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Pixel fucked: Inside Hollywood's VFX crisis

184 points by CharlesW 3y ago

rcarr 3y ago
> Now, not only were VFX houses responsible for conjuring vast fictional cities, bustling crowds of tens of thousands, and cascading waterfalls, but they would also spend months fixing mistakes: digitally erasing visible wig lines in period dramas, inserting absent props, snipping away errant strands of hair, tucking in double chins. Take with a pinch of salt because I don't work in the industry, but I'm not convinced this "VFX for everything" approach is cheaper or results in better films. I still think a lot of old films blow the modern counterparts out of the water. The very fact that they had to use practical effects and physical film was expensive meant you couldn't just shoot unlimited takes without burning through money (unless you were Kubrick who was notorious for doing takes from every angle). The whole "fix it in post" mentality leads to sloppy, rushed work and a lack of thinking and commitment on behalf of the director and producing team. See here[1]: > Even after shots are exhaustively delivered, Marvel is allegedly "infamous" for requesting "tons of different variations" until one earns the green light. and even worse: > We've literally made up entire third acts of a film, a month before release, because the director didn't know what they wanted," one source said about Marvel in general. You would never have had this back in the day. You planned out your big set piece in advance and you shot it, and you better get it fucking right because your head was on the chopping block if you didn't. Instead, the directors and producers are now offloading their responsibility to get things right on to the VFX artists. Maybe the demands of HD and 4K means that such work is necessary compared to back in the old days because stuff like wig lines and errant hairs wouldn't be visible due to the resolution. But some of me wonders if it is overproduction, which I think a lot of contemporary music nowadays also suffers from. Another evil is film companies refusing to create a "everything-in-one-place" content model like the music industry has done with Spotify, with the end result being an endless churn of content in an attempt to justify the subscription over their rivals. I imagine this is a contributing factor to the rushed "fix it in post" mentality but I can't see why film would be any different to any other industry - where taking your time to get it right the first time ends up being faster over the long run. [1] https://www.cnet.com/culture/entertainment/marvels-vfx-artists-are-suffering-now-theyre-speaking-out/ https://www.cnet.com/culture/entertainment/marvels-vfx-artis...
- slaymaker1907 3y ago
  I think it’s kind of natural for artists to demand higher standards than is truly necessary, even for discerning audiences. Something that many people are unaware of is that even for classical music, it’s standard practice to do multiple takes on a given piece and the stitch together the best parts in editing. However, I think I speak for a lot of fans when I say live recordings are just as good if not better than these Frankenstein recordings, so why bother going to all that trouble?
  - ghaff 3y ago
    A lot of design work is like that. I'm willing to believe we sometimes notice things at a subconscious level but do we actually benefit from the 10 million (or whatever) fonts in existence or from people agonizing for days over the most subtle difference in colors you'll be viewing on a non-color corrected monitor.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  Often there is a choice between not showing a thing happen on screen because it wouldn't be practical/economical, or using VFX. Now suppose for instance you're making a disaster movie about a tsunami hitting NYC; your options are doing it with scale models (which will look fake or limit you to very quick shots of the disaster), doing it with computers, or not making the movie at all. That sort of effect for that sort of movie isn't really negotiable. But when the effect isn't critical to the movie and not having the effect was a perfectly valid choice? Like for instance, a character throws a cigar and the director thinks it would be cool to have the camera follow and spin around the cigar as it's flying through the air. Maybe you could do that for real with a sophisticated robot arm holding the camera, but that's expensive. In a previous era, the director would forget about that idea, it wouldn't get into the movie and nobody would care that it wasn't in the movie. But now that computer imagery is cheap and abundant, a director can have that gratuitous effect. And if it doesn't look like crap when the movie is released, it will almost certainly look like crap a few years later. The movie would have been better off without the effect in the first place. But because VFX is so cheap, it is now used for nonsense like this all the time and it makes movies worse on the whole. One of the first movies I noticed this in was Fight Club. At the start of the movie when the MC is in the office, there's a long scene of the camera flying in between garbage in a garbage can. It's all CGI; there would have been no way to get a real camera flying around in between empty cans and donuts wrappers. It's an impossible shot to do for real, but they could do it with CGI. It also looks like crap, completely fake. I saw this movie in theaters and it looked fake then, and even worse now. In an era before CGI, the director could have settled on having a macro camera pan across a pile of trash without flying and twisting around inside of the trash. A real camera filming real trash. It would not have been as dynamic, but it would look real and continue to look real forever. Basically, the cheapness of VFX seems to blind many directors to cases in which less-is-more. Now we have more-is-more movies packed to the brim with every gratuitous effect anybody can think of and it all ages like milk.
