Visual effects technology has become enormously sophisticated in recent decades. And yet the VFX industry itself is in a tough spot. It’s not uncommon for visual effects artists to put in up to 100-hour work weeks to meet a studio’s deadline and accommodate last-minute changes.
That’s why you may find yourself watching a movie or TV show and thinking: Huh, the CGI in this scene — the computer-generated imagery — is not as good as it should be.
Director Taika Waititi had this observation about his own film in a clip making the rounds last week, courtesy of Vanity Fair. Promoting “Thor: Love and Thunder” along with star Tessa Thompson, the pair can be seen staring at a monitor and joking about a scene from the movie:
“Does that look real?” Waititi says, pointing at the CGI character he plays, a humanoid pile of rocks named Korg. “In that particular shot — no, actually,” Thompson replies and they both laugh.
If you’re inclined to view Waititi’s reaction as one of self deprecation, it’s worth considering that it probably sounded quite different to the VFX artists who worked on the film.
Or as someone on Twitter put it: “Seeing the millionaire director making fun of your work he and producers forced you to change five times before deadline with little pay is insane.”
The challenges faced by VFX artists, and the companies that employ them, aren’t well known to most audiences. The studios would likely prefer to keep it that way. But it is affecting people’s livelihoods — and what we’re seeing on screen.
The digital site The Gamer recently compiled several anonymous Reddit comments from people who work in the VFX industry, many of whom were venting about Marvel. One person noted that they’ve seen “grown men punch walls and throw monitors from stress. I broke down a couple of times and have seen the strain it can put on marriages.”
Marvel may come in for some of the worst criticism from VFX artists, but it’s far from alone. It’s an industrywide problem.
So what’s going on?
A 2014 documentary called “Life After Pi” spells it out.
Made by director Scott Leberecht, it’s just 30 minutes long. It’s free on Vimeo and it’s well worth your time if you care about how the sausage gets made. The title is a play-on-words, referencing the 2012 movie “Life of Pi,” director Ang Lee’s story of a teen struggling to survive on the vast ocean in just a lifeboat, which he shares with a Bengal tiger.
The tiger, of course, was not actually there during filming. Neither was the ocean. The majority of what you see on screen is computer generated — and indistinguishable from the real thing. The visual effects were done by a company called Rhythm & Hues, which won the Oscar for its work on the film.
“As an animator, I just like the creativity of it,” says VFX artist Amanda Dague in the documentary. “I can take a blank slate and create a performance out of nothing.” That’s absolutely the case with the movie’s tiger.
The bitter irony? Rhythm & Hues won the Oscar less than two weeks after it declared bankruptcy. The company had been in business for 25 years, with credits on 145 films including “Babe,” a number of Batman movies, “Stuart Little,” “X-Men,” “Elf,” and “The Hunger Games.”
While accepting the award for “Life of Pi,” visual effects supervisor Bill Westenhofer mentioned the company’s financial struggles, but he was drowned out by the orchestra, which began playing the theme from “Jaws” — or as one of his colleagues put it, he was “Jaws’d” off stage. Adding salt to the wound, neither Lee, who won for best director, nor Claudio Miranda, who won for best cinematography, thanked the VFX team in their speeches.
The financial challenges that befell Rhythm & Hues are not unique. More than 20 other VFX companies either closed or filed for bankruptcy in the 10 years before “Life After Pi” was made.
Here’s what’s behind that:
The studios pay a flat fee, or a fixed bid. Let’s use a housing construction analogy, one VFX artist says: A house is built on a fixed bid, “which makes sense because there’s a blueprint where everything is laid out, down to every screw, every I-beam, every piece of glass.” But if you want to make significant changes, the builder and the architect are going to factor in a cost adjustment.
Doesn’t work that way in VFX because they’re not paid by the hour, but by the project. And rarely are overages negotiated.
One of the founders of Rhythm & Hues is named John Hughes and he is soft-spoken and clearly troubled by what he sees happening.
“Filmmaking now is a very fluid situation,” he says. “The shots change dramatically. Easily half the shots that we bid could disappear and be replaced by other shots.”
Why?
“The art of filmmaking seems to have changed a little bit over the years. It used to be that you had a script, and you’d storyboard it, you’d have all three acts and then you’d go out and shoot. But nowadays, they often start shooting without really knowing what Act 3 is going to be. And it’s really hard to have a fixed bid and a fixed deadline when the studio and the director haven’t even agreed on Act 3 yet.”
A VFX artist named Dave Rand explains how that plays out: “When you’re creating these huge, fluid dynamic simulations like ‘Life of Pi,’ and they want to change this wave from going that way to this way, or make the rain go completely differently, that’s a lot of simulation time just to make the change. And then finally it gets shown to the client who says something like, ‘Why is it even raining in this shot, it’s not supposed to be raining.’”
This adds hundreds if not thousands of hours of labor, redoing the work or starting from scratch, often with no profit participation if the film or show does gangbusters.
Also, the director has little if any direct contact with the VFX artists themselves. You can start to see how it’s possible that someone like “Thor” director Waititi would half-jokingly ask “does that look real?” as if he had no involvement in the process. It’s clearly maddening for the VFX artists.
“We understand if you (the studio) have a vision and you’re moving toward that vision,” Hughes says. “But what we see often is that they’ll be heading toward a vision — and you might be heading toward that vision for six months — and then all of a sudden they turn around and go off in an entirely different direction.”
But the deadline remains unchanged. It’s no wonder that some of the visual effects we’re seeing aren’t as impressive as they could be. People are trying to work at the top of their game but they’re in compromised circumstances.
Here’s the dilemma as Hughes saw it at the time: “Our choices were to cut people’s salaries. Or to lay off a significant number of people. Or to work people overtime without paying them for overtime by restructuring their contracts.” Any of those changes “would have so dramatically altered the culture of Rhythm & Hues that they would have destroyed Rhythm & Hues.”
He pauses, deep in thought. “And, well, you know ... instead we’re in bankruptcy. So I ended up destroying Rhythm & Hues anyway.”
Does it feel conspicuous that big name actors and directors who work on these projects have been quiet about this issue?
Unlike other crew members who work in the TV and film industry, VFX artists are not unionized. That could change if there’s enough of a groundswell.
And if enough famous Hollywood players with clout decided this was an issue worth fighting for, especially when VFX is so vital to their work.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Nina Metz is a Chicago Tribune critic who covers TV and film.
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