4 ms·

I smell a startup. Leased CG sets. (Just realized 'leased' may not be the correct term here, don't hold that against me I am not an entrepreneur by any means.)

apercu 10y ago
"licensed"?
philippnagel 10y ago
SaaS (Sets as a Service)?
anigbrowl 10y ago
^^^^ This is why you research an industry before you go into it unless you want to lose your shirt. If you build or own something physical, people will pay to rent it from you. If it's something virtual, they'll put the same value on it that you put on completed movies as a consumer, a few bucks that bears no relation whatsoever to the effort you had to invest. In hollywood you are nobody until you have some credits, and you don't get any credits until you have done some work, and you don't get hired if you're a nobody so you'd better be prepared to give it away and keep giving for a while until people come looking for you, at which point you practice saying 'no' a lot and meaning it. One of my more memorable gigs was on a film that I turned down because the pay was too low. So they went with someone else but he did such a bad job they dumped him and came back to me offering twice as much midway through the production. Sadly the film never got released, as they tried to cheap out on everything the same way, resulting in injuries, some unusable footage, and an absentee director who vanished rather than get sued. Oddly enough I got a lot of follow-up gigs from that disaster - suffering builds bonds and boy did we suffer on that job.
- sandebert 10y ago
  You do realise that we need to hear more about that story, right?
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    Which part - the broken bones of the actors trying to run up a rain-soaked grassy hill in clogs? The 35 hour shifts in shitty weather? The time we almost killed the lead actress and he boyfriend spend the rest of the week sleeping in the communal toilet? That was one of those jobs where the production work was a lot scarier than the actual script :-D I joke about it now but in all seriousness bad producers are always trying to cut corners and this sometimes comes at the price of human lives, and even when people go to jail over it the costs are distributed inequitably - see this example of a director getting a 2 year sentence for causing the death of a crew member in an entirely predictable way: https://petapixel.com/2015/03/10/director-gets-two-years-in-jail-for-train-track-shoot-that-killed-crew-member/ https://petapixel.com/2015/03/10/director-gets-two-years-in-... At the low-budget end you have to be willing to threaten to quit on the spot no matter where you are, because you will be asked to put your safety at risk. I've never worked on a project where anyone died, but I've come close a few times. That's one reason I have such strong opinions about labor codes and safety regulations - I'm used to working outside them :-/
    - sandebert 10y ago
      Yeah, that part! Pile it all together into a script and make a movie out of it. I'd watch it! :) (Note to folks at HN: if behind-the-scenes movies are your thing, check out Living in Oblivion with Steve Buscemi and Catherine Keener. Good stuff.)
    - dvtv75 10y ago
      I've worked in the low budget end of TV. Studio stuff mainly. The number of close calls I've seen are unbelievable, but nothing quite on that scale. We did have one guy get a minor electric shock because the producer had him changing a light. He was on top of a five foot ladder but with no spotter ("Health and safety BS!") and the producer never bothered to tell him that it was still carrying current, even when the fader was right down. That's not the only time someone's fallen off a ladder, or had a shock. Not once was it reported to the health and safety people, either. There were also cable loops standing up from the ground (we used short pieces of carpet offcuts to hold them down, never worked and people would trip up. The business manager would never authorize the cash to have flush-mount patch panels installed in the floor (a legal requirement). Also not reported. One memory is how we had a strict uniform requirement, which often resulted in inappropriate dress for a location. There were a couple of location shoots in below-freezing conditions - in one place, three staff came down with hypothermia because they were clad in sweatshirts and jeans, another it was just one guy in a shirt and dress pants standing outside for seven hours while ice formed on car windows. That particular day, the lucky staff indoors were exposed to unsafe sound levels, with no protection, for the whole shoot. None of these incidents were reported, nor was it reported that the guy who drove the equipment truck back to the studio had been smoking pot for the whole night, in front of the senior staff at the location. Maybe he shared the joint. Chuck in some 12+ hour shifts without breaks, people working on scaffolding who had no clue how to operate safely, or the guy who replaced an old monitor only to accidentally drop the failed unit, and ended up hauled in front of the Production Manager to account for his "unsafe" actions. Equipment was never maintained: if something broke, it was the person using it at the time, not the 20-year-old tripod with broken spreaders and worn out fastenings. (Last time I saw that particular tripod, the spreaders had perished and were being held together by duct tape on three sides, and the tape was four or five years old.) Oh, the stories I could tell... no, wait, that's actually a good summary right there!
