The elephant in the room here is that VFX, unlike many other film professions, isn’t properly unionised. Half of the practices that make VFX a hell-scape to work in and produce so many poor results are due to the simple fact that the workers are not treated the same as other parts of the crew. As long as it’s cheaper to fix it in post than retake the shot you can look forward to much more of this.
How to unionize when the studios create VFX divisions in 3rd world countries and then tell you if you want to continue your career you'll follow the jobs overseas? I was at Rhythm & Hues Studios thru two Oscars, transitioning thru programmer, digital artist and then financial analyst. I was a lead game developer before doing VFX, and I thought the games industry was bad. Well, at least in film the people are vastly more diverse, but the work is still 6-7 days a week, 10-12+ hour days.
A lot of third world counties have pre existing unions, and a culture of unionization especially against foreign influence.
Uber for example has always struggled to operate in my country because anytime it tries to push driver wages down, drivers go on a nation wide strike and protest outside its offices. This prevents them from reducing costs without hurting themselves, so they can’t undercut the competition and reap the reward of becoming a de facto monopoly.
> when the studios create VFX divisions in 3rd world countries and then tell you if you want to continue your career you'll follow the jobs overseas
This is one of the things that has to get worse before it gets better. You let them, but you don't go there (or maybe you go, who knows). You start growing a spine
Then let them realize that they "can't come knocking" when the studio is somewhere else. Start putting the foot down with deadlines and revisions (nobody said it was going to be easy). Let them see how the quality suffers with an offshore team with much less skin in the game
"Oh but I might lose my job if I don't do how they tell me how to do it", well, yes. But the way things go you'll lose the job eventually when the company go bust
I see so many similarities with the freelance web/mobile developer space. And having run a small dev shop (3-6 people) for 7 years I agree that the _only_ way forward is to hold your nerve, fire the shitty clients and only ever do work you can feel proud of. Yes, there will be tens of thousands of people on (the VFX equivalent of) upwork who charge 1/3 your price, and clients will put immense pressure on you because of it. But if you’re know for honesty and quality, the work will come.
I'm curious, if you've been a programmer, one of the most in demand proffesions out there,
Why would you tolerate 10-12 hour days 6 days a week? What motivates you to not get a more time balanced job?
Everywhere I go, the issues to be solved are critical and the deadlines are present so I do the work that needs to be done, and (as I mention above) non-entertainment tech jobs think I'm either too expensive, or something... basically, it's a nepotistic world, and I developed my network in abusive industries, so to the non-abusive places I apply, I look like an alien. I get replies like "wow! we've love to have you, but you're clearly too expensive and would not be happy doing the non-shiny things we do." And I never even mentioned salary.
I have the best luck just being honest and concise, know your number and ask if they can meet it. If not, no-one wastes their time. If they say the can but low-ball you, not a big deal, decline and move on.
> I get replies like "wow! we've love to have you, but you're clearly too expensive and would not be happy doing the non-shiny things we do." And I never even mentioned salary.
This could be like when a romantic partner says, “Let’s be friends.”
Thing is, unions usually proliferate in industries where you are more or less replaceable. That isn't the case in industries that can't be easily automated.
Or creative industries where 20% of the people do 80% of the heavy lifiting work. As a vfx and cg supervisor at a large vfx company myself I work extremely long hours, picking up the slack for the 80%'ers who can barely simulate a piece of cloth or match a plate's key light direction. Why on earth would I choose to unionize and equalize my pay and benefits to those that are objectively poor at their job in an industry where successful results to tasks are so subjectively measured.
You are likely deluding yourself about your skill level; I’ve had the habit of tracking my peer's productivity (on Shotgrid) to stay above their metrics, and even if I could say objectively to be the faster in my dept., that is irrelevant. VFX needs different kinds of people, and I can’t count how many times “less” productive artists came up with very beautiful and ingenious solutions that I haven’t thought about it.
Also, we don’t stay long hours because we failed to put a light on the correct place. as the article points out, the issue is the director/production has no financial penalties for their lack of planning and indecisiveness. This is just the Parkinson's law of triviality [0] that happens in most businesses, but since VFX studios don’t put a hard cap on the number of revisions, artists end up absorbing that. One of my recent crunches was due to production going through 43 versions of a magic wand effect. IMO, by version 15, we already had multiple and more interesting looks than what was approved for final.
[0] https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/
There's your answer. Equalize pay and benefits because there's no telling whether those in charge of assigning pay have any good sense at all for quality. It's the argument of salary vs. hourly vs. per-item all over again.
> because there's no telling whether those in charge of assigning pay have any good sense at all for quality
They'll pay what they think you are worth, and you are free to leave if you think they aren't paying you enough. It's not like there are only two software companies in the entire world and you gotta work for one of them.
I think the reason programmers don't unionize is some are 10x better than others, so they don't want to get the same wages as 1x programmers. Conversely, something like airline piloting or being a factory worker or nurse can be done much more equally by everyone in the field, so they are more likely to unionize. Are there wild variations in talent of VFX professionals?
Programmers don’t unionize because they are well paid, and there is no structural barrier stopping people who gain skills and experience from getting better paid in the future.
To contrast that look at medicine. Doctors have no union. They have a huge barrier to entry but once you are already a doctor then how much you get paid is determined by your skills and where you work. Doctors can get paid millions with enough prestige on them.
Nurses on the other hand have a terminal limit. Every pay increase is gated by another nursing exam giving an additional certificate. Then in the end, the only upgrade is to doctor. However that means losing all benefits, retraining, and starting in a new track despite both professions being medical. Nurses therefore need a union.
Another thing that stops unionization is the ability to work on your own. Nurses with high enough qualifications can work on their own, but in most cases they still need a supervising doctor even if that doctor is only a warm body. VFX pros are much the same. They need a team with them to work on a big budget movie.
Programmers and doctors though can break away and start their own practice, serving the public directly and no one can stop them. With a little business savvy they can even rival the agencies that would have hired them as employees. If your profession can double as a stand-alone business then you rarely get a proper union.
Even in cases (e.g. electricians) where a union is formed, it will still conduct training and certification which positions it somewhat like a guild.
Doctors have a guild: the AMA. Lawyers have a guild: the ABA. Neither are the same things as unions but they have similar effects. The ABA and AMA also have large roles in professional education. Both also have major roles in accreditation and regulation of the profession. Unlike unions, they do not collectively bargain on behalf of individual workers. They aren't subject to the many regulations associated with organized labor.
They also enjoy broad exemptions to antitrust law which would otherwise apply. It's why other classes of worker cannot have the same type of protective guild -- it's legal when the ABA or AMA do it and illegal when someone else does it.
The situation with doctors and lawyers is considerably different however.
Doctors, whether MDs or otherwise, tend to be pretty well-compensated in US broadly.
Lawyers are much more of a mixed bag. White shoe law firms--mostly hiring students from top-tier schools with prestigious clerkships? Big bucks though either make partner or are mostly eased out. Some decent corporate law and successful private practices. But it's generally not a particularly well-compensated profession for someone from a mid to low-tier law school. And lots of people who graduate law school and even pass the bar don't actually end up practicing law.
Doctors are well compensated in large part because their unions (professional associations) restricts the number of new doctors unreasonably and advocates against certifying foreign doctors to practice in the US.
My understanding is that in many places, the trade unions (electricians, plumbers, etc.) operate more like the AMA than the UAW. There is a spectrum of unionization.
In addition, programmers have a decent shot at striking it out on their own if they can't stand W2 employment or if they think they can make more money starting a business.
That's one big reason why I am unlikely to support unionization for the foreseeable future. If an employer treats us like crap, we just leave and either find a better opportunity or start our own business with blackjack and hookers. As a programmer, you can start your own business today by simply offering your services and looking for clients. We aren't nearly as enslaved to our companies as many other professions are.
