Life of Pi without R&H

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refocusedmedia said:
No offense, but this response makes me think you aren't very informed about the VFX protest and surrounding issues. It has nothing to do with a "going rate", and your devaluation of these artists in your phrasing is precisely the problem at hand. Here is an excellent summation from a Reddit comment:


"Since some people here don't fully understand the situation, I will try to provide some insight.

VFX studios are having a very difficult time making profit on movies they work on, even if that movies goes on to make millions or over a billion dollars. VFX studios make 5% profit on a GOOD year, but most of the time breaking even or even losing money on a job. This in turn has a very negative effect on vfx workers working at those companies. The entire fault does not lie with movie studios or vfx studios, but both contribute to the bad state of affairs in different ways.
  1. The most noticable, is that other countries offer tax subsides that do not allow even competition. If a VFX studio in California bids on work for a set price, then a VFX studio in Vancouver can bid that very same price AND offer a 30-35% (not sure of exact figures) tax rebate on that work, but the VFX studio doesn't get that money, the movie studio does. So they (the movie studio) automatically get 30% of their VFX paid for by tax payers instead of out of their already wealthy pockets. The California VFX studio therefore cannot compete with this situation, so fair competition is impossible.
  2. Low rung jobs such as roto/paint fixes are being outsourced to China and India by movie studios because they can get the work done far cheaper there.
  3. Movie studios put vast pressure on VFX houses to lower costs AND do more work at those costs. They also put huge pressure on VFX studios to open offices in subsidized locales so they (the movie studio) can take advantage of tax breaks. Most VFX studios who refuse or can't afford to offer a subsidized location don't get the work and go out of business. However, movie studios expect the VFX studio to take care of all the costs of moving to the new country themselves. And still have the nerve to ask for cheaper labor.
  4. In addition to movie studios asking for more and cheaper work, they want it done in less time. VFX on a movie used to be 1 year long, and now they are trying to take the process down to 6 months or less. Because of this...
  5. VFX studios often have their staff put in TONS of overtime. 10-12 hour days are a norm, and during crunch time 16 hour days, heck, spending the night at the studio, is not unheard of and in fact common. These horrendous hours can last 3-6 months, 7 days a week. On top of this, several VFX companies are not paying for that overtime, because movie studios refuse to pay for the extra hours (remember they are putting on the pressure for cheaper), even though they have insane deadlines for VFX delivery.
  6. Every other movie trade except VFX has a union to prevent such gross injustices. VFX artists don't have a stable 9-5 full time job. They are just temp contract workers, jumping company to company, project to project. As such, they do not have portable benefits, as other unionized trades in filmmaking do.
  7. Artists are too afraid to speak up against these injustices because they'll just kick you out the door for causing too much trouble, because there are 100 dumb young kids who would jump at the chance to work on a Hollywood movie for peanuts. Without a union, they don't have much leverage.
  8. VFX studios are too chicken to take a stand against the movie studios, because really, they only have about 5-6 clients such as Paramount, Universal, 20th Century Fox, Sony, etc. If a VFX studio stood up to one of these companies about their unfair practices, they'd get black listed as trouble makers and never asked to work again, thus driving them out of business. Likewise, if a VFX worker complains to a supervisor about unfair hours and no overtime pay, he is similarly black listed to not be hired again on the next project.
This is just a handful of problems, but I feel the major ones. VFX artists in Hollywood are treated like s*%t. VFX artists have a huge passion and love of their skill and trade, and because of it are taken advantage of. It's time for them to stand up and just be treated like decent hard working human beings."


Some additional reading for you to read up on, should you care to:

http://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/1969o6/more_than_400_vfx_artists_protest_at_the_oscars/

http://vfxsoldier.wordpress.com/about/

http://vfxsoldier.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/an-open-letter-to-ang-lee/

http://www.latimes.com/entertainmen...naway-visual-effects-20130324,0,1842816.story

http://magazine.creativecow.net/article/vfx-at-a-crossroads

http://fxrant.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/john-parenteaus-thoughts-on-vfx-industry.html
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No offense, but this is exactly what I was responding to.