- kbenson 10y ago
  > If it's something virtual, they'll put the same value on it that you put on completed movies as a consumer, a few bucks that bears no relation whatsoever to the effort you had to invest. I would think there's a clear difference between consumer and B2B solutions here. As a business, it's a clear trade-off, pay X for the base models I can presumably get for some percentage of X, or just pay someone X dollars to do it, and presumably that percentage is well under 100% because the company has already done (and hopefully used) the work once, so it's just a way to monetize and existing resource. For a consumer, I don't really have the option of making a movie myself rather than paying for it. B2B products routinely cost tens of thousands of dollars. Now, if you're saying specifically that industry will value it that way because of the way they are, well, that might be true. Sounds like you would know better than me. At the same time, may a service like that isn't marketed towards the studios, but towards the special FX houses, and they just factor it into their costs, bids, etc.
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    You may think whatever you'd like, but you'll be underbid while you're making your value proposition. Of course people pay for CG services but the money is in content creation+. If your offering is too obviously recycled then it will be devalued in proportion. It's worth thinking of every film as a startup spun off by a studio, with a correspondingly short-term view of revenue cs. expenses. + by which I mean every director and producer want something nobody has ever seen before, which is the surest route to $$$. That leads to a very zero-sum approach to negotiations; if you do not have some sort of existing contract (eg by virtue of union or guild membership and the resulting standardized pricing agreements) then as a new entrant to the market you will be asked to work for nothing. Even if you're well-established this is a big problem. A good example of this was when highly-esteemed CFX house Rhythm & Hues went bankrupt a few years ago: http://variety.com/2013/film/news/rhythm-hues-bankruptcy-reveals-vfx-biz-crisis-1118066108/ http://variety.com/2013/film/news/rhythm-hues-bankruptcy-rev... As a more prosaic real-life example, I once earned myself a nice cash bonus for recovering all the footage from a project after the primary and backup drives both failed (or so it seemed to the less technical people). Had I proposed making the same investment in data protection up front, I guarantee the answer would have been No. While you do expect to work with the same people again, often over many years, every individual project is its own financial entity and producers' primary job skill is to hoard cash and minimize obligations. This isn't just because they're jerks (although being a jerk is a necessary job skill, which is why I'm bad at being a producer lol), but because when you're in production the scarcity switches from money to time. Actors have other commitments, the weather can't be controlled, locations are rented for very short durations with large overages if you exceed the rental period and so on. So the basic business strategy notwithstanding scale is to hang on to as much money as you possibly can until you go into production, at which point you start spending money like water and trying to save time instead. Obviously an unscrupulous person can exploit that phase transition profitably, but doing so deliberately will tarnish your reputation, and your personal reputation carries far far more weight than your work product, unless your work product is really world-class and people take the time to evaluate it. Of course I'm simplifying, but consider the thousands of people who have credits on a big movie. You can't exhaustively evaluate the quality of their individual contributions when you're hiring at that scale, and most producers have limited technical and even aesthetic ability anyway, so a thumbs-up from someone they've worked carries far more weight. I'm not trying to scare you out of participating int he industry, because in many ways it's really great and really does function on a meritocratic basis - if you're smart and innovative you can go a long way in a short time. But don't bank on a rational strategy, because the film industry manufactures dreams. Our work product is literally an escape from everyday reality that can be easily reproduced and distributed. In that sense it's kinda like doing business with a drug cartel - you can make a lot of money, but you have to approach each deal like it's the last one you'll ever make.
- cowardlydragon 10y ago
  Based on the article, he shouldn't be talking to Hollywood, he should be talking to Google/Amazon/Netflix/Microsoft/Facebook. They don't give a rats ass about reputation if you deliver what they need.
royjacobs 10y ago
Companies like Stargate Digital are doing exactly this. They've created things like a virtual New York and Chicago that was used by shows like Nurse Betty and ER. Saves those shows from flying their cast out of LA for location shooting and usually nobody really notices anyway.

