The State of the VFX Industry- or: Why I am so fucking furious about the Chip and Dale Movie
I’ve been thinking long and hard about if I should really do this… and if yes, how.
I hope the following is in any way interesting or informative and not just me rambling about something.
Let’s start out here: I’m a VFX artist with a couple years of experience in the VFX and Animation industry. That’s about as much as I will put into this post for privacy reasons.
About a year before the pandemic I got the oportunity to work at M/PC- which is one of the biggest VFX studios in the world, making anything from the Harry Potter movies over the Disney Remakes, Marvel films, that Dinosaur Documentary that just came out, etc.
If a movie contains VFX (meaning it’s live-action shots with any type of effects edited over), there’s a VERY high chance M/PC was working on some of the material- if not almost all of it.
My exact experience with how I got there or personal details are irrelevant here- but this is what I can say about them.
They hire people from all over the world, push them through a harsh crunchtime for as little pay as possible and then throw them back out. In some cases, they forget to extend work permits, which has resulted in people being deported in the past. Sometimes they extend work permits on such a short notice that the people end up only being allowed to work in the country via a loophole, and of course they end up losing that workpermit if they end up getting fired- which is very common, as they like to throw people out the second they don’t need them anymore.
I was shushed several times for bringing up labourlaws (not unions, not anything- just the actual labour laws in the country we were in) because that could get me fired if the wrong person hears it. I wasn’t from that country; So I had to clock in every morning and do 150% because I knew if I just stood my ground and said “no” to Overtime I’d be packing my shit and stepping on a plane a month later.
The office we were in itself had no windows and only sparce ceiling lights, which was why if we locked our PC screens, they turned white- to create a light source. We did however get little USB lights :) because, you know. that helps.
Frequently, we were asked to work through lunchtime and also do more overtime after work, which was why I would quite commonly have workdays where I spent between 10-12 hours straight at my desk working. They would always tap on the harsh deadlines for shots- most of which weren’t our fault for being overdue, which resulted in them asking us to come in on weekends. In winter, I had a moment where I realized that I hadn’t seen the sun in about 2 weeks.
When I then said “no” to overtime for a day, just so I could refresh my head, I was told I “needed to be careful if I wanted to keep the job”.
Not because I was not doing my work the way it was in my contract- but because I wasn’t willing to spend 10 hours at the office on a sunday- which was NOT a workday according to said contract.
Over time, I ended up getting more cocky about saying no to Overtime when I didn’t feel good, or asking for someone else to take a task I was given because I knew I wouldn’t be done with it by it’s deadline due to the other things I still had to do- which was probably was led to me being laid off.
The only people who got to stand up against this pressure were people in higher positions- and even they were expected to be at the studio every single day of the week, no matter what was going on. I had a lead who left work around 3 pm on a **sunday** and was only allowed to do so because it was his sons birthday. I am still sort of shocked that they made him come in at all.
These time constraints aren’t an accident. They aren’t a miscalculation. VFX artists are treated like this to keep the cost low, to be as cheap as possible. Specifically M/PC is known for this. Cut corners where you can, mistreat your workers as well as you can and whatever comes out will be good enough.
On top of that- remember how people were angry that they didnt list ANY VFX artists on the stupid dinosaur documentary?
Approximately half of all VFX artists working on a film don’t get credited. This isn’t about the studio I worked at- this is a general thing. You can work your ass off for hours upon hours for years just to get that stupid flop of a movie out, and they won’t even credit you. This may not sound like a big deal, but ultimately it means that if you say you worked on those movies in a future job interview and they go and check if you actually did- they won’t find you, and it looks like you were lying about your work experience.
Now, obviously, whenever I tell people that this is happening in one of the biggest studios in the industry, they go like “but if it’s that bad, why is nobody sounding the alarms about it? Why is nobody fighting against it?”
For the same reason you hear vague sexual abuse allegations from companies like that but never see who made them or what exactly happened. If you speak up against it, and they find out who did, they make sure you can never work at their company or any company connected to them ever again.
*And they are ALL connected.*
The one’s that don’t directly belong to T/echnicolour are just besties with T/echnicolour, and they share informations like that. Because, you know. Nobody wants to hire a snitch.
While I was working there, the studio in Vancouver closed down. If you heard “the studio that made sonic and cats closed down”, that was it. And no matter how much the internet liked to make this about “the poor studio and the poor animators being kicked out because mean, mean fans made it so they didn’t get money boohoo”…. that. was not it.
The details here are muddy on purpose, so I can’t clearly speak on this- but what I can say is that, while the closure of Vancouver loomed over them, they never got a clear info or anything. The remaining workers just showed up one day after doing overtime for way too long and the studio was gone and closed. We, at the other studio, received an email thanking the nice collegues over from Vancouver for their faantaaaastic work.