In Germany doctors are heavily unionized. The largest union, Marburger Bund has 131.000 members.[1] The second largest, Hartmannbund has 70.000 members.[2] For comparision: At the end of 2020, there were 409,121 practising doctors (not including dentists) in Germany.[3]
> they still need a supervising doctor even if that doctor is only a warm body.
This is a good thing for standard of care: it's a chain of accountability. Medical supervision is supposed to set local policies and quality gates across a range of different providers. This also extends to EMT's in the field, for example: their supervision says what drugs or procedures they can use, which affects what the ER is expecting when patients arrive.
> This is a good thing for standard of care: it's a chain of accountability.
This is classism in action. There’s no reason a nurse practitioner can’t bear legal responsibility for their actions. As long as it’s unambiguous who is the responsible party whether they are a physician, nurse or physiotherapist there’s a chain of accountability.
Not disagreeing that you need to enable all levels of provider, that's not what I'm saying. I also agree all levels of provider should have an easy career path to the top.
The point is there's a system requirement for interfacing one provider to the next, so that if you're receiving a handoff from someone else you know they prepared the patient for the next guy. There's also a malpractice/liability component.
Saying an attending physician and a nurse practitioner are in every way similar would seem unlikely, given the radically different environments they work in. When we compare outcomes they look as good or better than physicians but that’s not to say they can completely replace them.
> A meta-analysis of nurse practitioners and nurse midwives in primary care
> This meta-analysis was an evaluation of patient outcomes of nurse practitioners (NPs) and nurse midwives (NMs), compared with those of physicians, in primary care. The sample included 38 NP and 15 NM studies. Thirty-three outcomes were analyzed. In studies that employed randomization to provider, greater patient compliance with treatment recommendations was shown with NPs than with physicians. In studies that controlled for patient risk in ways other than randomization, patient satisfaction and resolution of pathological conditions were greater for NP patients. NPs were equivalent to MDs on most other variables in controlled studies. In studies that controlled for patient risk, NMs used less technology and analgesia than did physicians in intrapartum care of obstetric patients. NMs achieved neonatal outcomes equivalent to those of physicians. Limitations in data from primary studies precluded answering questions of why and under what conditions these outcomes apply and whether these services are cost-effective.
There are most definitely physician unions, especially in government-operated clinics which are often union shops. I was involuntarily in SEIU for a number of years as a result, though I thought striking was unethical for a doctor myself. See also UAPD and NAVAPD.
The AMA controls medical school certification, and size, and therefore controls the number of new entrants, keeping earnings high.
It doesn't organize medical doctors for working conditions, salary and benefits negotiation, insurance, or most of the other features of a union. A hospital chain doesn't negotiate with the AMA on behalf of their surgeons and hospitalists.
(It would probably be a very good thing if interns and early residents had a union supervising working conditions.)
My number of X's adapt to fit the possibilities and potential of the environment. Right now it's 1x. Actually that's a lie, it's my 1x effort but the company I work with is floating on cloud 10x because I know more of the requirements than they do.
Still have no idea what this mythical 1x - 10x number scale maps to. Inspiration can up anyone's game.
Or we are all well paid diva who, if bored, would just switch companies without much problems nor thinking.
I am unsure if being in union (as in the US type of unions) would bring a lot of wage benefits.
> I think the reason programmers don't unionize is some are 10x better than others, so they don't want to get the same wages as 1x programmers.
Tom Cruise makes (e.g.) $10M for being in a movie, and Jane Doe who plays Waitress #2 gets paid $10K for being in the same movie, and yet they're both part of SAG.
You can create union/guild structures which have a minimum pay scale but not a maximum.
That doesn't make much sense — some actors make much more than 10x over other actors (and they bring the kind of audience to command that extra compensation), and yet they're definitely unionized.
but did they unionize after getting rich or when they were broke?
for screenwriters, most studios will not even review scripts without going through SAG, according to an awarding screenwriter/director who is a good friend on mine.
I can't speak about actors, but there was a time when a major benefit of being in the musicians union was the standardization of contracts that might cover complicated issues such as credit, royalties, re-publishing, and so forth. So it wasn't necessarily the magnitude of the money, but making it humanly fathomable how the money would actually be distributed.
I've heard people say to freelance musicians (like myself), that you don't really need the union until you start working in recording or broadcast.
I've not seen a screen actor's contract but I'll bet the provisions for working conditions and rights are a bigger deal than the pay scale. Also, I've read that in general, unionization efforts tend to be triggered by working conditions rather than pay. Even programmers could benefit from that.
Years ago I felt that programmers didn't need unions because we are so in-demand and already highly paid. Then the whole "no poaching" scandal came out, and now I definitely do think we need some sort of union-ish something. I hate to say it because many of the individuals are actually good people, but the managers/execs as a class are amoral bastards who will do whatever they think they can get away with to make a buck. To me the extraordinary thing is that Apple has more money than Scrooge McDuck and still screwed over their own engineers.
It reminds me of the scene from the Simpsons: Homer and Mr. Burns are chilling together in what will become the rocket-house:
Homer: Oh Mr. Burns, you're the richest man I know.
Mr. Burns: Ah yes, but I'd trade it all... for a little more.
Absolutely 100% agree. I work in a senior role in a vfx company. The adage that 20% of the workers do 80% of the work is more true in vfx than you'd likely believe.
A lot of what this article talks about rings true in a presentation I watched recently by the team at Weta Digital which did the VFX for The Batman
They talked about, among other things, how they had to:
- digitally replace the stunt man's face in many of the action shots because his jawline was too dissimilar to Robert Pattinson's.
- digitally modify a hand because a prop gun misfired in a shot
- enhance the fight scenes to look more visceral and violent
- add rain and rain spatter to the car chase (the parts that weren't already fully digital)
I'm no filmmaker but I felt many of those things could have been done without VFX. Hire a stunt man that looks more like RP, reshoot the scene with the broken prop, forget about rain and/or tone down the epic action set piece, etc.
Instead it seemed like it all just came to rest on the shoulders of the VFX artists.
As someone in the VFX industry myself (but as a software dev writing the tools the artists use), I'd argue those examples are generally useful work being done on the movie to make things "more real". Whether it's worth it, is going to be very opinionated.
However, I would say: I re-watched GoldenEye recently, and - maybe it was because I'm in the industry and notice these things more - but the blatantly different stunt men (especially landing the Cessna in Cuba: the man looked totally different compared to the actor who should have been flying!) compared to the actors did make me personally go "hang on a moment, who's that?"
Some of this stuff can now also be automated to a degree (not completely, it still requires artist input, and sometimes a lot), but it's not often Rotoing every frame like it used to be ten years or so ago.
Things I'd personally argue aren't worth artists having to work on, but I know they do, are things like skin wrinkle removal on leading actresses, removing mustaches on actors, etc. And the biggest issue is clients changing their mind at the last minute, often having previously signed off on lookdev or anim at the earlier stages, or just generally having to deal with bad set preparation because the 'talent''s time on set is 1000x times more important than the unseen artists, who then have to do loads of work to compensate for badly lit (very un-evenly lit) greenscreens or lighting on set, because the on-set VFX supe was likely ignore when he complained ("Oh, they can just fix it in post").
What really gets me are two things. The jiggle cam, and "let's film stuff but obscure what is happening in post".
I have watched so many 2005+ movies, where all the action scenes are just replaced with 'jiggle the screen around', and thus, you see nothing.
Worse, I've seen fight scenes with no/little jiggle, but then every move, punch, dodge, car stunt is replaced with a fast cut, so you don't actually see... well, anything.
Someone else mentioned that the reason stunt doubles are changed vfx wise, is because maybe they couldn't find one similar enough.
