Category: ves
What if China no longer needs Hollywood?
www.cnn.com/2021/01/28/media/china-box-office-coronavirus/index.html
“In 2020, China overtook the United States to become the top movie market in the world. The country, perennially the second-largest movie market, brought in $3.1 billion at the box office in 2020, according to Comscore (SCOR) — nearly $1 billion more than the United States did last year.
“If China doesn’t need US movies, Hollywood studios will have to dramatically reduce their spending on big budget blockbusters,” Aynne Kokas, the author of “Hollywood Made in China,” told CNN Business. “The current budgets are unsustainable without access to the China market. That could fundamentally change the model of the US film industry.”
“Regardless of what happens with Covid, we have at a minimum entered a world where the Chinese and US box offices are equally important,”
So where do Hollywood and China go from here? That question, like so many in the film industry right now, has no easy answer. Yet whatever the future of the film industry is, it’s likely to be one where Hollywood and China remain the two major pillars holding up the global box office.
Disney Closing Blue Sky Studios
deadline.com/2021/02/blue-sky-studios-closing-disney-ice-age-franchise-animation-1234690310/
Blue Sky’s top grossing animation features at the worldwide box office were Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (’09, $886M), Ice Age: Continental Drift (’12, $877M), Icen Age: Meltdown (’06, $660M), Rio 2 (’14, $500M), Rio (’11, $484M), Ice Age: Collusion Course (’16, $408M), Ice Age (02, $383M), Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! (’08, $297M), Ferdinand (’17, $296M), Epic (’13, $268M), Robots (’05, $260M), and The Peanuts Movie (’15, $246M) and Spies in Disguise (’19, $171M).
20 New Series Coming to Disney+ in ‘Next Few Years’
www.awn.com/news/20-new-series-coming-disney-next-few-years
“In yesterday’s big Disney investor meeting, Lucasfilm’s Kathleen Kennedy revealed plans for 10 Star Wars and 10 Marvel series to stream on Disney+ in the next few years. PHEW! That’s 20 series in less than five years, which is ambitious to say the least.”
Right now, hit songwriters are driving Ubers
www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-55232418
Fiona Bevan, who has written songs for One Direction, Steps and Lewis Capaldi, said many writers were struggling because of the way streaming services pay royalties.
Bevan revealed she had earned just £100 for co-writing a track on Kylie Minogue’s number one album, Disco.
“The most successful songwriters in the world can’t pay their rent,” she added.
Facebook joins the Blender Development Fund
www.blender.org/press/facebook-joins-the-blender-development-fund/
Facebook will join the Blender Foundation’s Development Fund as a Corporate Patron as of Q4, 2020.
Epic Games Invests in SideFX
www.sidefx.com/community/epic-games-invests-in-sidefx/
Epic Games is now a minority investor in SideFX
Big tech snags Hollywood talent to pursue enhanced reality
https://www.cultofmac.com/726927/apple-among-the-tech-giants-snapping-up-vfx-experts-to-work-on-ar/
Silicon Valley’s biggest companies are snapping up the people and technology behind some of Hollywood’s blockbusters in an effort to improve their augmented- and virtual-reality offerings.
“It’s harder to make as much money working in visual effects,” said Paul Debevec, a veteran of the visual-effects industry who is now a professor at the University of Southern California. About 4½ years ago Google hired Mr. Debevec, an award-winning pioneer in the creation of convincing digital humans, to help the company advance extended reality.
Working in visual effects in film and TV can mean long, unpredictable hours, limited compensation, poor job security and paltry benefits—many call it the “cool tax” one pays for the pleasure of working in Hollywood.
Framestore acquires Company 3 / Method
In a press release, Framestore said the acquisition and resulting scaled-up business “represents the next phase of the industry, uniquely uniting all aspects that support the making of entertainment and communications content – from concepts, through to digital and post-production.”
www.broadcastnow.co.uk/tech/framestore-acquires-company-3-/-method/5154656.article
Titmouse Vancouver Join IATSE To Become First Canadian Animation Studio To Unionize
Animators at Titmouse Vancouver have unionized, voting 98% to 2% to join the Animation Guild, IATSE Local 938. IATSE says it’s the first animation studio in Canada to become unionized.
The studio’s many animated titles include Black Panther for BET, Star Trek: Lower Decks for CBS All Access, and Star Wars: Galaxy of Adventures for Disney XD.
