
VFX Workers protesting at the Oscars - mwilcox
http://www.fxguide.com/quicktakes/visualeffectsprotestatoscars/
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bleair
There is no guild for the companies that produce VFX work.

VFX studios do the work as work-for-hire, so if a film does poorly they don't
loose money, but they never ever get any of the profits if a movies does do
well. At the most simplified level - it's a loosing business model.

There's a very small set of "consumers" and there are more producers (vfx
shops).

The bid amount for work that is awarded is a tightly guarded secret (this
hurts transparency). Regardless, at a coarse level if tax subsidies (in Canada
or the UK for example) allow your competition to under bid you by 20 million
on a 60 million dollar set of work where your normal bid is for profit margin
of 3% you are screwed.

VFX today is labor intensive. There is still a great deal of creative
specialty skills involved, but outside of vfx they don't even quite realize
how easy or hard an effect is to create and thus they view outsourcing of all
work as a "sure and natural thing"

This year Life of Pi won the vfx oscar, and the work was done by a company in
LA that just went bankrupt (Sigh, it hurts to think about Rhythm and Hues). If
you watched the award show, just as the people accepting the award were about
to mention R&H they were played off the stage. Film producers do _not_ want to
even acknowledge how the industry works :).

As a long term career choice you do _not_ want to work in vfx. The people who
work in VFX are the funniest, most passionate, and creative sorts I've ever
worked with, but it's an industry that is going through "change" (as in,
disappearing).

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gee_totes
Most below the line jobs with studios are union, save for VFX, I guess. Why
aren't more people in IATSE VFX[0]?

[0]<http://vfx.iatse-intl.org/>

[UPDATE] after doing some research:

From the comments at the end of this blog post[1], it seems that Sony Pictures
Animation had gone union, and Imageworks had not.

Maybe also there is a dialectic between jobs lured out of big union states
(i.e. California) and to right-to-work states by film tax subsidy programs.

[1]
[http://animationguildblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/confessions-o...](http://animationguildblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/confessions-
of-union-buster.html)

~~~
Jare
I'm a complete outsider, but my impression is that union jobs are done by
workers contracting per-movie with the studio/production company, whereas VFX
are created by houses like ILM or R&H with (mostly) salaried employees.

In any case, if the current situation is: a) bad conditions/benefits for
workers, b) companies going bankrupt, and c) bigger movie budgets without
comparable revenue increases, then the entire industry is in trouble, because
improving any of those points worsens the other two.

This is not entirely different from the ongoing situation in the videogames
industry, where there are studio closures and layoffs weekly, and many feel
the entire model of big budget AAA games is already collapsing.

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nirvana
Alas, this article doesn't explain the problem. Ok, VFX companies are going
out of business while the films they helped make are having success and
winning awards. Why?

Did they not charge enough? Are they left holding the bag when effects go over
budget?

I had a short period in Hollywood working with a VFX house many years ago,
back then they had racks and racks of young artists doing the work. They were
able to hire them cheap and sell the results of their work to the industry for
a good price, making it pretty profitable.

However, that business model resulted in a boom of boutique VFX houses... so
is this just a boom that has gone bust because too many houses were created to
chase too few jobs?

Or are domestic producers unable to compete with foreign producers because
they can get even cheaper young artists to do the work? And if so, why not
split the work and create overseas divisions to do the more grunt work while
keeping the experienced artists at home working on the harder stuff?

Seems engineers have the same potential risk, but american engineers are still
able to compete.