I call hooey on that, the real issue is cost. Generic stunt doubles are far cheaper than "stunt double who looks like top tier star".
And the jiggle cam is cheaper than a real action scene, and fast cuts are too, because who cares how well it is timed/shot if you can't see it.
I think, much like any industry, all this junk is just cost savings. It also shifts blame, and requires less talent from the director and actors.
I doubt any modern director, or actor, could handle the pressure of expensive shots, dangerous shots, with people running through explosions, or car chases, stunt doubles or not.
Nope. Just throw all that at sfx, and all the stress, cost, and reputation risking shots are no longer an actor's or dieector's issue.
It's actually rarely about cost itself, just look at modern movie budget, they didn't exactly get cheaper than 20+ years ago. The main factor is time, predictability and control. When you do it in post with CGI, you always have full control and can change your mind at any time. If you do it practical, you are stuck with whatever you filmed. Going back and doing a reshoot takes a long while, in CGI you just jiggle some parameters and rerender. If your movie-star-lookalike stuntman breaks a leg, you have a problem. If you do it with CGI, it barely matters what you captured in camera, just change it.
With modern movies there is so much CGI to begin with, that it hardly even matters what you filmed, it's not unusual to completely redesign scenes in post, as the script wasn't even finished when they started filmed the thing.
In theory, the flexibility is great. In practice it is itself a problem, as those decisions are avoided throughout production and instead accumulate into post. Where they get further kicked down the road - client for first 80% of schedule: "looks alright". client for remaining 80% of schedule: "[now that we've actually thought about this] we want it to be this way". The artists lament what they could have done had they gotten this direction earlier, ultimately just polish the turd with weekly extensions until the client is satisfied-slash-actual-deadline, and look forward to the next show where things might not go as awry.
Like everything in our society, the real problem is that the people in charge of managing don't know how to do the work, and rather than listening to, taking feeding, and trusting the people doing the work, they act as if their job is to blindly push orders downwards and micromanage whatever catches their attention. The article ('s followup) touches on this, ("managed to get themselves into really high positions but don’t know how a green screen works... People in the traditional leadership roles are boomers or Gen X guys, and what we do now didn’t exist when they were coming up"), but is naive in thinking that it's going to get better over time. In actuality, the "creatives" of tomorrow are busy gladhanding today, and the dynamic will persist.
I think this is why the production setup of Mandalorian got many VFX people excited, despite Engine being so counter to the standard workflow. It pushed the bulk of CGI to where it belongs - as a backdrop for actual acting and storytelling, and directly fed into the director's real time decision making. There are always going to be touch ups and last minute changes, but those are only practical in the context of having larger structure locked down. There are definitely constraints of the digital backdrop technique (watch Mandalorian again after that video, and you see it in everything), but I look forward to seeing how it might trickle out into the rest of the industry.
> Worse, I've seen fight scenes with no/little jiggle, but then every move, punch, dodge, car stunt is replaced with a fast cut, so you don't actually see... well, anything.
Shakycam is the worst. Casino Royale (2006) was loaded with it. It was so bad I couldn't parse what was going on in an action scene. In a James Bond film, which is supposed to ride on its action scenes.
The shakycam trope can probably be traced back to The Blair Witch Project, but for the action/thriller genre it really comes from the Bourne series. It's an easy way to add verisimilitude to a fight/chase and lets you skimp on the fight choreography because the fighters can't be seen very well. But personally I find it disorienting, and it took me right out of what everybody says was an excellent Bond film (and might've been if they committed to smooth reasonable action shots rather than shakycam).
If yt wasn't so hostile to fair use, running shaky scenes through video stabilization to explore the artistic contributions of camera shake could make for an interesting channel. Is the scene ridiculous without it, like the stabilized Star Trek scenes making the rounds years ago? Or is watchability improved by the contents not bobbing and weaving around?
In my memory it was Batman Begins (2005) that had if bad and started the trend, but you’re right about the first Bourne movie (2002) being somewhere near the start (as far as tent pole movies go).
At any rate it’s a super lazy crutch for bad choreography. Contrasted with something like the Indiana jones airplane fight scene with its wide shots of the action is like night and day.
To me, this seems subjective and grouchy. It might be that when you were growing up, things were a certain way, and now they're a bit different. You have a minor aesthetic disagreement. Some people like the shaky cam.
You may like the shakey cam, and that's fine naturally, but claiming age has something to do with it is weird. It is also unfair to call me grouchy.
All I know is that shakey cam is incredibly unreal to me. I have never, in my entire life, experienced scenarios where my vision was like a shakey cam, and I say this as someone with a history of racing, stunt driving, and a variety of athletic activities which jostles one about.
When in such real life situations, my body senses motion, my brain sorts it out, and there is no shakey cam effect.
I liken it to making a sound track for a movie, but imagine two people talking, while someone randomly cranks the audio up and down, and changes the aurial position of the speaker randomly.
Sure, that's going to create tension and stress in the movie goer too, but it draws one out of immersion, and is just lazy work.
Intensity can be created with real actual intensity, the shakey cam is a crutch.
One point regarding Goldeneye and fx generally. From a lay persons perspective Goldeneye has pretty snappy pacing so from memory some of the sets, such as the starting chemical plant explosion look a little fake, but the movie just chuggs along and and has a fairly good storyline that doesn't stall out.
I find I notice effects a lot more in movies when the story has flat spots. And as I learn more and more about visual story telling. All I think about when watching movies that go heavy on stunts and action "how does this progress the storyline".
Once I knew what process shots were, I just can't unsee them in older movies. In particular, where the actors are driving in a car, when the background is clearly a rear projection on a screen.
It's also obvious that the windshield has been removed for the filming.
Not not mention that they tug the steering wheel back and forth as if they were playing real life frogger just to signal that they are "busy doing something". This doesn't make sense either.
It always seemed to me like there was a simple solution. Record the steering wheel movements of the stunt car. Use a motor in the fake car to replay the steering wheel movements.
I find that even real, natural driving shots often look fake, but I'm not sure why. I've accused a film maker friend twice of using "janky and obvious looking greenscreen" for driving shots and both times I was completely wrong. Once was a car on a trailer which might have accounted for some of the unnatutalness, but the second time was a real quad bike driving on a real road with a chase car in front of it and a backwards facing camera-person.
Some films (and a lot of TV shows in the 80s/90s) often got the angle of the projection wrong as well, so there's an obvious miss-match between the perspective of the interior of the car and the outside... i.e. the angle of the camera in the car is roughly horizontal, but the projection is looking upwards towards the sky at around 10/15 degrees.
Another obvious (when you know what you're looking for) tell-tale if the projection is better, is the light direction / shadows within the car compared to what the car's doing: car turns left 90 degrees, but oh no, the sun's still coming from the same direction as before...
What's funny to me is you can have all this "immersion" and then for most bigger markets you get some rando voicing for Brad Pitt. I can't believe e.g. Germans are ok with this. I can't watch Spanish movies with English voiceover, I'd rather have subtitles
Subtitles vs dubs/voiceovers are largely a cultural thing. I envy countries where movies/tv shows are pretty much exclusively subtitled, for example Sweden. Coincidentally, Swedes seem to be really fluent in English on average.
It's a win-win: you absorb languages for free as a child, and you later get to enjoy art in its original unmutilated form.
We also translate a lot of books, even though the profit margins aren't that big.
The main source of government-critical information during the Communist era were the radio transmitters (RFE, Czech broadcast of the BBC, Voice of America) which were hardest to stop. Those stations broadcast in Czech and Slovak. Anything that had to cross a physical customs point (movies, books) was heavily censored.