pixelpoet 3y ago
There's a lot of grieving on r/vfx, along with some posts with insider infos about sexual harassment getting deleted: https://old.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/uwwx82/anyone_read_that_dneg_reddit_post/ https://old.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/uwwx82/anyone_read_tha... Some more stuff from vfx subreddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/14jyllh/from_3_potential_job_offers_to_all_of_them_on_hold/ https://old.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/14jyllh/from_3_potenti... https://old.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/13zf3hd/vfx_a_little_rant/ https://old.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/13zf3hd/vfx_a_little_r... https://old.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/144mv2b/more_studio_craziness_in_mayjune_vancouver/ 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 :(
- kneebonian 3y ago
  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.
  - civilitty 3y ago
    Except that awful season of Battlestar Galactica where Starbuck comes back from the dead as an angel. Get ready for some truly terrible scripted television acted out by the catering crews.
    - LanceH 3y ago
      You know it will be chatgpt heavy scripting.
    - mirashii 3y ago
      Given that Ronald Moore has driven shows he’s worked on to similar absurd and horrid endings, like the similar religious subplot woven into the last season of DS9, I think we have a better culprit for the terrible last season of BSG.
SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
Paid by the word. TLDR; The industry is desperate for people and there is a lot of work to do. Some people work more than 40hr/week and some people don’t.
- zodester 3y ago
  What I don't understand is why the VFX industry doesn't follow market dynamics and pay the artists what they are worth given the talent shortage. Or maybe they are and that story isn't getting told?
  - snerbles 3y ago
    There are market dynamics. It's like game devs and pilots - a cool job lots of kids wanted to do growing up, so there's a glut of new talent eager to be used up and burned out for pennies.
    - 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y ago
      So glad EA games didn't hire me. Web devs seem to do alright.
      - npteljes 3y ago
        I share the sentiment. It was my wife's (then girlfriend's) explicit wish that I don't chase my passions in such an environment, and I'm really grateful for that after the years.
        ghaff 3y ago
        It's probably also the case that (not so well-paying) passion jobs become less interesting when they're your full-time, perhaps long hours, job and you don't really control what you work on. I was pretty passionate about photography once upon a time but I realized (correctly) that I'd probably end up doing photography for some small-time newspaper (when those still existed), some organization's public relations, or commercial photography--and not Life Magazine.
zgluck 3y ago
There was a very similar large thread (239 comments) last August: Hollywood’s visual effects crisis (defector.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32421538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32421538
- civilitty 3y ago
  > The elephant in the room here is that VFX, unlike many other film professions, isn’t properly unionised. That’s really all that needs to be said.
  - zgluck 3y ago
    There were other nuanced takes towards the bottom. For example, the one written by olivertaylor seemed insightful to me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32461613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32461613 (excerpt) 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! …
    - civilitty 3y ago
      > 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. Says the former manager of a VHX house who now negotiates with studios… he’d literally be one of the people responsible for this situation. It’s a shortage of employers willing to pay workers. Thats why they cant get enough artists
themerone 3y ago
Watch "Life After Pi" on YouTube. It is a documentary short about the vfx studio Rhythm&Hues which went bankrupt two weeks before winning an academy award.
- stavros 3y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lcB9u-9mVE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lcB9u-9mVE
doctorpangloss 3y ago
What's really crazy is maybe another 10 years from now, the computer will have aced video generation from moving 3D blocks and segment maps.
- CyberDildonics 3y ago
  Anyone can sell the future. moving 3D blocks and segment maps What does this mean exactly? Do you know?
  - zzzzzzzza 3y ago
    you draw some blobs in a 2 or 3 dimensional space and label them and tell the AI to animate a scene with e.g. a pirate talking to his parrot. It sticks the things in the indicated spaces.
sashank_1509 3y ago
I’m a bit curious how are conditions this bad. 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
- cubefox 3y ago
  The requirements grow with the capability of the tools. VFX getting better in the last decades didn't make the crunch less.
  - olivertaylor 3y ago
    Exactly. Is that a basic economic principle? I think it’s called the efficiency paradox.
    - cubefox 3y ago
      Wikipedia calls it Jevons paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
      - olivertaylor 3y ago
        Thanks!
- CyberDildonics 3y ago
  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.
Dowwie 3y ago