Animation/VFX/Game Industry JOB POSTINGS by Chris Mayne
Chris is now using Google’s Looker Studio (this may better help those that aren’t able to use the filters on the spreadsheet):
https://lookerstudio.google.com/u/0/reporting/2f39b56e-7393-4aa2-9fd5-bf8bf615c95f/page/5koHB
Older format: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eR2oAXOuflr8CZeGoz3JTrsgNj3KuefbdXJOmNtjEVM/edit#gid=0
For any studios that would like to add positions to this, please feel free to use the following form:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeXziY3GQ8N7bxM-GxwDoZ7AimguHru0105PLVQtNYygswIlw/viewform
The True Costs of Working from Home
www.awn.com/blog/true-costs-working-home
“…what are the long-term negative ramifications of working from home…
As entertainment industry freelancers, we know how to deal with these extra costs. When we supply our own equipment for a job, we charge a “kit fee.” A Kit Fee is billed as a daily expense, on top of our working fee, to cover our hard and soft costs such as supplies, software and computers.”
Netflix Opens Its First Animation Studio in Burbank
www.awn.com/news/netflix-signs-huge-animation-studio-lease-burbank
Streaming giant takes on over 170,000 square feet to house its first dedicated animation studio.
Microsoft Acquires ‘Fallout’ and ‘Elder Scrolls’ Publisher Bethesda Softworks
www.awn.com/news/microsoft-acquires-fallout-and-elder-scrolls-publisher-bethesda-softworks
Microsoft this morning has just announced plans to acquire ZeniMax Media, the parent company of Bethesda Softworks, one of the largest, privately held game developers and publishers in the world.
The game studio, which publishes a number of best-selling gaming franchises including The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, brings to Microsoft and its Xbox platform an impressive portfolio of games, technology, talent, as well as a track record of blockbuster commercial success.
NVIDIA to Acquire Arm for $40 Billion
The combination brings together NVIDIA’s leading AI computing platform with Arm’s vast ecosystem to create the premier computing company for the age of artificial intelligence, accelerating innovation while expanding into large, high-growth markets.
Netflix boss: Remote working has negative effects
www.bbc.com/news/technology-54063648
Netflix’s chairman has said working from home has no positive effects and makes debating ideas harder.
But Reed Hastings, who founded the platform, also said its 8,600 employees would not have to return to the office until most of them had received an approved coronavirus vaccine.
And he predicted most people would continue to work from home on one day a week even after the pandemic was over.
Kevin Hale from Y Combinator – How to Evaluate Startup Ideas
Y Combinator provides seed funding for startups. Seed funding is the earliest stage of venture funding. It pays your expenses while you’re getting started.
Proposing to solve PROBLEMS which are :
– Popular
– Growing
– Urgent
– Expensive
– Mandatory
– Frequent
Using a SOLUTION :
– Which is dedicated to the solve a known Problem
Making sure you have a unique INSIGHT :
– you are a Founder
– you have an ever growing Market
– you have a special Product
– you are able to grow and natively sustain your customer Acquisition
– you have a sustainable Monopoly
All these using a winning formula :
BEHAVIOR = MOTIVATION + ABILITY + TRIGGER
DC Comic and Universe Shut Down in Massive Lay Offs at Warner Bros
www.escapistmagazine.com/v2/dc-universe-possibly-shutting-down-as-warner-focuses-on-hbo-max/
news.toyark.com/2020/08/10/dc-direct-shut-down-in-massive-lay-offs-at-warner-bros-398330
DC Universe, DC’s streaming and digital comics platform, may be shutting down as WarnerMedia shifts all of its streaming efforts to HBO Max and perhaps looks for a new digital strategy for the comic books.
AnimationXpress.com interviews Daniele Tosti for TheCgCareer.com channel
You’ve been in the VFX Industry for over a decade. Tell us about your journey.
It all started with my older brother giving me a Commodore64 personal computer as a gift back in the late 80′. I realised then I could create something directly from my imagination using this new digital media format. And, eventually, make a living in the process.
That led me to start my professional career in 1990. From live TV to games to animation. All the way to live action VFX in the recent years.
I really never stopped to crave to create art since those early days. And I have been incredibly fortunate to work with really great talent along the way, which made my journey so much more effective.
What inspired you to pursue VFX as a career?
An incredible combination of opportunities, really. The opportunity to express myself as an artist and earn money in the process. The opportunity to learn about how the world around us works and how best solve problems. The opportunity to share my time with other talented people with similar passions. The opportunity to grow and adapt to new challenges. The opportunity to develop something that was never done before. A perfect storm of creativity that fed my continuous curiosity about life and genuinely drove my inspiration.
