benefit financially.
did he release software on the public domain those movies used?
Maybe the industry will eat itself and we can go back to film making where it's the story that drives the film.
Edit: watched "Life After Pi" linked to here in the comments section. I feel my comment above is too abrasive now. The VFX guys don't deserve this crap. I still dislike the modern "Blockbuster" however.
Imagine what that movie could have been with cheap gratuitous CGI. Instead of Vinny getting covered in real mud, you could have slow motion closeups of glossy mud drops with fluid simulation flying through the air, the camera spinning around the mud in three dimensions before it cakes Vinny. But would such a visual spectacle make the movie funnier? I don't think so.
And quite frankly, She Hulk would look a lot better if they simply found a buff actress and painted her green.
It’s a good observation. Marvel has flubbed the landing on almost every tv series even if the original premises and pilots were good. I don’t think they executed on the bit very well, but props for trying I guess.
Edit: I don’t agree with it being better with a green woman though. It did benefit a lot from it clearly being the same actress in both forms. There’s a time and a place for practical effects. That wasn’t it.
I think it should have been done with the same actress. A buff actress can be made to appear more or less buff with clever wardrobe, camera angles, lighting, etc. In some scenes you hide her muscles under loose clothing or flat lighting, and in other scenes you emphasize them. Forced perspective can make her look taller or shorter when needed. Playing with the focal length could change the apparent shape of her face as well.
CGI muscles completely ruins the whole deal for me. At the very least they should have done the opposite; hired a buff actress and slimmed down her muscles with CGI when necessary; I think that would look less fake than what they did.
There was a hulk tv series a long time ago that was just a green painted dude and it was very silly
(I know that not all CGI is that way, and I see quite a lot without knowing it's CGI, but most movies have at least some bad CGI in them too).
Could this stuff be the reason why?
Hollywood’s visual effects crisis (defector.com)
That’s really all that needs to be said.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32461613 (excerpt)
I work in the VFX business, formerly managing a VFX house and now negotiating contracts with studios and production companies.
A few random thoughts…
There is a massive industry-wide labor shortage and a massive surplus of work to be done. Artist rates are way up, there are more junior artists than ever, there are more shows with more VFX than ever, VFX shops are turning away tons of work, new shops are springing up, investment groups are buying and consolidating VFX houses to try and become big players, etc. This is a boom time for VFX.
This is absolutely a (labor) seller’s market. Individuals and companies that are not taking advantage of this to create a better environment for themselves are missing a huge opportunity. There’s never been a better time to quit a job you don’t like and find a better one. Or to start a company!
…
Says the former manager of a VHX house who now negotiates with studios… he’d literally be one of the people responsible for this situation.
It’s a shortage of employers willing to pay workers. Thats why they cant get enough artists
However, you are correct in that people in my position are often at fault - but executive leadership ALWAYS signs off.
The labor shortage situation has changed a lot since then but it was never a wages problem. I knew people at studios offering double their standard rate who still couldn’t find enough qualified people.
Take with a pinch of salt because I don't work in the industry, but I'm not convinced this "VFX for everything" approach is cheaper or results in better films. I still think a lot of old films blow the modern counterparts out of the water.
The very fact that they had to use practical effects and physical film was expensive meant you couldn't just shoot unlimited takes without burning through money (unless you were Kubrick who was notorious for doing takes from every angle). The whole "fix it in post" mentality leads to sloppy, rushed work and a lack of thinking and commitment on behalf of the director and producing team. See here[1]:
> Even after shots are exhaustively delivered, Marvel is allegedly "infamous" for requesting "tons of different variations" until one earns the green light.
and even worse:
> We've literally made up entire third acts of a film, a month before release, because the director didn't know what they wanted," one source said about Marvel in general.
You would never have had this back in the day. You planned out your big set piece in advance and you shot it, and you better get it fucking right because your head was on the chopping block if you didn't. Instead, the directors and producers are now offloading their responsibility to get things right on to the VFX artists. Maybe the demands of HD and 4K means that such work is necessary compared to back in the old days because stuff like wig lines and errant hairs wouldn't be visible due to the resolution. But some of me wonders if it is overproduction, which I think a lot of contemporary music nowadays also suffers from.
