By: pixel pusher

pixel pusher — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 07:27:35 +0000

sigh… my wife and i left the big world of big vfx companies a decade ago hoping that creating smaller, more efficient companies with more genuine intentions and more defined collaboration tools could enable us to do what we loved to do without the umbilical cord to dinosaur vfx giants and their associated henchmen, making closed-door negotiation deals that had nothing to do with the well-being of the artists that were intrinsically involved in making the true vision of their films reality. Sadly, the only association that supposedly held any hope for ensuring that the visual effects artists and technicians who showed up in the credits well after the caterers and the animal handlers on a 100% visual effects film that grossed way beyond any other comparable film would receive any real recognition for their efforts was the VES. We as an industry (and i am speaking for those of us who actually do what we do from a standpoint of collaboration and enjoyment of making the visually impossible possible) have come to witness the larger studios diminish our workforce’s collective value by following the foreign tax incentives and completely decimating the flow of work into the very place where innovation and technology changed the face of visual story telling forever. The ” VFX Bill Of Rights” is too little too late. Why didn’t the VES stand up for digital artists’s rights when European tax incentives were obviously luring studios away from domestic artist pools in favor of very cheap overseas labor… why did we have to see so many mid and upper level VFX companies close their doors due to an inability to compete with international bidding wars that would undercut any reasonable budget due to the fact that the studios could get 30%-40% TAX FREE incentives by simply shooting and posting their films in another country. If you think that posting a Visual Effects Industry Bill of Rights is going to accomplish anything, maybe you should have taken the initiative to convince Mr. Schwarzenegger’s studio liaison when you had the chance, to introduce local incentives that were comparable to the standards set by London, India, Australia and many other countries. Maybe that would have helped to keep the industry alive, here, where it was born… good luck with that.

Comments on: VES launches effects industry ‘bill of rights’

By: pixel pusher