You don't start a business that wont' make a profit. No industry is around for the purpose of making sure you make money.

You start a VFX company. You need to charge X dollars to pay your rent, taxes, staff, buy equipment, and make a profit. If Hollywood is willing to pay you X dollars, you have a profitable business. If Hollywood is only willing to pay you X - a dollar, that's not a good business and you are going to go under if you start it.

Nothing you stated refutes that simple fact, and it applies to all businesses.

I would not start a customer service call center if I could not compete with a similar business in India. That would be stupid and I would lose all my money.

Basically you're complaining that there is a global market. Yep, we live in a global market. It's not going ot change. The technology that makes it possible is not going away, and trying to stop it hurts you more.

Let's say you put a tarriff on VFX to make it "fair". What do you think the country you put the tariff on will do? They will put a tariff on YOUR goods and basically you'll have a trade war on your hands. That will hurt your exports and again people will lose jobs.

China will go, oh, ok. You want to put a tariff on our VFX artists? Fine, we'll put a tariff on your Hollywood movies. People always forget tariffs are a two way street.

Would you take this deal? You go buy 100 dollars worth of lottery tickets. If you hit the lottery you owe me a percentage, but I'm not going to pay for any of the tickets. If you lose, oh well that's your money.

You think the VFX artists that worked on John Carter are going to give the Studio back their salaries? They spent a 100 mil on that movie and it was a bomb. If you want to share in the profits, you have to share in the RISK.
 
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Samuel H said:
side note: John Carter was not a bomb; it bombed in the US, but made a profit thanks to moderately good box office in the rest of the world; so, you see, the world market thing is not that bad sometimes... http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=johncarterofmars.htm
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That is a bomb. When you spend this money that means it tied up and you didn't spend it on something else that could have been a success. Spending 250 million to make 32 million Gross? HUGE bomb by Hollywood standards.

It grossed 282 Million, and cost 250 million to make. All 282 Million didn't go to the studio, the Theaters got some of that money, and estimates are over 100 million spent on advertising.
http://www.comicbookmovie.com/fansites/GraphicCity/news/?a=57373


By comparison, The Hangover Part II cost 80 million to make, grossed over 500 Million.

[url]http://10think.com/top-10-most-profitable-movies-on-2012.html
[/URL]
 
Nobody starts a business to lose money. VFX used to be profitable and it can be in some circumstances but the margins are slim. If the big studios aren't careful, they will lose the resource that is the large VFX facility, and you will stop seeing advances in the technology because nobody who is left has the money for it. It's very short sighted.

John Carter was a huge money loser. 280 mil gross means half of that for the distributor and studio to split after marketing costs. Even if the studio used in house marketing labor and distribution because they are Disney, they might have been able to see 60 million out of that. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't consider a 60 million dollar return on a 250 million dollar investment a good one. That's a loss of 190 million dollars. They are never going to make that up in video, VOD, or anything else. They gambled and lost...190 million dollars.

You want to make B movies, great, but don't spend be stupid and polish a 250 million dollar turd. How many small good films could they have made for that and made their money back?
 
I know that less than half of the box office returns get to pay back the movie's budget or create a profit. But AFAIK the general rule is that if you gross more than your budget, you'll make a profit (thanks to DVDs, VOD, TV, planes, etc). Everybody wants to be Avatar, but I think being John Carter is, well, not as bad as the press would make you think.

edit: anyway, not relevant to the thread, sorry :(
 
^ "The men and women that made The Hulk incredible, or Spiderman amazing"
great quote

About the solutions proposed, I don't think the union will achieve anything; the royalty system could be great, though
 
The union will put pressure on the VFX companies to get the trade association going. At this point it's the only way.
 
