Category: ves
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.
SIGGRAPH 2020 Canceled; Event Moving to Virtual Conference Format
www.awn.com/news/siggraph-2020-canceled-event-moving-virtual-conference-format
SIGGRAPH 2020 is the latest is a growing list of animation, VFX, and gaming-related events to cancel or otherwise postpone their 2020 editions, including Comic-Con, Annecy, FMX, ITFS, MIPTV, and GDC.
DNEG Asks Global Staff Earning Over $43,200usd To Take A Three-Month Pay Cut
This policy applies to all its locations, including London (where it is headquartered), L.A., Vancouver, and Montreal.
A statement put out by the Animation & Visual Effects Union (AVU), a branch of BECTU, describes DNEG’s proposal as, in some cases, a “take-it-or-leave-your-job” package imposed with “very short consultation deadlines.” Affected staff have been given two weeks to respond to the proposal; the deadline is April 30. Reductions will take effect on May 1, and the arrangement will be reviewed in three months.
The union is calling on DNEG to convincingly demonstrate to its staff that the cuts are necessary. It wants the company to give “a detailed overview of their financial position to workers before requesting cuts,” and to give staff time “to access independent advice to interpret such information so that they can understand the way the burden of this issue is being shared between staff and shareholders.”
Magic Leap reportedly laying off 1,000 employees and dropping consumer business
Bloomberg writes that in addition to laying off what amounts to half its workforce, the company will wind down its consumer-focused business, which included video games and entertainment apps.
It will focus on enterprise uses, potentially including a partnership with a large unnamed health care company
EDIT 20200522
Magic Leap raises $350 million and puts layoffs on hold
https://www.engadget.com/magic-leap-raises-350-million-puts-layoffs-on-hold-034824726.html
Abigail Disney furious on Disney furloughs
www.cnn.com/2020/04/22/business/abigail-disney-furloughs-bonus-pay-coronavirus-trnd/index.html
In a Twitter thread Tuesday, the outspoken family heiress slammed Disney’s decision to furlough theme park employees after the company paid dividends to shareholders and gave executives big bonuses.
Marvel, Lucasfilm, Pixar, Other Disney Units Hit with Furloughs
www.awn.com/news/marvel-lucasfilm-pixar-other-disney-units-hit-furloughs
“An undetermined number of employees at Disney production units including Marvel, Lucasfilm, Pixar, and Searchlight, will be furloughed as of April 19; reports noted marketing and distribution departments were hit the hardest, as the studio’s feature film release calendar has been thrown into disarray.”
“…with no clear indication of when we can restart our businesses, we’re forced to make the difficult decision to take the next step and furlough employees whose jobs aren’t necessary at this time. The furlough process will begin on April 19, and all impacted workers will remain Disney employees through the duration of the furlough period. They will receive full healthcare benefits, plus the cost of employee and company premiums will be paid by Disney, and those enrolled in Disney Aspire will have continued access to the education program. Additionally, employees with available paid time off can elect to use some or all of it at the start of the furlough period and, once furloughed, they are eligible to receive an extra $600 per week in federal compensation through the $2 trillion economic stimulus bill, as well as state unemployment insurance.”
Skydance Media Acquires Animation Madrid Unit of Ilion Studios
variety.com/2020/film/news/skydance-media-john-lassiter-ilion-studios-1234571810/
The acquisition gives animation chief John Lasseter control over all aspects of production. Skydance and Ilion, both of which are privately held, did not disclose a purchase price.
The deal will give Skydance roughly 500 employees across two continents. It comes as Lasseter is trying to transform the company into a major force in animation. That transformation has been bumpy, at times, primarily because Lasseter’s hire was controversial. Lasseter, the major creative force at Pixar and Disney Animation, was ousted from the company in 2018 amid allegations of sexual misconduct with employees.
Why Cinemas will bounce back from the Coronavirus crisis
www.bbc.com/culture/story/20200403-why-cinemas-will-bounce-back-from-the-coronavirus-crisis
“Theatres are closing around the world… No one knows when projectors will be fired up again… Chinese theatres shuttered when the virus hit. In mid-March, an attempt to tentatively start opening cinemas again after the easing of the lockdown saw distributors refuse to release new films and audiences stay at home.”
“Compounding the misery for cinema owners is the fact that film studios have responded by putting films only very recently released in cinemas online.”
“The consequence of all this is that studios may wonder why they’re sharing revenue with exhibitors if they can get a bigger cut by going straight to homes. Indeed, while cinemas are on their knees, streaming platforms are profiting.”