Tell us about the projects you’ve particularly enjoyed working on in your career
I quite enjoyed working on live TV projects, as the combination of tight deadlines and high quality was quite an incredible learning platform as a professional artist. But working on large, high end live action feature projects was really where I learnt most of my trade. And gave me the most satisfaction.
Every film I worked on had some memorable experiences. Right from Avatar to Iron Man 3 to Jungle Book to The Planet of the Apes to The Hobbits to name a few.
But above all, the technical challenges and the high quality we reached in each and every of the projects that I worked on, the best memories come from working with amazing and skilled artists, from a variety of disciplines. As those were my true mentors and became my best friends.
Post Production, Animation, VFX, Motion Graphics, Video Editing …
What are some technologies and trends that you think are emerging in the VFX Industry?
In the last few years there has definitely been a bias from some major studios to make VFX a commodity. In the more negative sense of the word. When any product reaches a level of quality that attracts a mass of consumers and reaches a plateau of opportunities, large corporation tend to respond with maximising its sale values by leveraging marketing schemes and deliverable more than the core values of the product itself. This is often a commoditisation approach that tends to empower agents who are not necessarily knowledgeable of a product’s cycles, and in that process, lowering the quality of the product itself for the sake of profits. It is a pretty common event in modern society and it applies to any brand name, not just VFX.
One challenge with VFX’s technology and artistry is that it relies on the effectiveness of artists and visionaries for the most. And limiting the authority, ownerships and perspective of such a crowd has definitely directly impacted the overall quality of the last decade of productions, both technically and artistically. There are very few and apart creative forces who have been able to deliver project that one could identify as a truly creative breakthrough. While the majority of productions seem to have suffered from some of these commoditisation patterns.
The other bigger challenge with this current trend is that VFX, due to various, historical business arrangements, is often relying on unbalanced resources as well as very small and feeble economic cycles and margins. Which make the entire industry extremely susceptible to marketing failures and to unstable leadership. As a few recent bankruptcies have demonstrated.
It is taking some reasonable time for the VFX crowd to acknowledge these trends and learn to be profitable, as the majority has never been educated on fair business practices.
But. Thankfully, the VFX circle is also a crowd of extremely adaptable and talented individuals, who are quite capable at resolving issues, finding alternatives and leveraging their passion. Which I believe is one of the drives behind the current evolution in the use of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, virtual production, real time rendering, and so on.
There is still a long path ahead of us but I hope we are all learning ways to make our passion speaks in profitable ways for everyone.
It is also highly likely that, in a near future, larger software and hardware corporation, thanks to their more profitable business practices, large development teams and better understanding of marketing, will eventually take over a lot of the cycles that the current production houses currently run. And in that process allow creative studios to focus back on VFX artistry.
What effect has the pandemics-induced lockdown had on the industry?
It is still early to say. I fear that if live action production does not start soon, we may see some of the economic challenges I mention above. At both studio and artists’ scale. There is definitely a push from production houses to make large distribution clients understand the fragility of the moment, especially in relation to payment cycles and economic support. Thus, there is still a fair risk that the few studios which adopted a more commoditised view to production will make their artists pay some price for their choices.
But, any challenge brings opportunities. For example, there is finally some recognition into a momentum to rely on work-from-home as a feasible solution to a lot of the current office production’s limitations and general artistry restrictions. Which, while there is no win-win in this pandemic, could be a silver lining.
What would you say to the budding artists who wish to become CG artists or VFX professionals?
Follow your passion but treat this career as any other business.
Learn to be adaptable. Find a true balance between professional and family life. Carefully plan your future. And watch our channel to learn more about all these.
What inspired you to create a channel for aspiring artists?
As many fellow and respected artists, I love this industry, but I had to understand a lot of business practices at my own expenses.
You can learn tools, cycles and software from books and schools. But production life tends to drive its own rhythms and there are fewer opportunities to absorb those.
Along my career I had some challenges finding professional willing to share their time to invest into me. But I was still extremely fortunate to find other mentors who helped me to be economically and professionally successful in this business. I owe a lot to these people. I promised myself I would exchange that favour by helping other artists, myself.
What can students expect to learn from your channel?
I am excited to have the opportunity to fill some of the voids that the current education systems and industry may have. This by helping new artists with true life stories by some of the most accomplished and successful talents I met during my career. We will talk about technology trends as much as our life experiences as artists. Discussing career advises. Trying to look into the future of the industry. And suggesting professional tips. The aim through this mentor-ship is to inspire new generations to focus on what is more important for the VFX industry. Take responsibilities for their art and passions as much as their families.
And, in the process, to feel empowered to materialise from their imagination more and more of those creative, awe inspiring moments that this art form has gifted us with so far.
