> experience of working on a film or television series that is underbid, understaffed, subject to unreasonable, inflexible deadlines, and endless directorial nitpicking: "pixel fucked"
This feels like working for a video game company. People overworked, underpaid, and doing it for the love of the creative arts and working on a name brand project. Similar things have happened at Electronic Arts.
There's a lot in modern day life that seems to depend on an endless supply of naive young folk who don't yet realize they're being taken advantage of yet. They have that belief that their situation will be different.
It's one of those things you can't tell people either, they have to experience it unfortunately, so the cycle continues.
Not sure how you fix that beyond regulation / protection for those folks.
In the film industry everyone knows they're being taken advantage of, it's very explicitly discussed at the lowest ranks of production. It's just that it's the only entrance to the field if you aren't wealthy or heavily connected. You have to suffer until you build your network and credits enough to pull yourself up. There's little to no delusion, just embracing the suck.
I don't know much about VFX but that's certainly true in much of the scuba diving industry. They find young people who love to dive and want to make it a career, and sucker them into paying for training to become dive masters and instructors. Then those people get stuck working long hours for miniscule wages, always under constant pressure to cut corners on safety while trying to sell more equipment and training courses to customers. There are good dive shops and instructors who don't play that game but they are a minority.
In general be cautious about getting into any industry where people are there more for love than for money. That tends to create exploitive situations.
Sounds like working on a software project of literally any kind, minus one's ego necessarily driving the burnout truck (I know that's probably about 50/50)
Just to point out one of the threads talks about "From 3 potential job offers, to all of them on hold." from 1 day ago. This may be because the actors guild, and the screenwriters guild are both on strike right now and so nothing can really be produced at this point.
Is there an overproduction of artist hopefuls compared to the movies being made?
I would also guess differentiation is low. Any VFX studio is as good as the other, so every studio is paranoid about losing a movie deal, over not accommodating the directors whims?
this is one of the places I feel generative AI can do a lot of good. It can get rid of the routine VFX like changing an actors pant etc that VFX artists are inundated with and leave only the artistic work for VFX artists which is hopefully not as taxing and not as requiring of crunch
> Is there an overproduction of artist hopefuls compared to the movies being made?
Yes.
Hollywood in the general sense is also an industry packed to the brim with ego and wishful thinking. Nobody wants to rock the boat because, heaven forbid, an artist may never be allowed to live their dream working on the next Avatar or the next Toy Story for crossing the wrong person.
For better or worse, most young artists I've known are wishful thinkers. They each had a dream of working on the next Jurassic Park or the next equivalent to 2001 A Space Odyssey, or the next Frozen or whatever. Although the software industry is filled with aspirations of working at The Google or Meta, unlike programmers, artists in entertainment are willing to work for peanuts because they can't have their grand vision shattered.
The fantasy of being important is what fuels the entertainment industry. It's numerically infeasible for every artist to work on The Next Big Hit, but everyone is required to believe they can in order for there to be enough fresh artists to be chewed up and spat out.
I'm so glad I left animation and became a programmer. The worst coworkers in software pale in comparison to the giant throbbing dicks that exist everywhere in the entertainment industry. I can refuse to work weekends or, even more drastic, quit my job when the deal gets bad, and it's unlikely to permanently damage my career if it even does at all. My career isn't founded on a combination of free work and brown-nosing.
> this is one of the places I feel generative AI can do a lot of good.
I seriously think that studios aren't far from having their lunch totally eaten by small groups of individuals using various forms of AI. No doubt that GPT has been used in Hollywood already, but VFX and animation are stuck in the past in many ways. These studios are afraid to experiment, which is why they resort to using old school methods that are outclassed by individuals with deepfake tech.
Programmers have plenty of comfortable fallback options if they don't make it to FAANG.
Screenwriters and VFX artists, not so much. There are more people wanting to do these jobs than there are positions to be filled. That means anyone who isn't willing to put up with being used and abused can be easily replaced. It's why nearly every skilled trade in Hollywood has a union, because collective bargaining is often the only way to guarantee any sort of stability or fair treatment. VFX artist unfortunately don't have a useful union, so they get to experience firsthand what Hollywood was like for everyone else 90 years ago.
I'm not in the industry, but from talking to people that have been, VFX is one of those things that gets squeezed the most. It typically happens after principal photography is done, and the release date has been set in stone by the management and marketing machine at the studios. When you add the wide numbers of VFX houses, the lack of labor protections, and the ability to outsource to all corners of the world, there's so much competition that it's a race to the bottom with pricing and delivery dates.
