Rhythm & Hues bankruptcy reveals vfx biz crisis | Hacker News Reader

Rhythm & Hues bankruptcy reveals vfx biz crisis

variety.com

8 pointsnmudgal9 comments

Rhythm & Hues is in a strategic position which several of the Hollywood majors have to support, or the competition between these studios is going to seriously heat up.

R&H is the #1 studio in the world for digital animals: they did almost all the coca cola polar bears ads and "Babe the Talking Pig" nearly 20 years ago! Since that time they have dominated in the digital animal arena, doing pretty much every quality realistic digital animal in a major release film since, including "The Life of PI" (which is expected to get Best Visual Effects this year.)

Now look at the VFX studios left: ImageWorks is Sony's, ILM is Disney's, Weta is Peter Jackson's... What about Universal, Warner Bros, Paramount, Fox, & Paramount? They will have no one 'of scale' to produce their cute, talking animal pictures... This may seem minor, but it's not. Not at all. If is in the serious interest of these non-VFX studio owning film studios to keep R&H alive and well.

Things won't stabilize until VFX workers unionize and negotiate with the Producer's Guild collectively for pay, benefits, and residuals. The money is there to make this work; what's missing is the bargaining power.

I'm not a particularly pro-union guy in general, but given the way the film industry is currently structured, it's not really optional. They'll have to do it or they'll just continue to go bankrupt.

Uhh, no. The last thing the US VFX industry needs right now is to become more expensive.

The problem is not artists being screwed over pay & benefits, the problem is that most VFX shops are struggling to stay in the black, period. In part this is due to overseas competition and expensive bidding processes, but also shops taking on work at or below cost in an effort to keep people employed.

I don't see the contradiction really - if there's pressure to take on work below cost, then what's missing is bargaining power. I am very much not a union guy (I tried on 3 separate occasions to join the SF chapter of IATSE and they refused to even process an application), so I hope the answer is something other than a typical union structure. On the other hand it's become increasingly difficult to make a living as a technical professional in this industry, given the relentless downward pressure on wages.

Right, and that lack of bargaining power is because in these days of hefty PCs and standardized software studios can always find other VFX shops, either in the US or abroad, to do a "good enough" job for less.

There's zero chance of requiring studios to only use unionized VFX shops, so unionizing them will simply make them either less competitive (need to charge more to cover guaranteed benefits) or more prone to bankruptcy (cannot meet commitments to workers if there's a shortage of work)

I'm not arguing for unionizing them, although I can't help noting that other unions & guilds manage to negotiate deals with the studios.

What I'm pointing out is that having VFX shops crumble under financial pressure from studios doesn't do the studios any good either. Ultimately it's not about the hardware or software, but about the skill of the people using it. Given that R&H is a leader in its field and still went down, something is wrong with the business model.

When I was at NetApp I got to work a bit with the WETA Digital guys (Lord of the Rings vfx) and I was amazed at how cut throat this business was. I saw them bringing something that was absolutely critical to the success of the film and yet they had no pricing authority at all on their services it seemed like.

I wonder what role Hollywood Accounting [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hollywood_accounti...] is playing in all this?

Technical departments are not typically paid in points on studio films.

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