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/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15095920/ Williams did not receive credit, nor benefit financially.
- CyberDildonics 3y ago
  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.
- kobalsky 3y ago
  that's a wild statement. did he release software on the public domain those movies used?
efitz 3y ago
[flagged]
- thesuitonym 3y ago
  You could get rid of "in Hollywood" and this sentence is still accurate.
  - efitz 3y ago
    I don’t really think this is a problem everywhere in all industries. I think that there is something inherently corrupt about the business culture in the entertainment industry that attracts an abnormally high concentration of psychopaths and sociopaths.
  - next_xibalba 3y ago
    Tell that to all the millionaires in devs and investment bankers in SV and Wallstreet who aren’t unionized.
    - bannedbybros 3y ago
      [dead]
    - sergent_moon 3y ago
      You don't have to unionize if you're doing the fucking.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      The reality is they are actually not as well paid as they think they are. If your employer can afford to pay you $300k or more and still bring in billions in profit, you are generating a whole lot of profit that does nothing but go to the top to pay for another yacht. Being better paid than the lowest of people doesn't make you well compensated. People need to stop making this a rat race and considering pay only by who they make more than.
  - adql 3y ago
mminer237 3y ago
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.
- riotnrrd 3y ago
  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.
  - wanderingmoose 3y ago
    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.
    - riotnrrd 3y ago
      I worked on tools for artists and you're totally right. The fast iteration was so great; it felt more like good ol' fashioned stay-up-all-night hacking for the joy of it than anything else I've ever done professionally.
- Auracle 3y ago
  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.
- hondo77 3y ago
  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.
JKCalhoun 3y ago
"Sonic", "She-Hulk", "Cats", "Avatar".... 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.
- earthboundkid 3y ago
  Avatar is a relatively new franchise and there are only two movies in the series.
  - _0ffh 3y ago
    I heard it's one movie, once in the jungle and once in the ocean.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  She Hulk, amusingly, has many meta jokes about the difficulty of maintaining a straightforward legal comedy narrative with low visual spectacle.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    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.
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      Not in general. In the context of modern tv, particularly on the marvel side. The finale is she hulk complaining to marvel / Disney that the show was becoming a heap of generic spectacle garbage with a big superhero fight even though the premise of the show was light legal comedy. It’s a good observation. Marvel has flubbed the landing on almost every tv series even if the original premises and pilots were good. I don’t think they executed on the bit very well, but props for trying I guess. Edit: I don’t agree with it being better with a green woman though. It did benefit a lot from it clearly being the same actress in both forms. There’s a time and a place for practical effects. That wasn’t it.
bmarquez 3y ago
> 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.
- edvinbesic 3y ago
  Feels like working in advertising as well, granted it’s been a decade for me but I imagine the “creative” ego trip is still as alive as ever.
- diob 3y ago
  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.
  - nunez 3y ago
    see also: investment banking, Big Law, Medicine (with bigger paychecks)
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Or they have an understanding that they're being hazed (for lack of a better term) but if they make partner/finish residency they have a not necessarily cushy life but are, as you say, going to be well-paid and have a decent professional life if they like the work.
    - gammarator 3y ago
      Academia! (with much smaller paychecks, but occasionally tenure)
  - 3y ago
samdunham 3y ago
So the general consensus from the comments appears to be that there are far more people wanting these jobs than there are jobs available. So the solution should be to discourage people from entering this profession. It's supply and demand. And currently, that balances toward the studios. Weed out the excess supply and the studios will need to pay more to the remaining workers. As for the people that can't imagine doing something else? Welcome to the real world where lots and lots of people do lots and lots of jobs they don't love. At a certain point, you have to give up on the dream job to pay the bills.
alexalx666 3y ago
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
JohnFen 3y ago
I suspect that many here will disagree with me on this, but CGI has become so irritating to me -- right in the middle of the uncanny valley -- that it is one of the reasons why I've tended to avoid modern movies. Watching that stuff is like the visual equivalent of hearing fingernails on a chalkboard. (I know that not all CGI is that way, and I see quite a lot without knowing it's CGI, but most movies have at least some bad CGI in them too). Could this stuff be the reason why?
boppo1 3y ago
Hmm maybe pursuing a Technical Artist role isn't such a good idea after all.
d2049 3y ago
I guess there's no unions for VFX work? They're meant to prevent companies from making unreasonable demands of workers, that are described many times in the article.
lastdong 3y ago
Strong Unions desperately needed to help bring in fair regulations into law.