If you grow up with movies being fully dubbed in your native language you don’t question it much. Usually the same voice actor voices the same actor(s), so Brad Pitt has the same voice actor voice in all movies.
Dubbing movies becomes a problem when you are exposed to the actors’ original voice or the original audio track of movies because dubbing is a poor substitute. And hearing the same voice for different actors breaks immersion.
You're on point. I think the issue is the fourth wall is becoming thinner. When you watch an old movie, you don't get the immersion you got watching it when it was out
I did a rewatch marathon of sorts with the kids, Alien, Aliens, Terminator 1-3, stuff like that. Those new action flicks, especially the super hero movies, cannot compare against those. An opinuon my son shares, and he grew up with Marvel. He was glued to the screen when we watched Alien for the first time together, because it did build up astory ajd tension (his words, not mine). Compared to Marvel were the CGI orgy starts 2 minutes into the movie.
Heck, I'll take the Terminator 1 stop motion effects over any scene in the forst half of the last Dr. Strange "movie" (I couldn't bring myself to watch more than that, even Meg is more fun to watch...) any day of the week. Because T1 is still scary and conveys emotion (despair mostly for being chased by an unstoppable killet machine), while those Marvel effects are, well, boring by now. They have no wow effect (we see them in almost every single modern day movie), the convey no emotion (difficult to properly act, I think, when you are in front of a green screen and everything just plays out in your imagination) not do those effects actually drive the "story" forward.
As compared to, e.g., the Expense, a ton of sci-fi short films (Dust in a great channel for that on Youtube) or the Mandalorian. I think the over use of CGI is just an easy excuse for bad story telling, and people swallow it.
> while those Marvel effects are, well, boring by now. They have no wow effect (we see them in almost every single modern day movie), the convey no emotion (difficult to properly act, I think, when you are in front of a green screen and everything just plays out in your imagination) not do those effects actually drive the "story" forward.
I think this is the crux of it, moreso than the CGI Orgy (great term btw). You can have movies with visibly apparent CGI, or even straight up animated movies, but the action is great and still drives the plot and pulls on your heart strings. I know every beat of The Matrix by heart, but there's still a ton of suspense in every action shot, because each encounter adds some new angle to the power scaling. At the start, squad of mooks > 1 freedom fighter > several mooks, but even 1 agent is better than several FFs. Then that balance shifts.
Contrast that with the Smiths fight in the later films, and it's totally Conservation of Ninjutsu at play. Adding more baddies just divides the power of a single baddie, because we already know the outcome, so we know 1 Neo = N Smiths.
Watched Aquaman recently, same thing. Completely unprincipled power scaling. No reference frame, and it just scales up and up until it's CGI Army 1 vs CGI Army 2. That spectacle might work if I had more reference for the power levels, plus emotional investment, but I don't.
Have had the same experience with my son. The T1 eyeball scene, even while quite primitive by modern standards, was much more impactful to him than anything in Stranger Things.
Actually older movies (80s-90s) didn't have much special effect, I find the more realistic, rougher nature of the scenes much better than the cartoonish, hyper-polished SFX today. When you see a fire, it's a real fire, not something digitally added, etc.
As much as I love advances in tech & art & visuals, I'm also getting pretty tired of live-action films that are basically computer generated. It has a certain look to it, too clean & precise & shiny, even as they industry overall gets better at matting things down.
I wanna see a larger counter-reaction to all the gloss, and have movies get a lil rougher around the edges, while having the stories & characters be way more refined. Draw attention to the medium's limits, rather than try to make it real, and then it becomes hyperreal/ uncanny.
But I'm guessing the industry will wanna go full immersion (like VR) rather than take a few steps back. Maybe there's room for both, if studios were willing to be more experimental (doubt it!).
to be fair, Henry Cavill looked even weirder with his CGI-removed "shaved" face as well.
they should have made a movie about the behind the scenes debate on this matter. execs, the star, the VFX team, and the final reception. coulda been really hilarious, entertaining, and use the situation to their advantage.
Since you say you have experience in the vfx industry. Do you think someone can release a killer app that can reduce the use of many visual artists and just make vfx with the use of software instead? And how feasible is this?
It's probably also everything that is accidentally overlooked during the shoot. Previously you would hat a different take, perhaps, or live with the goof. Now you can just offload that to post-production.
But probably also a question if how expensive filming days are with the whole crew vs. how expensive VFX artists are. The latter work is also highly parallelizable.
It’s probably a good ol perfectly rational slippery slope. Fixing a minor mistake or two in post is absolutely the best choice for everyone. Each additional fix is not worth a reshoot either. But slip too far and the product suffers.
> forget about rain and/or tone down the epic action set piece, etc.
But this is the stuff which make the movie cinematic and draws the audience. Hiring a stunt man which looks more like the lead might not be possible - historically this have been solved by filming stunt scenes at a distance, from the back etc. But this makes the scenes less engaging.
A set with full crew and actors present is extremely expensive. For any mistake which can be fixed with VFX rather then a reshoot, it is probably the prudent financial decision to use VFX.
> historically this have been solved by filming stunt scenes at a distance, from the back etc.
Those were often done, but other options that increased engagement were having actors do their own stunts (not always appropriate) or casting stunt workers into bigger parts.
You can't have lead actors perform actual dangerous stunts (despite what marketing might tell you). The financial risks are far to high and insurance would never accept that. Just imagine the financial loss if the actor is not able to complete the movie due to an accident. It only really happens in B-movies and movies produced outside of Hollywood.
When you say that a prop gun misfired, do you mean that a real gun, used as a prop, went off accidentally? Between this anecdote and the rust shooting, actors seem to have really poor trigger discipline. Is this something that happens a lot?
I honestly could do with way simpler VFX if the end result at least had something like style or a vision to it. One result of this highly sophisticated and expensive pipeline seems to be that everything looks sort of generic. The superhero productions in particular, don't know how to describe it but visually they all basically look like the equivalent of what Material design is for apps.
i want something like Sin City or Hannibal (the tv show) again, I wouldn't really care if it's not the most technically sophisticated thing ever made.
So many forms of art don't need to be hi-fi, latest & greatest, "realistic," or only conform to the "acceptable" trends of the times.
I think even as a kid, some videogame cut scenes in 2D pixel art got me so hyped/ engaged/ moved.
Same goes for comic books, that were nothing more than black and white line art (granted the line art was executed superbly – what up Akira Toriyama & Bill Watterson!).
One can hope that studios would be more willing to try new things, but they don't even pretend it's about anything other than the bottom line.
Movies have become something absurd. It's wasted effort in my opinion. All this money doesn't lead to an improvement artistically. Some movies are just trash piles made for advertising products
Have you noticed lately how Star Wars movies and series are introducing some exotic looking animals and paying them some attention without using them in the story at all? Well, you then can buy toys of these in Disney stores around the world.
Did people forget what movies the “morchandizing” bit in Spaceballs was making fun of? Because in 1987 it certainly wasn’t The Force Awakens.
Guys are just starting to notice the blatant cash grab additions because the target market for the cutesy ones like bb8 and the porgs is girls and women.
Your'e being downvoted, but I for one agree wholly with the point you make.
I don't doubt filmmaking has always, in the end, been about business or they wouldn't be made. But the captains of the film industry, perhaps in optimizing profit, seem to be all circling the same kind of flashy, effects-laden action film.
I've heard people suggest it's a result of the "globalization of the industry", that action films with "effects > dialog" sells to a Chinese audience, for example. Perhaps there is some truth to it (if so, it suggests again studios optimizing for profit).
I've been on a "1001 Films To See Before You Die" tear for a few years now and it is hard not to see many of these old films and sigh, "When would Hollywood ever make a film like this today?"
Please, can we have another, another "new wave"? More indie cinema please. This market has been ripe for disruption since the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise took root.