Mulan Releasing Straight To Disney+ For $30 In September
screenrant.com/mulan-movie-streaming-release-date-disney-plus-price/
“This news of Mulan skipping a theatrical-only release to debut on Disney+ and in theaters the same day is quite shocking.
Disney’s Mulan is without question the biggest film to move to a streaming release so far (with, perhaps, the exception of certain movies that were already in theaters when closures began), even if it’s a combination of streaming and theater screenings. Mulan was expected to be a big box office earner for Disney, particularly as it’s one of the first blockbusters with a predominantly Asian cast.
Although Mulan can still prove to be a financial success, it will never be known whether the movie could’ve seen massive, record-breaking success like that which Black Panther earned when it released in 2018.”
Unity3D is finally going public
www.pcgamesinsider.biz/news/71461/unity-is-finally-going-public/
techcrunch.com/2020/08/24/unitys-ipo-numbers-look-pretty-unreal/
Between calendar 2018 and 2019, Unity’s revenue rose by 42 per cent year-on-year to $541.8m. Meanwhile, the firm’s revenue for the six months ending June 30th, 2020 was $351.3m, an increase of 39 per cent. The company has clocked up net losses of $163.2m for the year ending December 31st 2019 and $54.1m for the six months concluding June 30th, 2020.
Unity reckons the market it addresses around the world is worth around $29bn, across both video games and other creative industries it works in.
Unlike Epic Games, Unity has long worked with the major platforms and gaming companies to get their engine in front of as many developers and gamers as possible. In fact, the company estimates that 53% of the top 1,000 mobile games on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store and over 50% of mobile, personal computer and console games were made with Unity.
Sony buys $250 million (1.5%) minority stake in Epic Games
The deal gives Sony a minority interest in the game development studio and publisher last estimated to be valued as high as $17 billion
www.theverge.com/2020/7/9/21318978/sony-epic-games-fortnite-investment-250-million-game-development
Ennio Morricone RIP
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ennio-morricone-dead-prolific-italian-composer-was-91-858358
Pixomondo CEO Jonny Slow fires a stark warning to the VFX business
deadline.com/2020/07/post-production-covid-catastrophe-game-of-thrones-vfx-outfit-1202976057/
“Productions shutdown is now catching up and a lack of new business is leaving companies at serious risk.
“France-based VFX giant Technicolor SA filed for Chapter 15 in U.S. bankruptcy court as the company attempted to steady the ship and restructure some of its $1.58BN debt… The Pixomondo boss thinks that the Technicolor situation is just the tip of the iceberg.
“Post-production is a bit like an airline, if you haven’t got any passengers, you burn through your cash very quickly – most companies will struggle to stay solvent for more than a couple of months.”
“He notes the scale of a company such as five-time Oscar-winning studio DNEG. “They have 6,000 employees and $300M debt. When revenues stops – and it must because nothing is being shot – they have to find quite a lot of money to keep the lights on.”
“There’s a stalemate and that’s making the potential second lockdown news so depressing. It’s fuelling cautiousness…”
“There’s a real need for cash in this part of the sector and the payment terms need to be amended accordingly.”
“Long term I am pretty positive on the outlook for VFX. If travelling is harder, and if it’s harder to do crowd scenes, and if producers can only get insurance for working inside studios, there are opportunities for VFX companies,”
Technicolor Files for Chapter 15 in US
www.awn.com/news/technicolor-files-chapter-15-us-citing-covid-19-impact
Technicolor has suffered a series of setbacks in recent months. On May 28, the company announced it had merged its Mill Film and MR. X VFX companies in response to industry changes brought about by the pandemic; operating now as MR. X, the company noted it would keep all facilities open in Toronto, Montreal, Los Angeles, Adelaide and Bangalore.
Last year in early December, MPC abruptly shut down its Vancouver facility, leaving what sources claimed was as many as 300 artists out of work.
A week later, the company and its former CEO Frederic Rose, were indicted for fraud and breach of trust by French authorities. The charges were levied as part of an ongoing investigation of their role in the bankruptcy and subsequent acquisition of Tarak Ben Ammar’s post-production group, Quinta Industries, in 2012.
The CG Career YouTube channel is live!
I am excited to officially announce the release of a new YouTube channel dedicated to help and support digital artists in the feature production business!
We will be interviewing some of the most successful senior artists and supervisors in the feature digital art business. This project with the intent of providing artists in the industry with experiences and personal suggestions that can help our careers and success in this art form.
Please, visit us for more information and latest interviews.