184 points by CharlesW 3y ago

> Now, not only were VFX houses responsible for conjuring vast fictional cities, bustling crowds of tens of thousands, and cascading waterfalls, but they would also spend months fixing mistakes: digitally erasing visible wig lines in period dramas, inserting absent props, snipping away errant strands of hair, tucking in double chins. Take with a pinch of salt because I don't work in the industry, but I'm not convinced this "VFX for everything" approach is cheaper or results in better films. I still think a lot of old films blow the modern counterparts out of the water. The very fact that they had to use practical effects and physical film was expensive meant you couldn't just shoot unlimited takes without burning through money (unless you were Kubrick who was notorious for doing takes from every angle). The whole "fix it in post" mentality leads to sloppy, rushed work and a lack of thinking and commitment on behalf of the director and producing team. See here[1]: > Even after shots are exhaustively delivered, Marvel is allegedly "infamous" for requesting "tons of different variations" until one earns the green light. and even worse: > We've literally made up entire third acts of a film, a month before release, because the director didn't know what they wanted," one source said about Marvel in general. You would never have had this back in the day. You planned out your big set piece in advance and you shot it, and you better get it fucking right because your head was on the chopping block if you didn't. Instead, the directors and producers are now offloading their responsibility to get things right on to the VFX artists. Maybe the demands of HD and 4K means that such work is necessary compared to back in the old days because stuff like wig lines and errant hairs wouldn't be visible due to the resolution. But some of me wonders if it is overproduction, which I think a lot of contemporary music nowadays also suffers from. Another evil is film companies refusing to create a "everything-in-one-place" content model like the music industry has done with Spotify, with the end result being an endless churn of content in an attempt to justify the subscription over their rivals. I imagine this is a contributing factor to the rushed "fix it in post" mentality but I can't see why film would be any different to any other industry - where taking your time to get it right the first time ends up being faster over the long run. [1] https://www.cnet.com/culture/entertainment/marvels-vfx-artists-are-suffering-now-theyre-speaking-out/ https://www.cnet.com/culture/entertainment/marvels-vfx-artis...

slaymaker1907 3y ago
I think it’s kind of natural for artists to demand higher standards than is truly necessary, even for discerning audiences. Something that many people are unaware of is that even for classical music, it’s standard practice to do multiple takes on a given piece and the stitch together the best parts in editing. However, I think I speak for a lot of fans when I say live recordings are just as good if not better than these Frankenstein recordings, so why bother going to all that trouble?
- ghaff 3y ago
  A lot of design work is like that. I'm willing to believe we sometimes notice things at a subconscious level but do we actually benefit from the 10 million (or whatever) fonts in existence or from people agonizing for days over the most subtle difference in colors you'll be viewing on a non-color corrected monitor.
mcpackieh 3y ago
Often there is a choice between not showing a thing happen on screen because it wouldn't be practical/economical, or using VFX. Now suppose for instance you're making a disaster movie about a tsunami hitting NYC; your options are doing it with scale models (which will look fake or limit you to very quick shots of the disaster), doing it with computers, or not making the movie at all. That sort of effect for that sort of movie isn't really negotiable. But when the effect isn't critical to the movie and not having the effect was a perfectly valid choice? Like for instance, a character throws a cigar and the director thinks it would be cool to have the camera follow and spin around the cigar as it's flying through the air. Maybe you could do that for real with a sophisticated robot arm holding the camera, but that's expensive. In a previous era, the director would forget about that idea, it wouldn't get into the movie and nobody would care that it wasn't in the movie. But now that computer imagery is cheap and abundant, a director can have that gratuitous effect. And if it doesn't look like crap when the movie is released, it will almost certainly look like crap a few years later. The movie would have been better off without the effect in the first place. But because VFX is so cheap, it is now used for nonsense like this all the time and it makes movies worse on the whole. One of the first movies I noticed this in was Fight Club. At the start of the movie when the MC is in the office, there's a long scene of the camera flying in between garbage in a garbage can. It's all CGI; there would have been no way to get a real camera flying around in between empty cans and donuts wrappers. It's an impossible shot to do for real, but they could do it with CGI. It also looks like crap, completely fake. I saw this movie in theaters and it looked fake then, and even worse now. In an era before CGI, the director could have settled on having a macro camera pan across a pile of trash without flying and twisting around inside of the trash. A real camera filming real trash. It would not have been as dynamic, but it would look real and continue to look real forever. Basically, the cheapness of VFX seems to blind many directors to cases in which less-is-more. Now we have more-is-more movies packed to the brim with every gratuitous effect anybody can think of and it all ages like milk.