I was 7 years at Rhythm & Hues, leaving the industry during the production of Life of PI. It gets this bad for several reasons, including: each VFX studio has between 3-5 feature films moving through it, at different stages of production, at a time, and often a few commercials as well; that equals between 1200 and 2800 digital artists and their support staff all working on the same corporate campus; by necessity, these technical artists have a range of experience, so there is also an education department, a constant flow of new software, and software freezes for a given production that may last 18+ months; so by necessity the staff is managed en mass with cafeteria food, around the clock render completions and hence 3-5 "dailies" per 24 hour period. One production's compute going over expectations, or production changes, or staff changes easily ripple in impact through the entire studio - all productions.
> this is one of the places I feel generative AI can do a lot of good. It can get rid of the routine VFX like changing an actors pant etc that VFX artists are inundated with and leave only the artistic work for VFX artists which is hopefully not as taxing and not as requiring of crunch
And the last decades' exponential increases in productivity could have lead to keynes' famous 15 hour workweek - except they didn't.
Instead, productivity got directed to more output and more profit and working hours stayed the same if not increased.
As such, I'm more predicting this will simply lead to less VFX artists being employed by the studios than for there being a substantial improvement in working conditions.
You’re right about the productivity. And many movie studios already own VFX studios. Netflix has Scanline, Disney has ILM, etc. But it is not super common.
It is more efficient for the business to hire the same guy for 45 hours than three guys for 15 hours. If we assume that all of them get their turn eventually, then this can only be done by rotating who gets employed.
VFX has been turbo-fucked for a long time. I don't know quite why. Part of it is the employment law specific to the geography, e.g. comp time after 50 hours, overtime after 60 hours in Culver City (this seems to have changed since I worked there in 2005 though).
The studio I worked at lost a ton of money on films but did them for prestige, then tried to break even on grueling commercial and episodic work, all while pinching every penny imaginable--like firing a staff artist when his twins were born and bringing him back as a contractor to avoid paying his health insurance.
Around Superbowl time artists were forbidden (not physically, but by threat of e.g. "leave and you're fired") from leaving the studio for the weekend until all the Superbowl commercials were finished and rendering.
> Is there an overproduction of artist hopefuls compared to the movies being made?
Yes, this is true literally everywhere in the arts: there are far more aspiring artists in any given field than there is money to support as full-time artists, and the way the market for art works you end up with a very small number of artists making lots of money, a modest number of artists making barely-adequate money, and a whole lot of people making occasional incidental money but unable to devote themselves exclusively to the field because of lack of funds unless they have unrelated support, where the skill/quality differences between being in the top category and the bottom may be very narrow for individuals, even if they are notable on average, because there is so much volume that a lot of the filtering mechanisms that exist in practice are rough.
Hollywood in general has a surplus of hopefuls. But Hollywood is largely unionized. VFX is a glaring exception.
My friends who work in animation describe a constant back and forth between the union and the studios over demands for more work for the same pay. Generative AI will just make it easier for directors to ask for even more ludicrous tasks.
> But Hollywood is largely unionized. VFX is a glaring exception.
And, in fact, this one of the reasons why VFX gets so heavily overused for stuff that you could do in-camera.
Is the actor wearing the wrong pants? Well, reshooting that requires paying union actors, gaffers, camera operators, etc. to shoot it again. Fixing it in post means you pay a couple of ununionized VFX artists.
this is one of the places I feel generative AI can do a lot of good. It can get rid of the routine VFX like changing an actors pant etc that VFX artists are inundated with and leave only the artistic work for VFX artists which is hopefully not as taxing and not as requiring of crunch
What are you basing any of this on? I have seen demos that would be incredible for previs and animatics but nothing that would pass for final quality.
Computer graphics research, software and hardware continues to march forward, that's a reason visual effects have progressed so much in the last 20 years.
From what I can gather and have read, two things can be true at the same time:
1) Viewers can tell the difference between good and bad VFX and have a lot of complaints about the quality of VFX on a lot of projects.
2) Studios don't seem to care. They care about price and about tight deadlines.
Marvel is getting criticized a lot for the quality of its VFX, which has been poor at times in recent years, and a bit culprit of that is that release dates are set with schedules for work. But rewrites and reshoots happen, which push back when VFX can do their work, but the release dates don't move. So this leads to a lot of rushed work.
Thank trash software. Keeping the ship afloat becomes more important, than wondering where the ship is heading. Thats what trash software does to ppls brains.
Its so bad, it allows (and requires) 600 ppl to sit together and produce a few seconds worth of mindless forgettable sensory over stimulation, to keep a 14 year old glued to his seat. I mean Bill Waterson does a better job with just a pencil.
On top of it, there arent enough over stimulation requiring eyeballs on the planet to sustain such a mindless mega machine(see Odlyzko Content is not King), that the trash software enables. Its natural the whole thing keeps breaking down regularly.
It will only change when people step back from keeping the ship afloat and ask where the ship should be heading.
The documentary "Jurassic Punk" tells a story about Steve Williams, a VFX artist who was central to the animation presented in several blockbuster films, including The Abyss, Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15095920/
Williams did not receive credit, nor benefit financially.