If the work of VFX can be fully offshored, then a union won't work. The reason director/actor/writer/grip/driver unions work, is because if all American (or for France - French, Germany - German etc.) directors, or actors, or writers, or grips, or drivers together withhold their services, an American production cannot function, since it's not like acting or directing or grips or drivers or writers can be off-shored. You are not going to say "well, we don't have Tom Cruise, but wait, we have Gerard Depardieu! We don't have a single American writer, but wait, we have this writer from Uganda! You can't get drivers in the U.S., but hey, we can get plenty in Congo! Won't work.

But how about VFX? If you can fully outsource - 100%, or close it - to Canada, or Russia, or China or Britain, well, when the American VFX Union says "no American VFX artists", the U.S. producer just says, "that's fine, we'll get the Brits and Canadians to do it, or the Chinese". Already a ton of that is happening. In general, there is a reason why some productions go to say, Canada.

Now, American VFX is still the most advanced in the world, but I think the rest of the world is not far behind, and can eventually catch up. That is not enough power for American VFX to wield.

The American VFX artists don't have enough power because their labor is not unique. An American actor or writer cannot be displaced by a Chinese actor or writer. An American VFX artist can - not fully today, but soon, and if push comes to shove, the producer will take the slightly worse quality offshore VFX work to save millions of $.

So, we're back to square one - we know the problem, but what is the solution?

Like so much in life, it's easy to complain, hard to find solutions. I'm sympathetic to anyone whose livelihood is at stake - but it doesn't help to merely say "poor me", because we all got our "poor me" stories and hearing more such DOES NOT HELP. What does help is finding a solution. Well, what is it?
 
The shear amount of r&d that goes into something like Life of Pi's tiger is quite staggering, the bulk of the work that's getting outsourced to India is far less skilled stuff like roto.

a good analogy would be that of how most old hand drawn/2d animation studios used to operate with all the creative stuff done in house and the more repetitive, menial work such as coloring sent oversees.
 
OldCorpse said:
If the work of VFX can be fully offshored, then a union won't work. ...
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I completely agree. All those arguments you mention are the reason I said I don't think the union will achieve anything. If you're complaining that productions are taking VFX work offshore, making USA-VFX more expensive will only make it worse (to clarify: you'll get a smaller VFX industry, charging more; maybe that's what people want, my "make it worse" is based on a guess that this is not the case).

The reason that a royalty system is different from this and could work is that it adds something new: risk-sharing. If the VFX house takes a bigger part of the risk (and making movies is a risky business), it could get a bigger share of the pie. Taken to the extreme, if some VFX houses start to produce and distribute their own films (i.e. they take all the risk), this could change the landscape in a big way.
 
The problem is, without a trade organization, the VFX companies don't have the leverage to demand residuals/profit participation. The companies have been refusing to band together and deal with the studios on their own. The studios have a trade organization in the MPAA. Artists uniting and making demands of the VFX companies will be a stick approach instead of the carrot approach that they have been using. If the artists are organized, they can make demands or threaten to stop work and miss delivery dates industry wide. This would paralyse the industry. No summer movies in theaters when promised would be a huge problem for the studios.

The artists and VFX companies have more power than they know, or have been willing to use. It's time for them to use it.

There are a finite number of artists and companies that can deliver the quality that the studios need by the dates they need it. If those folks say no, the studios will be screwed. If Life of Pi had been done by the folks who did Olympus has fallen, it would have been a dud and not won any oscars. Quality matters to audiences and critics.
 
Samuel H said:
^ "The men and women that made The Hulk incredible, or Spiderman amazing"
great quote

About the solutions proposed, I don't think the union will achieve anything; the royalty system could be great, though
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I think thats' fine if you're going to give back your salary if the movie is a bomb. If you want to share the rewards, you need to share the RISK.

Actors do this sometimes by making a deal like, I usually get 20 million a movie but I'll take 5 mill and a piece of the gross. If the movie is a dud they get nothing more, so they're risking 15 million.

What are VFX artists going to risk for a piece of the gross? If nothing, then they don't deserve any royalties. Otherwise, why not give royalties to grips, editors, colorists, electrics, the wardrobe people, the set designers, greens, etc., etc.
 