Another evil is film companies refusing to create a "everything-in-one-place" content model like the music industry has done with Spotify, with the end result being an endless churn of content in an attempt to justify the subscription over their rivals. I imagine this is a contributing factor to the rushed "fix it in post" mentality but I can't see why film would be any different to any other industry - where taking your time to get it right the first time ends up being faster over the long run.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/culture/entertainment/marvels-vfx-artis...
But when the effect isn't critical to the movie and not having the effect was a perfectly valid choice? Like for instance, a character throws a cigar and the director thinks it would be cool to have the camera follow and spin around the cigar as it's flying through the air. Maybe you could do that for real with a sophisticated robot arm holding the camera, but that's expensive. In a previous era, the director would forget about that idea, it wouldn't get into the movie and nobody would care that it wasn't in the movie. But now that computer imagery is cheap and abundant, a director can have that gratuitous effect. And if it doesn't look like crap when the movie is released, it will almost certainly look like crap a few years later. The movie would have been better off without the effect in the first place. But because VFX is so cheap, it is now used for nonsense like this all the time and it makes movies worse on the whole.
One of the first movies I noticed this in was Fight Club. At the start of the movie when the MC is in the office, there's a long scene of the camera flying in between garbage in a garbage can. It's all CGI; there would have been no way to get a real camera flying around in between empty cans and donuts wrappers. It's an impossible shot to do for real, but they could do it with CGI. It also looks like crap, completely fake. I saw this movie in theaters and it looked fake then, and even worse now. In an era before CGI, the director could have settled on having a macro camera pan across a pile of trash without flying and twisting around inside of the trash. A real camera filming real trash. It would not have been as dynamic, but it would look real and continue to look real forever.
Basically, the cheapness of VFX seems to blind many directors to cases in which less-is-more. Now we have more-is-more movies packed to the brim with every gratuitous effect anybody can think of and it all ages like milk.
moving 3D blocks and segment maps
What does this mean exactly? Do you know?
TLDR; The industry is desperate for people and there is a lot of work to do. Some people work more than 40hr/week and some people don’t.
It's like game devs and pilots - a cool job lots of kids wanted to do growing up, so there's a glut of new talent eager to be used up and burned out for pennies.
Market dynamics is just a model, as with any model it doesn't fit reality perfectly, it breaks down at the edges.
That comparison may coldly boil down something people feel very deeply about, but I'd also argue the market is already doing that.
I your examples of the video game programmers being paid less, it is because their compensation is in two parts: the money and the pleasure, astisfaction of passion, & the prestige of working on video games. In contrast, working on a CRM project has no other pleasures nor prestige, so those companies must may more dollars.
Seems the difference in [pleasure, passion, & prestige] could even be quantifiable by measuring the paycheck differences?
Hammer hits nail on head, bulls eye. I've been a graphics programmer for 45 years, from research in the early 80's, through 3D video games, and years of Academy Award VFX studio work. It is the passion: making the media that captivates imaginations, and an ever visible stream of new applicants whose work looks really appealing - so you better shine or you'll be replaced.
This is an example of proper “market dynamics”.
Sadly, people who work in video games and movies are some of the most overworked and underpaid professionals relative to the value they provide because they have been socialized to see themselves as artists who are "doing what they love" so it's about "more than the money". Which allows studios to exploit them, because for the studios it is very much about the money.
If game developers were just as willing to work for FAANG then conditions would improve for them overnight. Same as if VFX artists were willing to do mobile app UX design. But as long as they stick to only their passion, they fail to exert any financial pressure to improve wages or working conditions.
> A clause in Angell’s contract reportedly required him to pay a £30,000 penalty should he quit in the middle of a project.
I can't imagine anyone signing that kind of contract in tech.
Employees probably have less bargaining power than in tech, since the skills aren't as transferrable. The employers are just contractors being squeezed by the studios both on cost and on extra work, and pass that squeeze onto the employees. And since the VFX houses aren't the ones making the profits on the final movie, running a VFX studio and trying to get the best people (and best product) by promising better conditions doesn't actually work.