apercu 10y ago

"licensed"?

philippnagel 10y ago

SaaS (Sets as a Service)?

anigbrowl 10y ago

^^^^ This is why you research an industry before you go into it unless you want to lose your shirt. If you build or own something physical, people will pay to rent it from you. If it's something virtual, they'll put the same value on it that you put on completed movies as a consumer, a few bucks that bears no relation whatsoever to the effort you had to invest. In hollywood you are nobody until you have some credits, and you don't get any credits until you have done some work, and you don't get hired if you're a nobody so you'd better be prepared to give it away and keep giving for a while until people come looking for you, at which point you practice saying 'no' a lot and meaning it. One of my more memorable gigs was on a film that I turned down because the pay was too low. So they went with someone else but he did such a bad job they dumped him and came back to me offering twice as much midway through the production. Sadly the film never got released, as they tried to cheap out on everything the same way, resulting in injuries, some unusable footage, and an absentee director who vanished rather than get sued. Oddly enough I got a lot of follow-up gigs from that disaster - suffering builds bonds and boy did we suffer on that job.

sandebert 10y ago
You do realise that we need to hear more about that story, right?
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  Which part - the broken bones of the actors trying to run up a rain-soaked grassy hill in clogs? The 35 hour shifts in shitty weather? The time we almost killed the lead actress and he boyfriend spend the rest of the week sleeping in the communal toilet? That was one of those jobs where the production work was a lot scarier than the actual script :-D I joke about it now but in all seriousness bad producers are always trying to cut corners and this sometimes comes at the price of human lives, and even when people go to jail over it the costs are distributed inequitably - see this example of a director getting a 2 year sentence for causing the death of a crew member in an entirely predictable way: https://petapixel.com/2015/03/10/director-gets-two-years-in-jail-for-train-track-shoot-that-killed-crew-member/ https://petapixel.com/2015/03/10/director-gets-two-years-in-... At the low-budget end you have to be willing to threaten to quit on the spot no matter where you are, because you will be asked to put your safety at risk. I've never worked on a project where anyone died, but I've come close a few times. That's one reason I have such strong opinions about labor codes and safety regulations - I'm used to working outside them :-/
  - sandebert 10y ago
    Yeah, that part! Pile it all together into a script and make a movie out of it. I'd watch it! :) (Note to folks at HN: if behind-the-scenes movies are your thing, check out Living in Oblivion with Steve Buscemi and Catherine Keener. Good stuff.)
  - dvtv75 10y ago
    I've worked in the low budget end of TV. Studio stuff mainly. The number of close calls I've seen are unbelievable, but nothing quite on that scale. We did have one guy get a minor electric shock because the producer had him changing a light. He was on top of a five foot ladder but with no spotter ("Health and safety BS!") and the producer never bothered to tell him that it was still carrying current, even when the fader was right down. That's not the only time someone's fallen off a ladder, or had a shock. Not once was it reported to the health and safety people, either. There were also cable loops standing up from the ground (we used short pieces of carpet offcuts to hold them down, never worked and people would trip up. The business manager would never authorize the cash to have flush-mount patch panels installed in the floor (a legal requirement). Also not reported. One memory is how we had a strict uniform requirement, which often resulted in inappropriate dress for a location. There were a couple of location shoots in below-freezing conditions - in one place, three staff came down with hypothermia because they were clad in sweatshirts and jeans, another it was just one guy in a shirt and dress pants standing outside for seven hours while ice formed on car windows. That particular day, the lucky staff indoors were exposed to unsafe sound levels, with no protection, for the whole shoot. None of these incidents were reported, nor was it reported that the guy who drove the equipment truck back to the studio had been smoking pot for the whole night, in front of the senior staff at the location. Maybe he shared the joint. Chuck in some 12+ hour shifts without breaks, people working on scaffolding who had no clue how to operate safely, or the guy who replaced an old monitor only to accidentally drop the failed unit, and ended up hauled in front of the Production Manager to account for his "unsafe" actions. Equipment was never maintained: if something broke, it was the person using it at the time, not the 20-year-old tripod with broken spreaders and worn out fastenings. (Last time I saw that particular tripod, the spreaders had perished and were being held together by duct tape on three sides, and the tape was four or five years old.) Oh, the stories I could tell... no, wait, that's actually a good summary right there!