He did receive credit and he was paid by ILM. He also became a visual effects supervisor. Maybe he feels he didn't receive enough of the credit compared to Dennis Muren and Phil Tippet, but he was also not in charge of the show. He did end up in many behind the scenes interviews. If anyone didn't get enough credit, it was probably the texture painters, lookdev artists, shader writers and lighters who actually made the dinosaurs look realistic.
Honestly, I'm a little curious why VFX work has so much allure. It's a decent wage, but I don't see why that job specifically is worth it. Surely there are other jobs demanding less work while paying more money. Is it just because it's art? I feel like that sort of corporate "spend two weeks making a realistic fire which will be on screen for 3 seconds" can't be that fulfilling as art in itself, when you have essentially zero creative control.
The problems that you work to solve are not the usual "I need a new parameter for this API endpoint" type of work. It's fun (for a while) and crazy and even glamorous (watching something you've worked on in a theater with the public is great). Another nice thing is that, while most software written is very evanescent (almost every bit of software I have worked on in my 38-year career is gone), my name in the credits of some very popular movies will be around 100 years after I'm dead. That's pretty cool.
I worked in VFX for almost ten years. It's incredibly fun! I absolutely loved making movies and I worked with some amazing artists. It pays terribly, but it was the most fun I've ever had in a job.
I would add that there are really challenging problems and continual technical development. And since each movie comes with its own new set of requirements, each one is a fresh slate of new, crazy problems. For me personally, I love the short iterative cycle between math and an output image.
I'm sure it's pretty fun to see the stuff you worked on in theaters, and from what I've seen on the 'VFX Artists React' show that Corridor Crew puts out the VFX artists actually do have some amount of creative control - depending on what they're doing.
Maybe the industry will eat itself and we can go back to film making where it's the story that drives the film.
Edit: watched "Life After Pi" linked to here in the comments section. I feel my comment above is too abrasive now. The VFX guys don't deserve this crap. I still dislike the modern "Blockbuster" however.
My Cousin Vinny did it. Honestly I don't think VFX has ever truly helped a comedy.
Imagine what that movie could have been with cheap gratuitous CGI. Instead of Vinny getting covered in real mud, you could have slow motion closeups of glossy mud drops with fluid simulation flying through the air, the camera spinning around the mud in three dimensions before it cakes Vinny. But would such a visual spectacle make the movie funnier? I don't think so.
And quite frankly, She Hulk would look a lot better if they simply found a buff actress and painted her green.
Best hedge funds write their own software so should VFX studios. If you are using the same tools as guys from Poland you can not expect to compete on anything but project management skills and price
Readit News
This feels like working for a video game company. People overworked, underpaid, and doing it for the love of the creative arts and working on a name brand project. Similar things have happened at Electronic Arts.
It's one of those things you can't tell people either, they have to experience it unfortunately, so the cycle continues.
Not sure how you fix that beyond regulation / protection for those folks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuLr9HG2ASs
In general be cautious about getting into any industry where people are there more for love than for money. That tends to create exploitive situations.
Dead Comment
Some more stuff from vfx subreddit:
https://old.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/14jyllh/from_3_potenti...
https://old.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/13zf3hd/vfx_a_little_r...
https://old.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/144mv2b/more_studio_cr...
On and on... I work in vfx but on the software side, and am very sad to hear about this happening :(
Get ready for some truly terrible scripted television acted out by the catering crews.
It is a documentary short about the vfx studio Rhythm&Hues which went bankrupt two weeks before winning an academy award.
Is there an overproduction of artist hopefuls compared to the movies being made?
I would also guess differentiation is low. Any VFX studio is as good as the other, so every studio is paranoid about losing a movie deal, over not accommodating the directors whims?
this is one of the places I feel generative AI can do a lot of good. It can get rid of the routine VFX like changing an actors pant etc that VFX artists are inundated with and leave only the artistic work for VFX artists which is hopefully not as taxing and not as requiring of crunch
Yes.
Hollywood in the general sense is also an industry packed to the brim with ego and wishful thinking. Nobody wants to rock the boat because, heaven forbid, an artist may never be allowed to live their dream working on the next Avatar or the next Toy Story for crossing the wrong person.
For better or worse, most young artists I've known are wishful thinkers. They each had a dream of working on the next Jurassic Park or the next equivalent to 2001 A Space Odyssey, or the next Frozen or whatever. Although the software industry is filled with aspirations of working at The Google or Meta, unlike programmers, artists in entertainment are willing to work for peanuts because they can't have their grand vision shattered.
The fantasy of being important is what fuels the entertainment industry. It's numerically infeasible for every artist to work on The Next Big Hit, but everyone is required to believe they can in order for there to be enough fresh artists to be chewed up and spat out.