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visugeek said:
There are a finite number of artists and companies that can deliver the quality that the studios need by the dates they need it. If those folks say no, the studios will be screwed. If Life of Pi had been done by the folks who did Olympus has fallen, it would have been a dud and not won any oscars. Quality matters to audiences and critics.
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The studio doesn't have to make Life of Pi. Hangover Part II cost 80 million to make and grossed 581 million. It was not FX heavy and made a ton of money. Kung Fu Panda made bank, and it was of course animation, not FX. Bridesmaids was made with 32 million and grossed 288 million.

What can Hollywood do if the VFX goes on strike and they can't get good VFX elsewhere like India, Britain, Canada, China? Make something else that doesnt' require huge VFX studios. I think a strike would just be cutting your own throat.

And studios will just get creative rather than rely on VFX. Paranormal activity was made for 5 million dollars and grossed 202 million. Many if not most of the FX were probably practical not digital.
 
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Paranormal Activity was made for $15K.

When the studio bought it, they planned to re-shoot it with a bigger budget, but that never happened. They tested with an audience, and a lot of people left the theatre, they thought it was bombing and they'd have to re-make it completely. Then they asked and the people who had left in fact did so because they were too scared (not spooky-film fans I guess!). So they released it nearly as-is. They may have spent $5M in marketing, though :)

***

I think a VFX strike would have a huge effect. Of the highest-grossing films of 2012, nearly everything is VFX-heavy: http://boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2012
 
Samuel H said:
Paranormal Activity was made for $15K.

When the studio bought it, they planned to re-shoot it with a bigger budget, but that never happened. They tested with an audience, and a lot of people left the theatre, they thought it was bombing and they'd have to re-make it completely. Then they asked and the people who had left in fact did so because they were too scared (not spooky-film fans I guess!). So they released it nearly as-is. They may have spent $5M in marketing, though :)

***

I think a VFX strike would have a huge effect. Of the highest-grossing films of 2012, nearly everything is VFX-heavy: http://boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2012
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Then editors can strike for a piece of the gross, and colorists, and grips, electrics, wardrobe, set design, etc, etc. It's not going to happen.

Either you invest in the film, risk losing your investment and you get a piece of the gross, or you work on the film and get paid a salary, take your pick.

If the movie industry doesn't pay you what you THINK you are worth, go do something else. You can strike all day, but IMO Hollywood will just offshore or make some films with less VFX for a while. They aren't giving you a piece of the pie if you aren't risking any investment and they aren't going to pay more than market price for your services.

The best suggestion in this thread so far is if you are a VFX company and you aren't happy with the prices you're being paid by Hollywood, then produce a movie. I would think a top notch VFX company could attract a good director, script writer, actors, and get some financial backing for the right project.
 
"Maybe some of the people posting here can afford to hire VFX studios, but I think a lot of people on a forum like this have to live with what they can do in After Effects so this isn't really an issue that's going to spark a lot of interest."
Well said.

​
 
If Life of Pi didn't look like something on the s*%t demo reel of a The Dave School washout, maybe I'd have some pity.

But it does, and I don't.

Disney shot this back in what, '58, '59??
Just sayin'.
 
refocusedmedia said:
Here is a good summary to share around:

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So the argument is R&H got 100 MILLION dollars, but still went out of business, so that's the fault of the makers of Life of Pi that paid them the 100 Million? Yea, that make sense.

Again, if the guy that co-founded the Cameron VFX studio wants a piece of the 700 million that Life of Pi made, he should go out and make a movie and risk losing the capital it costs to make it. I don't see him offering to pay back the studios that spent money on VFX for John Carter.

he wants his cake, and to eat it to. he doesn't want to risk anything, but wants to share in the rewards. Pay me a salary, AND give me a piece of the gross, but I'm not going to risk a penny of my money if the thing is a huge flop and loses money. That's ridiculous.

Do we know WHY R&H is going bankrupt even though they got 100 Million? Could it be poor management?

he says there was only a 5% margin. Well 5% of 100 million is 5 million dollars. OMG, I only made 5 million dollars! Boo hoo.
 
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