“A century ago, there was even the worry, as there is now, that cinemas would be permanently shut down by a virus. From 1918 to 1920, the so-called ‘Spanish Flu’ took the lives of 50 million people worldwide”
“[But] The British government saw cinema as an essential tool for public well-being. “Cinema was the major leisure activity – it kept people occupied, and it helped keep them calm. It also kept them out of the pubs!” says [film historian Lawrence] Napper. The British government saw cinema as an essential tool for public well-being.”
“[all this] should give us cheer to note that while the film industry in America was certainly impacted, it did not suffer overall but rather changed shape – and in fact flourished even further.”
“Film writer Richard Brody recently noted ….Many smaller companies went out of business, and the resulting shakeout led to a consolidation that made the big ones bigger, creating the studios that became the masters of production, distribution, and exhibition together; the flu, combined with the end of the war, gave rise to the mega-Hollywood that’s being duplicated again today.”
“World War Two was also, against the odds, a time in which cinema prospered. Many countries, including Britain, saw the cinema as a propaganda tool: a place to give information and boost morale”
“Pre-pandemic, there were already signs that the culture of cinemagoing was starting to crack under this {streaming culture] pressure”
“However in the new Coronavirus-afflicted world, the battle with streaming platforms seems like relatively small fry.”
“The effect of the virus has already been to make things that seemed unimaginable a month ago a reality. Hollywood studios have joined Netflix in breaking the theatrical window. ”
“And given that blockbusters rely on huge marketing campaigns, it’s unlikely that studios will want to take an immediate risk with their bigger titles when cinemas do eventually re-open – before they are sure if audiences are ready to embrace cinema again.”
“But for all the sense of impending doom, history suggests that cinema will adapt and bounce back. Crowds flocked to the cinema after the 1918 pandemic, and videos only made people more interested in cinema, not less. After several weeks or, more likely, months cooped up indoors, watching films on our television sets and computer, the experience of seeing a film in cinemas the way they were meant to be seen will be all the more magical”
Jeffrey Katzenberg: Movie industry ‘ready to embrace’ at-home viewing and theaters
www.cnbc.com/2020/04/03/katzenberg-film-industry-ready-to-embrace-at-home-viewing-theaters.html
“Katzenberg’s comments come at a time of disruption for the film industry due to the coronavirus. Movie theaters across the country have shut down, causing studios to adjust their release lineups.”
“Katzenberg used a sport analogy to describe where the movie industry was headed, arguing the embrace of in-person sports and TV broadcasts has been successful despite hesitancy decades ago.”
“Katzenberg’s latest venture is Quibi, a mobile-focused video streaming service that is set to debut Monday.”
“Viewers no longer have frequent stretches of 30 to 40 minutes to watch uninterrupted content, even though they consume 70 minutes of short-form content a day, Katzenberg said. They can use moments of downtime to watch chapters of serialized content in shorter increments of 10 minutes or so.”
“While Katzenberg acknowledged — somewhat humorously — that success in the venture will be “somewhere between improbable and impossible,” he said that Quibi would be “skating to where the hockey puck is going,” rather than pursuing the type of hour-long television shows that everyone else is chasing.”
Pandemic Production Prospects, Possibilities, Concerns
www.shootonline.com/news/pandemic-production-prospects-possibilities-concerns
“For many, production has stopped in its tracks due to the coronavirus pandemic. ”
“Others have stepped up their in-house activity, tapping into their homegrown production and post capabilities.” [Or working from home]
“While losing the physical proximity and communal nature of collaboration, creatives and artists have managed to stay connected through technology”
“While some projects have “completely died,” said Gavin Wellsman [a creative director at The Mill in New York], others are still in the pipeline and have adapted to a world where social distancing is imperative and live-action production as we’ve known it is no longer feasible at the moment. Clients are turning to visual effects, CG and other options.”
“Still, much work has fallen by the wayside. And many projects don’t translate properly from live action to another [full CG] discipline.”
“London-based independent production house MindsEye launched HomeStudio…. HomeStudio brings together a lineup of directors who have their own equipment, DPs with studio space, and stop-frame animators who can turn out content in this period of imposed self-isolation. This isn’t a roster of talent that a company has signed in the traditional sense; rather it’s a collection of talent that’s being made available to agencies and brands.”
“However, ingenuity, imagination and improvisation can only go so far when production and post companies are suffering from poor cash flow, a situation which is exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis. …many companies would settle for–or at least welcome with open arms–getting paid in a timely fashion by marketers and ad agencies for services already rendered. ”
“In a live poll of over 500 AICP member participants during a Zoom Town Hall last month, the issue of outstanding receivables was the most immediate concern. It was found that 28% of companies reported that they are owed in excess of $1 million, while 23% are owed between $500,000-$1 million and 34% are owed between $100,000-$500,000. The members were also polled on how late these payments are: 29% reported that payments are 45 or more days late (per their contracted terms), and one-third are 30-45 days late. Extrapolating across the industry, conservatively, this is well in excess of $200 million.”