That's true, however if the majority of movies are like that, most people will watch them, shifting movie culture toward this kind of movies. Sure, niches could form, but given a movie requires a lot of money, that's really hard. Besides action/blockbuster movies, also so called "artistic" movies are generally worse in quality than the past (I don't think this is just nostalgia). One related thought: doesn't make sense that every year someone has to win an oscar. There should be years without a winner at all. That's not allowed, so winning an oscar doesn't really set a quality goal but it's bounded by a year timeframe
> I don't quite understand why so many folks keep watching them.
A lot of people don't seem aware that other movies exist. Which is odd as the VFX-laden, action-heavy franchise blockbusters everybody complains about are only a small proportion of movies that are made.
I know many holes could be poked in my opinion, but I believe that at this point in time we could probably stop making movies, tv shows, even books. We already have enough amazing, intemporal content to fill many life times.
From my point of view it's inevitable new content is made. If you make content, you just can't stay quiet: how that catches on is another matter. I agree that too much content is made: the reason is mostly money and lack of education.
> You saw Taika Waititi savaging his effects team in the clip at the beginning of this story
Waititi's comments are blown out of all proportion in this article (and also on Twitter). He points at a CGI character and says "does that look real?" but then similarly points at human characters and says "does he look real?".
It seemed like the monitor they used using in the Vanity Fair video had its brightness set too high, making the scene look more fake than it did in cinemas.
I just watched it for the first time, and it seemed like it was pretty innocent. Right after the moment in question, they point out a continuity error, and then go on to list several examples of the challenges of a complex production like that. It did not seem like they were blaming the VFX artists, just acknowledging that those movies are made at an insane scale. They didn't say it, but it seemed to me like they were both a little detached from the process due to its size, despite being nominally so crucial to it.
A lot of the best VFX work is what you don't even notice.
Sound is the same. Producers and directors want to keep their options open as long as possible and then everyone wants to touch the final product so they feel they really earned their credit Being a technician is pretty exhausting and unglamorous, plus if you're too good at what you do it becomes a prison because you're a known quantity and nobody wants to take a risk on giving you upward mobility, but you don't necessarily get paid enough to have any economic autonomy.
Now I work in an adjacent area where I have editorial/creative control, which is great, but also a lot more fraught financially (much like any other startup). I do get annoyed when I hear people criticize the media/entertainment industry; there's a lot of celebs and jerks that deserve criticism, but people outside it mostly assume everyone's on easy street and have no appreciation of the workloads and craft involved.
It seems the special effects industry got the short-end of both cut-throat industries (tech and cinema) without the benefits of any of them
Then they will go broke, and wonder what happened. Again
Taika Waititi sounds like a great guy but that jab was better left unsaid.
I think a lot of people (yes, all around us) think that it's easy just because "it's done in the computer" and they have a menu item to merge somebody's wig into the background just like that. But that's "the business fault" because they don't surface the cost of that upfront
My impression is that the advancements in cgi has let producers and directors get sloppy in planning. “We’ll fix it in post” feels evident in the final product to a very high degree.
But worse, it lets producers “work around” actors schedules by having them film at different times and locations for the same scene.
I am also curious how this period in movies will hold over time. Older movies with more practical effects (such as Star Wars) still have a very crisp look to them while newer movies look blurry and bloomy due to the heavy post processing.
Star Wars is a tricky one, since the versions that are generally available and that lots of people have seen have all had various levels of after-the-fact VFX applied to them.
Once I learned how optical printing worked, Return of the Jedi was ruined for me. I could see the flickering black line around the flying craft. I never noticed that when I watched RotJ in the theater.
If you take a classic which have stood the test of time and compare it to the current average, the classic will probably look better. But that is just survivorship bias because we have forgotten all the forgettable movies. If you look at the average sci-fi movie from the 1970's, the special effects are not usually very impressive.
I was once on a flight watching Zoolander while a guy next to me watched some Avengers movie. The contrast in color grading between the two was shocking. Zoolander had crisp differentiated colors/objects, while the Avengers film was a morass of soft-focus muted purple and brown.
Everything about how much life sucks for visual effects artists may be true, but I'm not convinced it's any worse than everything that comes beforehand:
> In today’s Hollywood, compositors, along with all of their colleagues, are often left to clean up all of the messes left by writers, actors, directors, producers, and all of the other name-brand talent.
"Clean up all of the messes" sounds awfully derogatory. How about the fact that on-set you might have 50-200 people working at any given time, so doing anything that will delay the next shot by even just 10 minutes can be astonishingly expensive, and not every problem can be predicted in advance. Not to mention things like the sun setting. If something can be fixed in post, it's because it's the better more efficient option, not because people meant to leave a "mess".
> is being left to a post-production workforce that is disparate, overworked, confused, and exploited.
News flash: the production workforce is just as disparate, overworked, confused, and exploited. 16 hour days and 6 day weeks are standard for everyone involved. Not saying this is good either, but setup for each day and shoot takes so long (just think the hours spent in daily hair, makeup and wardrobe for actors) that days need to be 16 hours long just to get in a reasonable amount of shooting.
Visual effects may be difficult and suck, but everything in production is like that. I just don't like how this article seems to frame it that the regular production side of things somehow has things easier.
Well said. I also think it's worth remembering that everyone involved in the production of Hollywood movies are likely doing so at least partially because there's an immense amount of worldwide prestige in working on them. Similarly to how I feel about Tesla employees working 16h days, I don't imagine the thousands of people behind every big budget movie were under any delusion they'd be working a comfy 9-5.
I make music for film, and I edit video in relation to that work often.
I can recall several years of having to learn how to do things in so many different applications that dictated the end product because the applications were very complex to use, and quite time consuming. I couldn't understand how friends were paid less than application developers (Around 60k annually) to do some of the most impressive VFX things I've observed in commercials and movies, and it was very hard for them to find work even when they had great portfolios.
Fast forward to now, there are mobile apps that can edit videos, and add effects, color grading, etc to videos. I can literally run a video editing session in my car that outputs better product far more quickly than I used to be able to do with $2k software... Even mobile software that can work with object files... Making the process of creation easier will likely be the best field for innovation moving forward. Making things more simple will also save studios and VFX editors tons of money, time and grief.
TikTok formats are dominating the entertainment world right now, VFX movies are beginning to look disingenuous because they either overdo effects, or they cut corners and make things low quality, relying too much on the power of celebrity to push the movie forward... Viewers are also worn out by actors trying to take cues on green screen sets, it comes across often as far too staged, or far too busy visually.
Movies where the VFX trump everything else end up being weak on writing and emotional composition in my opinion. Movies that rely on celebrity become very weak on VFX... I think good movies come from a great script that can be used to plan everything that comes thereafter, and then the quality of the final product depends on the vision of the director and execution of the team involved.
Movies like Blade, Hancock, Ant Man, and even more recent work like "The Boys" are some of my personal favorites because VFX are not the primary hitch to the stories... Avatar completely lost me, even though far more money was spent to make it. VFX is a support tool to great films, when it becomes the primary aspect, the script suffers and budgets balloon, and the worst part is that movies take 5 years to make instead of just taking one.
> Visual effects departments didn’t even exist, particularly in television, until roughly a decade ago.
…what? To pick a random example Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted in 1987 with ILM doing the effects. Is the author really claiming visual effects departments sprung into existence in 2012? That’s ridiculous.
"Marvel allowed the back half of Multiverse of Madness to showcase far more of Raimi’s hallmark directing style, but by then it was too late for the entire film to play out as a cohesive whole. It still grossed nearly a billion dollars worldwide."
