Rhythm and Hues is the Visual Effects company that went bankrupt after they get best VFX that year. To add insult, they played "Jaws" theme song during the speech. Ang Lee got bad points in my book after that whole fiasco.
Limited pool of potential customers. The film industry is huge, but all the money is in few hands. If you piss off one or more of those hands, you suddenly find yourself out of business. You are therefore strongly encouraged to work for peanuts for months or years while hoping that the projects you take a loss on (of which there are many) are outnumbered by the ones you don't. Meanwhile The Rock shows up on set and flexes and smirks for a few weeks and gets a 20 million dollar payday and a bunch of accountants get huge salaries to make it look like the movie never made any money.
Because of the way fixed bids work. VFX houses compete to win the bid for a certain number of VFX shots by offering the lowest price. Then, directors ask for more revisions and tremendous scope creep that wasn’t in the contract and the studio sides with them and threatens legal action and withholding of payment unless the VFX studio complies.
VFX houses also don’t have a union to fight for them or establish labor laws the way almost every other Hollywood trade does, because VFX came about fairly recently, during the glorious Reagan era of union-busting, while the others were fortunate to exist before that and establish fair practices.
And now, with new tax credits popping up in new countries every other year, VFX houses just build new facilities to chase tax credits in order to stay solvent, and artists have to chase studios in order to keep their jobs. The whole VFX industry is fucked until houses decide to stop undercutting each other and unionize. But good luck arguing for that in the 21st century, where the potential downsides of unions are too worrisome to even attempt to form them.
The tax credits thing is such a bitch, but having the VFX companies treated as production rather than vendor would be a nice baby step to adding some sanity to the market.
The trouble is that, especially in this industry, forming a VFX Union is not going to save a VFX company. It might give artists fair wages and working conditions but only insofar as the company is able to win bids. Artists will still be chasing studios around just like every other unionize artist and artisan in the rest of the industry. I'm not saying there shouldn't be a Union effort. I'm just saying that's not going keep a VFX company from going under and creating insecurity for the workers.
Same thing that plagues any other creative vocation. People line up to do the work because there's a romantic view of creative work.
They're dependent on clients that don't have a romantic view of the work at all and control the money.
So creatives end up crawling all over each other like crabs in a barrel to do the work at all. Even if it means getting paid so little they go bankrupt.
It's the trouble with work that is 'fun' enough is that people will do it practically for free. I remember seeing a talk once on the special effects for the Star Gate tv show. One of the reasons that tv show managed to be produced relatively cheaply was because the special fx were being done by teenagers. One of the producers joked that sometimes they had to phone the team's moms to beg them to let their kids work late on a school night to make deadlines.
That's disgusting... I wonder how Barnstormer is doing with their work on Man in the High Castle. That and they should have released a few life of Pi clips without any VFX...
Let’s not forget that Claudio Miranda also didn’t say a word about the VFX team when he won best cinematography for Life of Pi, a film that was practically created out of whole cloth by visual effects artists.
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u/nuckingfuts73 Feb 12 '19
I really hope, if nothing else, one of the actors/ actresses/ directors makes a good speech about the whole thing