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Comment by sashank_1509 | Hacker News Reader

I’m a bit curious how are conditions this bad.

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

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> Is there an overproduction of artist hopefuls compared to the movies being made?

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.

Programmers have plenty of comfortable fallback options if they don't make it to FAANG.

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.

The unions/guilds set some floor for wages and conditions while working. But they don't really do a lot for the aspiring actor waiting tables between auditions for bit parts however much he believes he could be the next Tom Cruise.

> Programmers have plenty of comfortable fallback options if they don't make it to FAANG.

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.

I'm not in the industry, but from talking to people that have been, VFX is one of those things that gets squeezed the most. It typically happens after principal photography is done, and the release date has been set in stone by the management and marketing machine at the studios. When you add the wide numbers of VFX houses, the lack of labor protections, and the ability to outsource to all corners of the world, there's so much competition that it's a race to the bottom with pricing and delivery dates.

There are a lot of factors, but you’re not wrong.

Are they in a union? I know most of the industry is unionized but I've never heard of vfx having its own or being part of one of the others.

No. The VFX industry in the US is not unionized.

You are correct in that the industry as a whole is not union. Most of the smaller vfx houses are not union.

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.

> 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.

I was 7 years at Rhythm & Hues, leaving the industry during the production of Life of PI. It gets this bad for several reasons, including: each VFX studio has between 3-5 feature films moving through it, at different stages of production, at a time, and often a few commercials as well; that equals between 1200 and 2800 digital artists and their support staff all working on the same corporate campus; by necessity, these technical artists have a range of experience, so there is also an education department, a constant flow of new software, and software freezes for a given production that may last 18+ months; so by necessity the staff is managed en mass with cafeteria food, around the clock render completions and hence 3-5 "dailies" per 24 hour period. One production's compute going over expectations, or production changes, or staff changes easily ripple in impact through the entire studio - all productions.

> 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

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.

You’re right about the productivity. And many movie studios already own VFX studios. Netflix has Scanline, Disney has ILM, etc. But it is not super common.

I was more thinking about employment by the VFX studios themselves - i.e., if the article is right and VFX companies are already in a race to the bottom with respect to the movie studios (their customers), this race would likely swallow all productivity benefits that generative AI could provide.

Oh right, of course. I agree. But as with any technology, new possibilities emerge. Perhaps someone will come up with a new paradigm.

It is more efficient for the business to hire the same guy for 45 hours than three guys for 15 hours. If we assume that all of them get their turn eventually, then this can only be done by rotating who gets employed.

I would rather businesses take a hit on efficiency and have our 15-hour work weeks. Maybe that'd provide an incentive for businesses to pursue making project management and hand-off among staff more efficient.

It's much easier to exploit people passionate about their industry.

This is why game developers have some of the worst working conditions in the the software industry.

Yes, they're both "passion jobs" and people often work on "passion projects" in them.

VFX has been turbo-fucked for a long time. I don't know quite why. Part of it is the employment law specific to the geography, e.g. comp time after 50 hours, overtime after 60 hours in Culver City (this seems to have changed since I worked there in 2005 though).

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.

> Is there an overproduction of artist hopefuls compared to the movies being made?

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.

Hollywood in general has a surplus of hopefuls. But Hollywood is largely unionized. VFX is a glaring exception.

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.

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?

> But Hollywood is largely unionized. VFX is a glaring exception.

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.

The problem is that when you start relying on this too much, then you eventually start shooting entirely without the pants. “We’ll fix it in post!”

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.

The Avengers films did exactly that. They filmed characters with random costumes because they hadn't done the designs yet. Then replaced the costumes with CG later.

Why even bother with a script?

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_actor

They even did fakeouts by the trailers using even further different CG costumes.

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 ridiculous and completely untrue. They filmed the actors in special suits that could be tracked more easily. They added the suits as CG because the CG suits look much better and let the actors actually move around. Not only that but if the iron man or war machine masks go down and obscure their face they can transition to a full CG character and have them fly off.

The requirements grow with the capability of the tools. VFX getting better in the last decades didn't make the crunch less.

Exactly. Is that a basic economic principle? I think it’s called the efficiency paradox.

Wikipedia calls it Jevons paradox:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Thanks!

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.

From what I can gather and have read, two things can be true at the same time:

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.

Notably while many other entertainment specialties have unions, I don’t think vfx does

Thank trash software. Keeping the ship afloat becomes more important, than wondering where the ship is heading. Thats what trash software does to ppls brains.

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.

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