Just watched the 3D Blu-ray this evening and the introductory sequence was indeed of appallingly bad CGI quality ("Windows 98 screensaver" indeed), as was the bus-wrecking beast which came off like a rejected design from Monsters Inc., and really the entire first act as a whole was just really rickety. In that sense the poor CGI was the symptom of a more systemic disease. Fortunately Earth-838 has lots of welcome character surprises and the ending redeemed a lot. Not Raimi's best, but hardly his worst.
3D has been garbage since it's inception in cinema though: the guy who pushed it on us (James Cameron) couldn't even constrain himself to the rules of the new tech in the movie which was meant to showcase it (I.e focus pulling will hurt the eyes of the viewer, you have to essentially construct the whole scene in focus so the viewer can look around it).
It wasn't the 3D that was the problem, though, even though the 3D was obviously not native and the digital mattes were fairly flat. It just wasn't good visuals even in 2D.
That said, Dredd 3D was a high mark in 3D because it was almost all native, especially the component effects photography (the Slo-Mo scenes in particular blew me away). The few upconverted shots stick out like sore thumbs. Upconversion can be done well - see T2 3D, which was mesmerizing - but nowadays 3D conversion is now just another VFX workflow with the same drawbacks.
I definitely wouldn't say no to a "fully Raimi" movie, but I quite liked the way it started off as typical Marvel cheese and pulled off a surprising change of tack somewhere in the middle. In fact that might be my favourite aspect of the movie.
Multiverse of Madness has to be one of my favourite marvel films of late, I get that the author doesn't like it but saying that it's not a "cohesive whole" is just not true.
> Multiverse of Madness has to be one of my favourite marvel films of late
I’m curious why you think that. I thought it was one of the most boring Marvel films in the franchise, and I’m surprised I was able to stay awake for the entire thing. On the other hand, its twin, "Everything Everywhere All at Once", had me deeply engrossed and interested.
It was crazy and out there, like the comics are - which is what I love in Marvel. The scene where Dr Strange commands the dead in another universe is like absolute peak enjoyment for me. The worst marvel film for me is Civil War since it's so.....grounded(closely followed by Ragnarok, but that's purely because I can't stand Waititi's humour)
I've watched it 3 times now and I still love it - it's their best film since Infinity War, everything else after that was very much meh.
I felt completely left out, because although I had seen the last Spiderman movie, I hadn't watched Wandavision or half of the TV shows. It was like trying to follow a game in a sport you only have a casual interest in: you kind of know the rules but have no idea who the main teams or players are or who is up or down in the league, so your enjoyment is limited to the occasional good goal or pass (or VFX shot in this case).
In contrast to DC movies - very hit and miss in quality, but you can at least watch a movie without having to follow a dozen other TV shows and other films in the franchise.
So I personally enjoy this style of storytelling - it rewards you for knowing the backstory of all the characters, it allows for a richer universe, and you don't feel like the film treats you like an idiot for explaining everything you might already know.
But - I can also see why this is a problem - you're right that people who haven't seen Wandavision would be very confused by this film. Wanda went from being a hero in Infinity War/Endgame, to suddenly being a villain.
I know, and I agree it's a problem. I don't know what the right answer is. I think building a big universe requires some background knowledge of the events and characters, but maybe in this specific case Wanda could have used like one more scene just to explain what happened in Westview.
> Perhaps the apex of this creative fatigue was Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which underwent extensive reshoots but didn’t have enough of an effects budget to cover that new footage adequately. As a result, the effects in the opening sequence of the film are about as convincing as a Windows 98 screensaver. One supervisor expressed to Defector their exasperation not only with the process on that film, but with the startlingly inert creative choices that went into it.
> “When you see something like the first third of Doctor Strange, you’re like, Why not do something more interesting, where you’re not straining your budget and 1,000 artists to try and make something that you know is going to look substandard? Why not try something else when you have a good director like Sam Raimi?“
... followed by the original paragraph.
There's no big shocking revelation that backs up the "not a cohesive whole" point imo.
I think it's hard to accurately judge something you have worked on.
I'm a video game developer and I struggle to enjoy the games I work on - all I can see is the bugs and the areas we didn't deliver or where we changed the artistic vision or where yes, we had to re-do certain systems a hundred times. And yet, people seem to enjoy them. They review well. So maybe my opinion as a developer isn't really worth that much.
I feel the same about the opinion you copied here - having watched Multiverse of Madness 3 times now I don't see any issue with the opening sequence. It looks pretty good from visual standpoint in fact. But I'm sure a trained VFX artist can point out the areas where it fell short and how many times they had to change it. The only visual effect in this entire film that stood out to me as "bad" was the sequence with illuminati right after they killed their thanos - that just looks like a poor Photoshop.
In harry potter, the actors were chosen at age ~8 (ish, young what ever it was)
This meant that in the middle movies, they went through puberty. My generation of VFX people cut their teeth doing puberty based acne removal. Both harry and ron had pretty bad zits, and because continuity is kind, the needed to be removed.
Meryl Streep in MamaMia had "digital makeup" applied by one bloke working the night shift.
> It can come in the form of changing frame rates on an entire TV show from 24 frames per second to 60 because a network is, rationally or not, dedicated to that second number.
I don't understand why 60fps is the default for all nrw productions. Lots of movies today cut the action into tiny pieces, make the camera shake a lot and the set itself may shake as well. With 24 frames per second one can hardly see anything but blurred colors. Slow camera pans also tend to become choppy and unpleasant to lool at.
The backgrounds are “real” and can be captured in-camera, so there is no need for special effects to blend hair. Similarly, reflective surfaces aren’t a problem either.
This was used to good effect for the Mandalorian series where the protagonist wears shiny metal armour.
Most of VFX's problem isn't technology. If you read the post, its not really mentioned.
No the main problem is indecision.
As other people have pointed out, virtual sets require a solid and stable vision of what the story and look of the movie is going to be, before filming starts.
Some film makers work like this. For example medium to high budget TV shows between 2010-2018 (before marvel basically.) Notably also chris noland.
There are numerous examples of poor planning/indecision: the two poorer modern james bonds (quantum and spectre) both started shooting before the script was fixed. So loads had to be made up in editing.
Another example is this:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfVu52tZxd0 "the sand room" from prince of persia. This was designed, scripted and executed by one of the VFX houses, because the producers realised that they had no way to link the two halves of the film.
In Clash of the titans (2010) they spent loads of money making mount olympus with a real set. Hired all the old masters. after filming, the producers were like "Nah, I don't like that, lets make it like google maps". So the set was removed (I'm not sure if it was digitally done or a reshoot).
Then Hades's cloak was a pain because the producers first wanted smoke. Then ink, then smokey ink.
As alluded to in the post, the producers can get away with this because the contract is to do as many revisions until its done. There is little to no cost hit to the producers of the film to fiddle, be indecisive or back track.
It’s nowhere near a solved problem, there’s a large number of camera moves you can’t do with that tech, and it doesn’t help you if you have any sort of virtual or CG augmented character or prop in the shot (because you’d still have to do the compositing).
If you want to talk about The Mandalorian, IMDB credits over 380 compositors on that series. In-camera effects are fantastic, but they’re not reducing the visual effects burden.
If you really want to, that should be doable, you just have to sync the shutters of the cameras with the screen and switch the virtual scene along with it, much the same way as 3D TV used to work. At least for two cameras, that should work well enough, as the 180° shutter common with 24fps movies leaves enough room for a second camera.
tbh this might be one reason to prefer 60fps+, swapping scenes at 120fps would generally just look like two superimposed images, which would likely be fine. Though the whole scene might have to be much brighter to compensate for the shorter shutter, as that's already a problem for 60fps.
As long as the same background isn’t in both cameras I think it’s doable (facing different directions for dialog) or one with a cropped closeup. Though not sure the software currently support 2 cameras.. kind of an interesting problem.