Right after this email dropped, we were all immediately called into a meeting on the company floor, where first we were told that our jobs were not affected by this (which was true, they weren’t, they just hadn’t been stable to begin with), but they also made it very clear that if we went to post about this on social media, or talk to any journalistic publication about this incident, we would lose our jobs and be *blacklisted*. I can’t quote them verbatim, but I do remember them mentioning how “most of us were very young”, and how “this would be very unfortunate for us”.
They knew they fucked up, and let us know if we spoke to anyone about what had happened we’d never work again- because they wanted it to be muddy. They wanted the general narrative to be “the poor poor studio that made sonic and cats had to close down because of public backlash”. That story is MILES better for their reputation than “we squeezed every last droplet out of the foreigners we made work there in hopes they don’t know their own labour laws and then purposefully run that office’s finances into the ground so we can fire them all at once”
This all is also, by the way, why I am purposefully leaving out a lot of information in this post. Not because I’m insane and paranoid or anything- but they do that. They check the internet for stuff about them. And I’d honestly enjoy NOT using my expensive degree to go back to work in a coffee shop because I made an inconsequential post on tumblr dot com- but I feel it would be the better thing to do than to sit there and be fucking pissed without doing ANYTHING.
So, to bring it all back- Why am I so pissed about the chip and dale movie?
The reason for why a lot of VFX-heavy movies look like absolute shit, is not because VFX itself is a problem or doomed to be ugly or because the artists are bad or blind or whatever- it’s because of all of those exploitative factors.
The artists don’t get a say in anything. If you speak up about something being wrong, you might get fired. Your opinions don’t matter. The timecrunch is so tight that you don’t get the chance to make it right- and to be clear, nobody who is officially an “artist” gets any time to make it right.
The people making the decisions and who would be able to speak up are the people who are handleing the money. The issue with VFX is in not even one case the VFX itself; the issue with VFX is the capitalistic nature of the goddamn film industry. All of those movies aren’t movies that wanna tell a story or that want to inspire- they are money machines. The people who make the decision don’t give a fuck what the movie looks like or if it’s good, and they especially don’t give a fuck about if the people working on it die doing it- as long as it’s cheap, it’s good.
That is also why productions prefer using 100% VFX instead of costumes and puppets. Because costume makers, SFX artists, makeup artists and puppeteers have labour unions. They get paid properly for their work. They work humane hours. They might take longer and have the chance to make it right- which in turn makes something more expensive. Not because their work is worth more; but because they have the priviledge to expect fair compensation.
VFX artists don’t get that priviledge- not to mention the countless VFX artists who live and work in the global south, a lot of them also for a Technicolour studio, who get way less for all that work… only so rebel fucking wilson and james corden can dress up at the oscars and piss all over that labour.
And while making those jokes as just some guy on the internet is like… sort of annoying for people who are affected in some way, imagine if people who are literally responsible for why these things are ugly in the first place, and for all the labour abuses made those jokes.
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, GIVE IT UP FOR THE FUCKING CHIP AND DALE MOVIE
Everything about it, from how they used old assets without crediting the original artists, to how the jokes don’t make fun of the production houses but treat it like this was “just a thing lol” to the fact that the “2D” lead characters aren’t actually 2D animated but cellshaded 3D characters in order to save money-
is deeply, incredibly insulting.
To make the same artists that have been through production hell by the hands of the producers and execs who commissioned this piece of shit work on a movie that actively mocks their entire profession is one of the most disrespectful things I could possibly fucking imagine
This is on the same level as if let’s say amazon made a trademark “amazon pissbottle”, making fun of their own labour rights abuses, while having the same underpaid workers who gotta piss into bottles bc they dont get pee breaks package and deliver the fucking things
I want to genuinly tear my hair out about the level of disrespect that this movie is on. When the trailer first came out, I had no clue what to feel and was just SO confused, but by now I have sorted my thoughts and feelings and gotta say- fuck everyone who is responsible. Fuck everyone who planned that shit out.
and also: genuinly, fuck everybody who likes it. As much as it “is funny” or whatever, the whole thing is a symptom of a diseased industry, and I am genuinly hoping that more and more people get the chance to speak up about this- because it might only get worse from here.
If you really read this until the end, thank you for hearing me out haha,,, This wasn’t meant to vent or make anyone feel sorry. This was meant to put the situation of that industry into perspective and give an appropriate backdrop for what’s going on, and why a lot of these things are genuinly dispicable.
Next time you go to the cinema and the VFX looks like shit- just know that this is not a VFX problem, and making fun of VFX itself is misguided. Make fun of the people responsible. Make fun of the director. Look at which studios were involved in the making of the film at the end of the credits and drag their ass. Tag their social media profiles, ask them how much their regular artists get during crunchtime.
Let them eat their fucking OT cake themselves.