I'm so glad I left animation and became a programmer. The worst coworkers in software pale in comparison to the giant throbbing dicks that exist everywhere in the entertainment industry. I can refuse to work weekends or, even more drastic, quit my job when the deal gets bad, and it's unlikely to permanently damage my career if it even does at all. My career isn't founded on a combination of free work and brown-nosing.
> this is one of the places I feel generative AI can do a lot of good.
I seriously think that studios aren't far from having their lunch totally eaten by small groups of individuals using various forms of AI. No doubt that GPT has been used in Hollywood already, but VFX and animation are stuck in the past in many ways. These studios are afraid to experiment, which is why they resort to using old school methods that are outclassed by individuals with deepfake tech.
Screenwriters and VFX artists, not so much. There are more people wanting to do these jobs than there are positions to be filled. That means anyone who isn't willing to put up with being used and abused can be easily replaced. It's why nearly every skilled trade in Hollywood has a union, because collective bargaining is often the only way to guarantee any sort of stability or fair treatment. VFX artist unfortunately don't have a useful union, so they get to experience firsthand what Hollywood was like for everyone else 90 years ago.
And the last decades' exponential increases in productivity could have lead to keynes' famous 15 hour workweek - except they didn't.
Instead, productivity got directed to more output and more profit and working hours stayed the same if not increased.
As such, I'm more predicting this will simply lead to less VFX artists being employed by the studios than for there being a substantial improvement in working conditions.
This is why game developers have some of the worst working conditions in the the software industry.
The studio I worked at lost a ton of money on films but did them for prestige, then tried to break even on grueling commercial and episodic work, all while pinching every penny imaginable--like firing a staff artist when his twins were born and bringing him back as a contractor to avoid paying his health insurance.
Around Superbowl time artists were forbidden (not physically, but by threat of e.g. "leave and you're fired") from leaving the studio for the weekend until all the Superbowl commercials were finished and rendering.
Yes, this is true literally everywhere in the arts: there are far more aspiring artists in any given field than there is money to support as full-time artists, and the way the market for art works you end up with a very small number of artists making lots of money, a modest number of artists making barely-adequate money, and a whole lot of people making occasional incidental money but unable to devote themselves exclusively to the field because of lack of funds unless they have unrelated support, where the skill/quality differences between being in the top category and the bottom may be very narrow for individuals, even if they are notable on average, because there is so much volume that a lot of the filtering mechanisms that exist in practice are rough.
My friends who work in animation describe a constant back and forth between the union and the studios over demands for more work for the same pay. Generative AI will just make it easier for directors to ask for even more ludicrous tasks.
And, in fact, this one of the reasons why VFX gets so heavily overused for stuff that you could do in-camera.
Is the actor wearing the wrong pants? Well, reshooting that requires paying union actors, gaffers, camera operators, etc. to shoot it again. Fixing it in post means you pay a couple of ununionized VFX artists.
What are you basing this on and why would this be the case?
What are you basing any of this on? I have seen demos that would be incredible for previs and animatics but nothing that would pass for final quality.
Computer graphics research, software and hardware continues to march forward, that's a reason visual effects have progressed so much in the last 20 years.
1) Viewers can tell the difference between good and bad VFX and have a lot of complaints about the quality of VFX on a lot of projects. 2) Studios don't seem to care. They care about price and about tight deadlines.
Marvel is getting criticized a lot for the quality of its VFX, which has been poor at times in recent years, and a bit culprit of that is that release dates are set with schedules for work. But rewrites and reshoots happen, which push back when VFX can do their work, but the release dates don't move. So this leads to a lot of rushed work.
Its so bad, it allows (and requires) 600 ppl to sit together and produce a few seconds worth of mindless forgettable sensory over stimulation, to keep a 14 year old glued to his seat. I mean Bill Waterson does a better job with just a pencil.
On top of it, there arent enough over stimulation requiring eyeballs on the planet to sustain such a mindless mega machine(see Odlyzko Content is not King), that the trash software enables. Its natural the whole thing keeps breaking down regularly.
It will only change when people step back from keeping the ship afloat and ask where the ship should be heading.
Williams did not receive credit, nor benefit financially.
did he release software on the public domain those movies used?
Maybe the industry will eat itself and we can go back to film making where it's the story that drives the film.
Edit: watched "Life After Pi" linked to here in the comments section. I feel my comment above is too abrasive now. The VFX guys don't deserve this crap. I still dislike the modern "Blockbuster" however.
Imagine what that movie could have been with cheap gratuitous CGI. Instead of Vinny getting covered in real mud, you could have slow motion closeups of glossy mud drops with fluid simulation flying through the air, the camera spinning around the mud in three dimensions before it cakes Vinny. But would such a visual spectacle make the movie funnier? I don't think so.
And quite frankly, She Hulk would look a lot better if they simply found a buff actress and painted her green.