“Matt Miller, president and CEO of AICP: A healthy production and post community is integral to the overall economy’s recovery once we are clear of the pandemic. Production and post talent will be needed to help brands connect with the consumer marketplace and bring it back to life. It’s thus in the interest of [all] marketers and agencies to do what they can–and should do–to contribute to keeping the production and post sectors whole. “
StratusCore – Web based virtual studio
StratusCore will provide the following to VES members:
– 40 hours of Virtual Workstation use per month
– 25 render credits per month
– 50 GB of hot storage
– 50% off all purchases
A question of ethics – What CG simulation and deepfakes means for the future of performance
www.ibc.org/create-and-produce/re-animators-night-of-the-living-avatars/5504.article
“When your performance is captured as data it can be manipulated, reworked or sampled, much like the music industry samples vocals and beats. If we can do that then where does the intellectual property lie? Who owns authorship of the performance? Where are the boundaries?”
“Tracking use of an original data captured performance is tricky given that any character or creature you can imagine can be animated using the artist’s work as a base.”
“Conventionally, when an actor contracts with a studio they will assign rights to their performance in that production to the studio. Typically, that would also licence the producer to use the actor’s likeness in related uses, such as marketing materials, or video games.
Similarly, a digital avatar will be owned by the commissioners of the work who will buy out the actor’s performance for that role and ultimately own the IP.
However, in UK law there is no such thing as an ‘image right’ or ‘personality right’ because there is no legal process in the UK which protects the Intellectual Property Rights that identify an image or personality.
The only way in which a pure image right can be protected in the UK is under the Law of Passing-Off.”
“Whether a certain project is ethical or not depends mainly on the purpose of using the ‘face’ of the dead actor,” “Legally, when an actor dies, the rights of their [image/name/brand] are controlled through their estate, which is often managed by family members. This can mean that different people have contradictory ideas about what is and what isn’t appropriate.”
“The advance of performance capture and VFX techniques can be liberating for much of the acting community. In theory, they would be cast on talent alone, rather than defined by how they look.”
“The question is whether that is ethically right.”
‘A race to the bottom’: What’s the story behind bad CGI?
“When something in the design goes wrong, creating a furry Lovecraftian horror who repulses the human eye, all the blame lands on the VFX. And when something goes right (like Sonic’s cuddlier redesign) the team sees no reward, not even job security.”
“Those who work in post production are “much more vulnerable than almost any other industry”, “No one has job security, not even the higher-ups. No one knows where they’re working next year, or three months from now. The industry is in a race to the bottom – everything has to be done quicker and cheaper than the last project. And we’re treated as a disposable short-term workforce.”
“The infamous “crunch” which animators have blamed for rushed work like Cats is a reference to “crunch time” – the period before a film’s release where artists have to work staggering amounts of overtime in order to get a job done before the money runs out. The instability of the VFX industry, and the inconsistency of the work it produces, may be due to these tight schedules.”
“Unpaid excessive overtime is the default,”“Some places are better than others. But generally speaking, when you get a contract somewhere big in London like ILM, the first thing you get is an overtime waiver. At the minute, EU rules limit how much overtime employers can ask for, so workers have to waive their own rights before they begin. These companies plan for unpaid overtime in their spreadsheets before they even start a project.”
Edwin Catmull and Patrick Hanrahan have won the $1 million Turing Award
The two men who invented game-changing 3D computer graphics techniques now widely used in the film industry have won the highest distinction in computer science: the Turing Award
Rip Terry Jones
As per John Cleese: “Two down, four to go”
edition.cnn.com/2020/01/22/entertainment/terry-jones-dies-scli-gbr-intl/index.html
The modern phenomenon of the two days weekend break
www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200117-the-modern-phenomenon-of-the-weekend
“The idea of reducing the working week from an average of five days to four is gaining traction around the world.
“There are a number of parallels between debates today and those that took place in the 19th century when the weekend as we now know it was first introduced. Having Saturdays as well as Sundays off work is actually a relatively modern phenomenon.
“the weekend did not simply arise from government legislation – it was shaped by a combination of campaigns
“Religious bodies argued that a break on Saturday would improve working class “mental and moral culture”…. and greater attendance at church on Sundays.