My understanding it the rendering is done at higher quality when the background is the cameras field of view to save resources.. the rest is there just for ambient light.
Of course this takes a lot of pre planning, but those virtual set ups kinda always do.
You are wrong, but explaining this to you would involve you knowing things you don’t.
No virtual production does not solve VFX. Many reasons including the ability of the screens in resolution and max lumens, and the fact that a VP stage doesn’t allow you to shoot anything, because of size and other limitations. It also won’t add a CG character in front of your characters.
The thing about virtual sets is, like real sets, they force you to have commotted to every decision about a shot at the point you shoot the actors. And half the reason Hollywood uses VFX so much is to NOT do that. So don't expect virtual sets to be universally adopted any time soon.
> This is a “solved problem” now with technologies like this: https://youtu.be/bErPsq5kPzE
The backgrounds are “real” and can be captured in-camera, so there is no need for special effects to blend hair. Similarly, reflective surfaces aren’t a problem either.
While at the same time, when seeing that initial shot I could immediately tell the background was fake. Like in any fake-ass marvel-movie.
And I’m not into VFX tech, I’m not into the industry as whole. I’m just a casual movie-watcher (going from being a hard-core movie-watcher), and my involvement in these movies is getting lower and lower as the movies increasingly gets less and less real.
The last truly great movie I saw was Mad Max Fury Road. It has you engaged all the way through, because everything which matters there actually is real, something your mind can tell.
I recently saw Bullet Train. It was OKish because it was mostly about characters, and it had a semi-decent story to tie it all together. All the excessive VFX bits at the end was pretty “meh“ though. It would have been a better movie without it.
I saw something recently where the producers of Andor were saying they used The Volume a lot less than on the Mandalorian because of the number of fast shots that simply couldn't fit in it. The Volume is great for some things but it's not a magic wand.
What happens when a person is in front of or interacting with a CG character? You think the character is going to be animated and rendered before shooting? That has never happened on any movie in the last 25 years of digital effects.
> Once the time comes to do that post-production work, the crunching begins. These are workers who, similar to video game developers
This comparison is increasingly out of date. From my experience and what I've heard, the notion of video game developers crunching is getting rarer and rarer, while I haven't heard of any such trend in visual effects.
That was a reaction to the direction of movies which eventually evolved into this, but sort of an overreaction in my opinion. Rules like "the camera must be handheld" and "the director must not be credited" seem unnecessary. It felt like that manifesto was meant to make an ideological point rather than to help make better movies. In practice, even most of its adherents broke those rules, because they were bad rules.
That said, while reading this article I did think about Dogme 95, and started wondering what a similar manifesto specifically related to the use of VFX would look like, if it were maybe a little bit less reactionary, and more tailored to "how do we make VFX an integrated, manageable, sustainable part of movies?". Has anybody done this already?
If you google "vfx workflow" or "vfx pipeline" you'll find lots of stuff.
As I understand it the reason things get out of control on big movies is that there's no incentive to plan shots properly or be decisive, because VFX houses are expected to sign stupid contracts. There are smaller movies where people are more disciplined, eg. Monsters, where I believe director Gareth Edwards did all the VFX himself.
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!
It’s not actually true that the contracts allow studios like Marvel to make whatever changes they want at any time. I’m sure it can feel like that to artists at times but that’s not how it works. Contracts are negotiated at a fixed price for a certain scope of work, with the tacit understanding that both parties will be flexible. If requests for changes push that scope of work outside the original deal VFX studios can negotiate overages and schedule changes (and they’re free to attempt this at any time). It is totally within their power to be firm and demand livable contracts. But… it’s a subtle art. Like any human endeavor or any contract worth tens of millions of dollars trade offs and accommodations are made. No vendor wants to leave a client high and dry or totally screw them over, and no client wants to ruin their relationship with a vendor they rely on. I can’t imagine there’s anything about this that is specific to either the visual effects industry or the movie industry. There are a lot of people running VFX companies that are simply bad at this part of the job and get themselves into hot water. When that happens it’s the front line workers (as always) who have to work the extra hours.
That said, there are a number of (very large) companies where it is absolutely normal to work 6 days a week 10 to 12 hours a day. This is not a secret, it’s been very common for a very long time. Personally, I wouldn’t work for a company like that.
What we’re experiencing is a huge shift in how movies are made and an industry that is struggling to keep up. Workflows, infrastructures, and tool chains designed for how movies were made for decades are being pushed to the limit, both because of the volume of work and the way in which people want to work. We’re moving from a world where everything had to be planned way in advance (because of how massively expensive and slow everything was) to one where we’re expected to be more improvisational (because of how much much cheaper and faster it is to do the work). You can’t characterize that as a change from a good way of working to a bad one, it’s simply change. One with countless industries have also faced.
And keep in mind that just like any other industry, many of the changes to the film/tv business are technology driven, and VFX is at the forefront of that. So producers looking to totally reinvent how movies are made end up using the VFX industry to do it. If you take VFX out of the conversation there is little that’s changed (technologically) about how movies are made in the last 20 years. So VFX is baring the brunt of the changes that are happening in the larger industry.
Sounds like “hollywood” is finally fully corporate, devoid of any soul it once had. I just finished the ILM docu-series and wow what an amazing and incredible story. It’s sad that, for the industry, it’s all culminated in abusive studios, disconnected directors and fuck it someone else will fix my mess mentality. And the disrespect for VFX workers, my god, they should come join an ops team they’d get more respect. I guess it’s kinda to be expected when you’re just perpetually milking cash cow IP to death (hardly the innovation it once was). And since when do lasers arc in space?? I don’t watch super hero movies on principle at this point. It’s the least I can do.
I'll never understand this vibe. You're a programmer, in most places that's among the best paying jobs available. How are you being there exploited the same way as VFX artists are?
If you are in an agency which basically sells labour (body shop) and if the agency is doing fixed bid projects ("you build us XYZ mobile app which does ABC by MNP for XXX") you will be in a comparable situation. There is a difference however:
* Devs are harder to find and currently they are likely to flat-out refuse to work on location
* In dev, "time+materials" (bill by the hour) is much more prevalent.
One of the reasons VFX work is so miserable is that the producers will try to place a project in the cheapest locality and with a fixed bid, implying an unlimited amount of change requests as long as the deadline is not passed. One of the best medicines against the indecision and non-commitment from clients is making them pay for time spent (both waiting while they meddle and working when the umpteenth change requests comes about). This works very well - it does imply you have to fire clients who do not want to work like this.
VFX studios are in a bind because if you want to work "big ticket stuff" (Marvel etc.) they will negotiate hard on contracts, they will want insane deadlines, and they will want fixed bid. And they will want you to be in a locality which provides tax breaks.
Having worked on both sides, being a former VFX programmer and artist makes tech companies afraid of your expense plus they incorrectly think your used to pampered treatment. In tech companies, they see VFX films and do not realize they are seeing the collaborative work of thousands of digital workers - so they expect the programming output of thousands of people. It is a no win situation, because to get them to understand you have to convince them they believe in fantasy.
I've been trying to avoid sequels, reboots, and other Millennial nostalgia-based movies going to a mainstream theater, and I found it nearly impossible. Accidentally watched Uncharted not realizing it was based on... a video game of all things. It wasn't good. Nothing else was good either the past 2 years.
I'm not partial to old movies, but there are some gems, and they show how much you can do without modern VFX. I don't know what modern live-action movies were even improved by fancy effects besides The Matrix, which was awesome. Even when the scene is about action, it's cooler when it's realistic, like the Blues Brothers chase where they're actually driving 118 MPH and 104 real cars are getting wrecked.
What’s funny is that considering the waste and negligence described in the article, I bet it’s cheaper to wreck 104 real cars than to pay a VFX team to do it.