kbenson 10y ago
> If it's something virtual, they'll put the same value on it that you put on completed movies as a consumer, a few bucks that bears no relation whatsoever to the effort you had to invest. I would think there's a clear difference between consumer and B2B solutions here. As a business, it's a clear trade-off, pay X for the base models I can presumably get for some percentage of X, or just pay someone X dollars to do it, and presumably that percentage is well under 100% because the company has already done (and hopefully used) the work once, so it's just a way to monetize and existing resource. For a consumer, I don't really have the option of making a movie myself rather than paying for it. B2B products routinely cost tens of thousands of dollars. Now, if you're saying specifically that industry will value it that way because of the way they are, well, that might be true. Sounds like you would know better than me. At the same time, may a service like that isn't marketed towards the studios, but towards the special FX houses, and they just factor it into their costs, bids, etc.
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  You may think whatever you'd like, but you'll be underbid while you're making your value proposition. Of course people pay for CG services but the money is in content creation+. If your offering is too obviously recycled then it will be devalued in proportion. It's worth thinking of every film as a startup spun off by a studio, with a correspondingly short-term view of revenue cs. expenses. + by which I mean every director and producer want something nobody has ever seen before, which is the surest route to $$$. That leads to a very zero-sum approach to negotiations; if you do not have some sort of existing contract (eg by virtue of union or guild membership and the resulting standardized pricing agreements) then as a new entrant to the market you will be asked to work for nothing. Even if you're well-established this is a big problem. A good example of this was when highly-esteemed CFX house Rhythm & Hues went bankrupt a few years ago: http://variety.com/2013/film/news/rhythm-hues-bankruptcy-reveals-vfx-biz-crisis-1118066108/ http://variety.com/2013/film/news/rhythm-hues-bankruptcy-rev... As a more prosaic real-life example, I once earned myself a nice cash bonus for recovering all the footage from a project after the primary and backup drives both failed (or so it seemed to the less technical people). Had I proposed making the same investment in data protection up front, I guarantee the answer would have been No. While you do expect to work with the same people again, often over many years, every individual project is its own financial entity and producers' primary job skill is to hoard cash and minimize obligations. This isn't just because they're jerks (although being a jerk is a necessary job skill, which is why I'm bad at being a producer lol), but because when you're in production the scarcity switches from money to time. Actors have other commitments, the weather can't be controlled, locations are rented for very short durations with large overages if you exceed the rental period and so on. So the basic business strategy notwithstanding scale is to hang on to as much money as you possibly can until you go into production, at which point you start spending money like water and trying to save time instead. Obviously an unscrupulous person can exploit that phase transition profitably, but doing so deliberately will tarnish your reputation, and your personal reputation carries far far more weight than your work product, unless your work product is really world-class and people take the time to evaluate it. Of course I'm simplifying, but consider the thousands of people who have credits on a big movie. You can't exhaustively evaluate the quality of their individual contributions when you're hiring at that scale, and most producers have limited technical and even aesthetic ability anyway, so a thumbs-up from someone they've worked carries far more weight. I'm not trying to scare you out of participating int he industry, because in many ways it's really great and really does function on a meritocratic basis - if you're smart and innovative you can go a long way in a short time. But don't bank on a rational strategy, because the film industry manufactures dreams. Our work product is literally an escape from everyday reality that can be easily reproduced and distributed. In that sense it's kinda like doing business with a drug cartel - you can make a lot of money, but you have to approach each deal like it's the last one you'll ever make.
cowardlydragon 10y ago
Based on the article, he shouldn't be talking to Hollywood, he should be talking to Google/Amazon/Netflix/Microsoft/Facebook. They don't give a rats ass about reputation if you deliver what they need.

royjacobs 10y ago

Companies like Stargate Digital are doing exactly this. They've created things like a virtual New York and Chicago that was used by shows like Nurse Betty and ER. Saves those shows from flying their cast out of LA for location shooting and usually nobody really notices anyway.