pixelpoet 3y ago

There's a lot of grieving on r/vfx, along with some posts with insider infos about sexual harassment getting deleted: https://old.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/uwwx82/anyone_read_that_dneg_reddit_post/ https://old.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/uwwx82/anyone_read_tha... Some more stuff from vfx subreddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/14jyllh/from_3_potential_job_offers_to_all_of_them_on_hold/ https://old.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/14jyllh/from_3_potenti... https://old.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/13zf3hd/vfx_a_little_rant/ https://old.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/13zf3hd/vfx_a_little_r... https://old.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/144mv2b/more_studio_craziness_in_mayjune_vancouver/ 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 :(

kneebonian 3y ago
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.
- civilitty 3y ago
  Except that awful season of Battlestar Galactica where Starbuck comes back from the dead as an angel. Get ready for some truly terrible scripted television acted out by the catering crews.
  - LanceH 3y ago
    You know it will be chatgpt heavy scripting.
  - mirashii 3y ago
    Given that Ronald Moore has driven shows he’s worked on to similar absurd and horrid endings, like the similar religious subplot woven into the last season of DS9, I think we have a better culprit for the terrible last season of BSG.

SV_BubbleTime 3y ago

Paid by the word. TLDR; The industry is desperate for people and there is a lot of work to do. Some people work more than 40hr/week and some people don’t.

zodester 3y ago
What I don't understand is why the VFX industry doesn't follow market dynamics and pay the artists what they are worth given the talent shortage. Or maybe they are and that story isn't getting told?
- snerbles 3y ago
  There are market dynamics. It's like game devs and pilots - a cool job lots of kids wanted to do growing up, so there's a glut of new talent eager to be used up and burned out for pennies.
  - 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y ago
    So glad EA games didn't hire me. Web devs seem to do alright.
    - npteljes 3y ago
      I share the sentiment. It was my wife's (then girlfriend's) explicit wish that I don't chase my passions in such an environment, and I'm really grateful for that after the years.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        It's probably also the case that (not so well-paying) passion jobs become less interesting when they're your full-time, perhaps long hours, job and you don't really control what you work on. I was pretty passionate about photography once upon a time but I realized (correctly) that I'd probably end up doing photography for some small-time newspaper (when those still existed), some organization's public relations, or commercial photography--and not Life Magazine.

zgluck 3y ago

There was a very similar large thread (239 comments) last August: Hollywood’s visual effects crisis (defector.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32421538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32421538

civilitty 3y ago
> The elephant in the room here is that VFX, unlike many other film professions, isn’t properly unionised. That’s really all that needs to be said.
- zgluck 3y ago
  There were other nuanced takes towards the bottom. For example, the one written by olivertaylor seemed insightful to me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32461613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32461613 (excerpt) 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! …
  - civilitty 3y ago
    > 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. Says the former manager of a VHX house who now negotiates with studios… he’d literally be one of the people responsible for this situation. It’s a shortage of employers willing to pay workers. Thats why they cant get enough artists

themerone 3y ago

Watch "Life After Pi" on YouTube. It is a documentary short about the vfx studio Rhythm&Hues which went bankrupt two weeks before winning an academy award.

stavros 3y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lcB9u-9mVE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lcB9u-9mVE

doctorpangloss 3y ago

What's really crazy is maybe another 10 years from now, the computer will have aced video generation from moving 3D blocks and segment maps.

CyberDildonics 3y ago
Anyone can sell the future. moving 3D blocks and segment maps What does this mean exactly? Do you know?
- zzzzzzzza 3y ago
  you draw some blobs in a 2 or 3 dimensional space and label them and tell the AI to animate a scene with e.g. a pirate talking to his parrot. It sticks the things in the indicated spaces.

sashank_1509 3y ago

I’m a bit curious how are conditions this bad. 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

cubefox 3y ago
The requirements grow with the capability of the tools. VFX getting better in the last decades didn't make the crunch less.
- olivertaylor 3y ago
  Exactly. Is that a basic economic principle? I think it’s called the efficiency paradox.
  - cubefox 3y ago
    Wikipedia calls it Jevons paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
    - olivertaylor 3y ago
      Thanks!
CyberDildonics 3y ago
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.