The Revenant is one of the last movies in recent memory that seemed to do something novel.
If we’re going to primarily be inundated with highly computer-influenced content, I prefer it to not try to look perfectly real which is why I’ve really enjoyed some of the animated series that have popped up recently. I’ll also admit that I’ve seen Into the Spider-Verse because my friends wouldn’t let me avoid it. I’ll give Marvel a pass on that one—the animation is amazing.
> I bet it’s cheaper to wreck 104 real cars than to pay a VFX team to do it.
This reminds me: you know that scene in Tenet where a Boeing goes into building? It was neither VFX nor a model. It was a full size, real Boeing. Nolan said it was cheaper.
> I’ll also admit that I’ve seen Into the Spider-Verse because my friends wouldn’t let me avoid it. I’ll give Marvel a pass on that one—the animation is amazing.
Credit where credit is due: Spider-verse is the result of the phenomenal teams at Sony Pictures Imageworks. They absolutely nailed this movie, I could rewatch it countless times and still be amazed.
SPI has also produced some amazing technology for the industry, such as being the originator of the Arnold render engine, OpenColorIO (OCIO), and Open Shading Language (OSL).
Netflix could not accept my payment because of some clerical error on their side and they were unwilling to fix it when I called trying to give them money. They literally could not take my money so I’ve been without Netflix for the last year, sadly. I’m a little salty because what company would deliver a canned “we can’t do that due to system error maybe try later idk lol” message to a customer when money is on the line? It’s absurd. /rant
> I've been trying to avoid sequels, reboots, and other Millennial nostalgia-based movies going to a mainstream theater, and I found it nearly impossible. Accidentally watched Uncharted not realizing it was based on... a video game of all things. It wasn't good. Nothing else was good either the past 2 years.
Same, but for a different reason: I saw too much of how the "sausage gets made", and watching an artistically shitty Marvel blockbuster just doesn't provide enough entertainment to "zone out" of the human suffering that goes into producing that stuff.
Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, Postal, Detective Pikachu, Sonic 1&2. Not necessary the greatest of cinema, but all of them did a good job of turning the source material into a movie. Probably helps that the source material of all of them is relative simple and leaves plenty of room for interpretation.
Also Steins;Gate, though that's a visual novel turned anime, not a regular game. But probably the best example of staying very close to the source material and succeeding.
> Sounds like “hollywood” is finally fully corporate, devoid of any soul it once had.
Perhaps, but then again people have been saying that about Hollywood since at least the 1930's. Hollywood has always been an industry aimed at making money thorough entertaining people. Sometimes this has resulted in great art being created, and Hollywood is not averse to art as long as it makes money.
I also watched that doc a week ago, and loved that pioneering spirit from Dykstra and the other heroes of my youth. In the next 5-10 years, I think that the growth of AI in VFX will bring some of that back. In fact, that's happening right now, across the world, as every VFX house seems to have some sort of AI skunkworks in place; techniques that are not ready for prime-time, as many applications of CGI weren't throughout the eighties, but who time is yet to come.
Okay yes, we can see distant light from slightly behind stars because it follows curved spacetime. The energy projectiles in question in Star Wars VIII arc in a parabolic trajectory through flat spacetime over much shorter distances.
I get that there is some suffering involved, and some broken egos. But people are having jobs and getting paid, aren't they? That's important; specially for artists and technical artists who don't have many well-paying opportunities otherwise.
What worries me is that I watch these productions because they are the lowest common denominator, the kind of thing attractive to my friends and partners who didn't finish high school.
These movies, to justify their budgets and make the money back, have to be appealing to the widest possible audience. Therefore, they can not afford to hurt any sensibilities, and their plots need to happen in worlds as disconnected as possible from our reality. They can't be neither "political" nor "well-educated" in any obvious way. So when anybody watches a Marvel movie, they are maximizing their social futility, the amount of brain-bleaching they get. Worse, they are not using their time to assess/judge the work of a smaller studio who wants to bring public attention to something more concrete.
Read this recently. Truth is most vfx left Hollywood long ago for greener tax subsidies overseas. Industry is too small or too democrat-adjacent? for government to notice. Oh well, was always a sweatshop so perhaps a good riddance to those abusive jobs.
Georgia, which gives one of the biggest subsidies in the US isn't overly democrat. I don't think its a partisan issue really, it just reflects the state of worker/employer relations I suspect.
Democrat led states and cities have paid sick leave, paid parental leave, longer leave periods for new moms, higher minimum wages, daily overtime laws, laws requiring sitting, pay transparency laws, laws requiring employee to be able to sit, higher unemployment insurance benefits, same minimum wage regardless of tips, etc.
Republicans led states do not. That seems to be clear evidence indicating one cares more about labor than the other.
That’s fair. I guess at the state level things are better. Maybe even at the federal level democrats care more than republicans. I do however feel disillusioned with how little it feels like the democrats in congress are willing to do to fight for labor.
Democrats passed Affordable Care Act in 2009 during the only 6 months where they had a tenuous 60 seats in the US Senate required to pass non budgetary laws.
Democrats also almost passed significant child care benefits and tax credits in the original build back better bill in 2021, which of course was voted against by every Republican. Even a single Republican voting with the Democrats would have enabled millions of poorer families with children.
In my entire adult lift (since 2000) I cannot recall a single bill proposed by Republics to benefit lower income/poorer people. I do know they pushed through two wars and a bunch of tax cuts.
I know Democrats tried to reform healthcare as early as mid 1990s (which then culminated in Affordable Care Act).
Seems like pretty conclusive evidence that the parties are not the same at the federal level too, and the voting rules at the Senate level do not leave any options other than severe compromise.
You’re right that they’re not the same. I’d say a bill in 2009 and another in 2021 do not give me the feeling that they’re fighting particularly hard for labor rights either. Though I’m sure there are more and you’re just listing a couple from memory.
They could start by getting more candidates in the Senate, by more aggressively advocating for policies that will genuinely help people. It really seemed like Bernie Sanders's policy proposals resonated with a majority of Americans, but the Democratic Party did everything they could to sink him. Their more moderate proposals were less exciting, which I think is why the election between Biden and Trump was so close. If the Democratic Party had gotten behind more popular policies, they could have won more seats in the Senate too.
The problem, of course, is that both parties (though not Bernie Sanders) are beholden to big corporate interests. So they have to fight for lukewarm policy that doesn't really excite the people, but satisfies their major donors. They could fix this by advocating for election reform, but I don't think the party establishment really wants to change that.
It is worth noting that Bernie Sanders even did a town hall style meeting on FOX news, with positive reception. The Democratic Party could see the value in what Bernie was doing and support candidates like him, but they choose to go after big corporate interests instead. And I think that is their folly.
It does not make any sense to me that voters are voting for the exact opposite of Bernie (Republicans) rather than voting for someone closer to Bernie (Democrats).
> but they choose to go after big corporate interests instead.
Yet we established in this very comment chain that Democrats have passed some significant bills against big corporate interests, and Republicans have done the opposite.
> It does not make any sense to me that voters are voting for the exact opposite of Bernie (Republicans) rather than voting for someone closer to Bernie (Democrats).
> Yet we established in this very comment chain that Democrats have passed some significant bills against big corporate interests
I don't believe we established that? I allowed that these two bills you mentioned may have benefited labor, but that is not the same as going against big corporate interest. Certainly some labor policy would go against corporate interests (and that policy I believe is unsuccessful), but the ACA has been described as a massive government handout to insurance companies.
I get what you mean. Maybe this is the best we could ever hope for? Because one thing is clear to me: If Hollywood and the VFX artists working for it had been Republican-leaning over the decades, we'd still be at the "Steam train moving towards the camera" stage.