“In 1842 a campaign group called the Early Closing Association was formed. It lobbied government to keep Saturday afternoon free for worker leisure in return for a full day’s work on (Saint) Monday.
“a burgeoning leisure industry saw the new half-day Saturday as a business opportunity… Perhaps the most influential leisure activity to help forge the modern week was the decision to stage football matches on Saturday afternoon.
“The adoption of the modern weekend was neither swift nor uniform as, ultimately, the decision for a factory to adopt the half-day Saturday rested with the manufacturer. Campaigns for an established weekend had begun in the 1840s but it did not gain widespread adoption for another 50 years…. it was embraced by employers who found that the full Saturday and Sunday break reduced absenteeism and improved efficiency.
The Mill opens new offices in Berlin
www.themill.com/stories/the-mill-opens-new-studio-in-berlin/
Greg Spencer will lead a multi-disciplinary team of artists in his role of Creative Director.
Justin Stiebel will be continuing his role as Executive Producer at The Mill Berlin and will be managing client relationships as well as all new business enquiries.
DNeg possibly charged with fraud
An Oscar-winning visual effects studio aiming for a £600 million stock market flotation has become entangled in an alleged scheme to defraud the taxman.
DNEG, which has worked on films such as No Time to Die and Captain Marvel, could have to pay HM Revenue & Customs more than £10 million in back taxes and penalties.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/visual-effects-studio-reveals-tax-raid-vjb3pj8s3
MPC closing Vancouver in favor of other locations
dailyhive.com/vancouver/mpc-studio-vancouver-shut-down
vancouversun.com/news/local-news/moving-picture-company-closes-vancouver-studio-report
The letter states that MPC’s Vancouver studio will “cease operations effective immediately and refocus its geographical presence to other locations.”
“This decision has not been taken lightly,” states the letter, noting that “more attractive opportunities in other locations have created a challenging environment” for the company to sustain its Vancouver office.
MPC is owned by French multinational corporation Technicolor, which provides various services in the media and entertainment industries.
Technicolor operates several other VFX brands including The Mill, Mr.X, and Mikros.
The letter also states that MPC and the other Technicolor brands will continue to expand in other cities including Montreal, Paris, Adelaide, LA, and Toronto.
What the Boeing 737 MAX’s crashes can teach us about production business – the effects of commoditisation
Airplane manufacturing is no different from mortgage lending or insulin distribution or make-believe blood analyzing software (or VFX?) —another cash cow for the one percent, bound inexorably for the slaughterhouse.
The beginning of the end was “Boeing’s 1997 acquisition of McDonnell Douglas, a dysfunctional firm with a dilapidated aircraft plant in Long Beach and a CEO (Harry Stonecipher) who liked to use what he called the “Hollywood model” for dealing with engineers: Hire them for a few months when project deadlines are nigh, fire them when you need to make numbers.” And all that came with it. “Stonecipher’s team had driven the last nail in the coffin of McDonnell’s flailing commercial jet business by trying to outsource everything but design, final assembly, and flight testing and sales.”
It is understood, now more than ever, that capitalism does half-assed things like that, especially in concert with computer software and oblivious regulators.
There was something unsettlingly familiar when the world first learned of MCAS in November, about two weeks after the system’s unthinkable stupidity drove the two-month-old plane and all 189 people on it to a horrific death. It smacked of the sort of screwup a 23-year-old intern might have made—and indeed, much of the software on the MAX had been engineered by recent grads of Indian software-coding academies making as little as $9 an hour, part of Boeing management’s endless war on the unions that once represented more than half its employees.
Down in South Carolina, a nonunion Boeing assembly line that opened in 2011 had for years churned out scores of whistle-blower complaints and wrongful termination lawsuits packed with scenes wherein quality-control documents were regularly forged, employees who enforced standards were sabotaged, and planes were routinely delivered to airlines with loose screws, scratched windows, and random debris everywhere.
Shockingly, another piece of the quality failure is Boeing securing investments from all airliners, starting with SouthWest above all, to guarantee Boeing’s production lines support in exchange for fair market prices and favorite treatments. Basically giving Boeing financial stability independently on the quality of their product. “Those partnerships were but one numbers-smoothing mechanism in a diversified tool kit Boeing had assembled over the previous generation for making its complex and volatile business more palatable to Wall Street.”
Double Negative pulls plans of listing on Stock Exchange
DNEG said last month it was looking to raise £150m from a float on the LSE’s Main Market. This valued the firm at more than £600m.
But yesterday it said it has decided to postpone the listing due to ‘ongoing market uncertainty’.
The London-based group added that it had received ‘a strong level of interest from investors’ and still intends to go public once market conditions improve.