Dowwie 3y ago

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/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15095920/ Williams did not receive credit, nor benefit financially.

CyberDildonics 3y ago
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.
kobalsky 3y ago
that's a wild statement. did he release software on the public domain those movies used?

efitz 3y ago

[flagged]

thesuitonym 3y ago
You could get rid of "in Hollywood" and this sentence is still accurate.
- efitz 3y ago
  I don’t really think this is a problem everywhere in all industries. I think that there is something inherently corrupt about the business culture in the entertainment industry that attracts an abnormally high concentration of psychopaths and sociopaths.
- next_xibalba 3y ago
  Tell that to all the millionaires in devs and investment bankers in SV and Wallstreet who aren’t unionized.
  - bannedbybros 3y ago
    [dead]
  - sergent_moon 3y ago
    You don't have to unionize if you're doing the fucking.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    The reality is they are actually not as well paid as they think they are. If your employer can afford to pay you $300k or more and still bring in billions in profit, you are generating a whole lot of profit that does nothing but go to the top to pay for another yacht. Being better paid than the lowest of people doesn't make you well compensated. People need to stop making this a rat race and considering pay only by who they make more than.
- adql 3y ago

mminer237 3y ago

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.

riotnrrd 3y ago
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.
- wanderingmoose 3y ago
  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.
  - riotnrrd 3y ago
    I worked on tools for artists and you're totally right. The fast iteration was so great; it felt more like good ol' fashioned stay-up-all-night hacking for the joy of it than anything else I've ever done professionally.
Auracle 3y ago
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.
hondo77 3y ago
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.

JKCalhoun 3y ago

"Sonic", "She-Hulk", "Cats", "Avatar".... 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.

earthboundkid 3y ago
Avatar is a relatively new franchise and there are only two movies in the series.
- _0ffh 3y ago
  I heard it's one movie, once in the jungle and once in the ocean.
jncfhnb 3y ago
She Hulk, amusingly, has many meta jokes about the difficulty of maintaining a straightforward legal comedy narrative with low visual spectacle.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  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.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    Not in general. In the context of modern tv, particularly on the marvel side. The finale is she hulk complaining to marvel / Disney that the show was becoming a heap of generic spectacle garbage with a big superhero fight even though the premise of the show was light legal comedy. It’s a good observation. Marvel has flubbed the landing on almost every tv series even if the original premises and pilots were good. I don’t think they executed on the bit very well, but props for trying I guess. Edit: I don’t agree with it being better with a green woman though. It did benefit a lot from it clearly being the same actress in both forms. There’s a time and a place for practical effects. That wasn’t it.

bmarquez 3y ago

> 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.

edvinbesic 3y ago
Feels like working in advertising as well, granted it’s been a decade for me but I imagine the “creative” ego trip is still as alive as ever.
diob 3y ago
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.
- nunez 3y ago
  see also: investment banking, Big Law, Medicine (with bigger paychecks)
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Or they have an understanding that they're being hazed (for lack of a better term) but if they make partner/finish residency they have a not necessarily cushy life but are, as you say, going to be well-paid and have a decent professional life if they like the work.
  - gammarator 3y ago
    Academia! (with much smaller paychecks, but occasionally tenure)
- 3y ago

samdunham 3y ago

So the general consensus from the comments appears to be that there are far more people wanting these jobs than there are jobs available. So the solution should be to discourage people from entering this profession. It's supply and demand. And currently, that balances toward the studios. Weed out the excess supply and the studios will need to pay more to the remaining workers. As for the people that can't imagine doing something else? Welcome to the real world where lots and lots of people do lots and lots of jobs they don't love. At a certain point, you have to give up on the dream job to pay the bills.

alexalx666 3y ago

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

JohnFen 3y ago

I suspect that many here will disagree with me on this, but CGI has become so irritating to me -- right in the middle of the uncanny valley -- that it is one of the reasons why I've tended to avoid modern movies. Watching that stuff is like the visual equivalent of hearing fingernails on a chalkboard. (I know that not all CGI is that way, and I see quite a lot without knowing it's CGI, but most movies have at least some bad CGI in them too). Could this stuff be the reason why?

boppo1 3y ago

Hmm maybe pursuing a Technical Artist role isn't such a good idea after all.

d2049 3y ago

I guess there's no unions for VFX work? They're meant to prevent companies from making unreasonable demands of workers, that are described many times in the article.

lastdong 3y ago

Strong Unions desperately needed to help bring in fair regulations into law.