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Some of it is good though. Just inefficient because trading stuff between sites and timezones is inefficient. But if for a certain company it all goes to India, then they won't be trading assets back and forth and they'll be able to underbid at 3x less than anybody else. I hope you're right, I just see a growing polarity shift in the industry. In every meeting we're told "we're actually mostly an Indian company now" because of where the headcount is. And friends at dneg say Namit (head of dneg and prime focus) also wants to make vfx an India centric industry.
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Jan 23, 2023 01:41
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Could be. My boss who’s been in the industry 20+ years remembers a time when it was all in California. Then it was almost all in canada and london. It’ll still probably always have a footprint in those places, same as vfx still has some footprint in cali, but where the majority of the work is could still shift. Depends on the skill of the labor pool.
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Jan 23, 2023 04:41
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Yeah thats the whole business model. It's born out of a bit of desperation as getting profit from the vfx industry is a little like getting blood from a stone. And it doesn't help that when you try to be the largest, you also become the studio with the most overhead, and then you need to continue to bring in the work to keep the lights on at the facilities you've set up all over the world. And the clients know you need to underbid to keep paying the rent and software licenses, and it becomes a vicious cycle.
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Jan 26, 2023 05:11
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Big K of Justice posted:That's not really necessary at all. I can't recall the last time I worked that late. Even in TV/Film. Something is wrong if that's the case. Oh something is definitely wrong. But it's not super unusual. When I was in animation school my professors had stories of working until 5 am and driving home and almost wrapping their car around a tree. They told us not to do that, but also warned us "studio bosses will definitely ask you to do that. And early in your career it will be hard to say no."
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Jan 27, 2023 04:42
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It's been 8 years since I tried to texture anything but I'm surprised to hear there's not an AI way to do flawless UV unwraps yet. I guess its the same way you'd think Paint/Roto would be automated already but nope. https://twitter.com/axl99/status/1635807734212997120?cxt=HHwWgMDR6fSdx7MtAAAA
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Mar 15, 2023 03:34
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EoinCannon posted:Studio I work at wants to get more into stylised animation work and less vfx so I'm doing some stuff in that direction, also learning substance a bit. Nice! This seems to be a trend with studios. Theres so much potential vfx work out there but clients are crazy and working with such short deadlines and the work has to look photo-real which is such a challenge. Stylized cg seems much easier from a management perspective. Cinesite and Animal Logic as well as a bunch of smaller studios transitioned away from vfx and toward cartoony tv series and features because of this. Also I think the profit margin in full-cg work is better? I definitely never worked as much OT in cartoony stuff as I do in vfx. Every stint in vfx I do I gain like 30 lbs from the OT and the fact everyone drinks so much...
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Mar 20, 2023 01:59
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The Alonso thing is interesting. I've long heard terrifying things about her but it almost felt like she knew she had overstepped her bounds by promoting Argentina, 1985 in violation of her contract with Disney. But yeah, I hope the next person filling that role isn't such a bully or kingmaker type. We need less power hungry maniacs who never give benefit of the doubt in this business. Ccs fucked around with this message at 23:25 on Mar 26, 2023 |
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Mar 26, 2023 02:35
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Listerine posted:So when it goes to streaming/physical disc, what happens- does the final version become the definitive one, or do they still keep the unfinished versions for release in those foreign markets? I think the final version becomes the definitive one. This article suggests Alonso leaving during the Iger shakeup will lead to a lot less vfx work. So hard times ahead. https://deadline.com/2023/03/disney-lawsuit-threat-victoria-alonso-firing-marvel-patty-glaser-1235309916/ Ccs fucked around with this message at 23:26 on Mar 26, 2023 |
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Mar 26, 2023 16:23
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I will say I don't think Alonso's behavior is that uncommon in vfx. I've seen animation supervisors and vfx supes who are equally horrible to people. Depends on how stressed they are.
Ccs fucked around with this message at 23:26 on Mar 26, 2023 |
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Mar 26, 2023 19:04
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Well, it finally happened. The largest vfx studio announced to us the other day that they are gonna move 90% of the work to India starting in August 2024, at a gradual pace over the next 3 years. It was a fuckin weird meeting, full of cheery declarations that they wouldn't completely close the western sites so supervisors don't have to worry, but rather that those would become "template" studios that produce the most important shots in every sequence, and that these would then be the shots that the India studios (they just opened a second one) would use to gauge their quality against. The guy wasn't even reading from a script so he maybe accidentally betrayed what order the disciplines would be outsourced. Comp, modeling and rigging is already 90% in India, so following that will be layout, lighting, dmp, cfx, fx, and finally animation. This is a place that used to employ well over 3000 people in Canada and the UK, but going forward their vision is for each western site to never grow over 350-400 people, where 10 shows running at a time might have 5 artists from each department working on the important shots for those shows and then supervising the India teams. At a previous studio we had a matchmove supervisor who used to have to constantly be on calls at 4 am with the studio in India that was doing the actual work, and I'm just waiting for that kind of thing to now be standardized across every department.
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Oct 13, 2023 14:22
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Big K of Justice posted:
It's less "hopeful" and more "grinning through the pain" as their financial position is extremely shaky right now. Their narrative to investors is that they'll send it to India to get better margins and make up for the last few years of bleeding money, and now they're communicating that plan to the artists (at a time when even their best artists are just happy to still have a job.) But if they succeed it will surely impact the other studios as they will enlarge their India sites and poach in the search for equally good margins/ability to bid competitively.
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Oct 19, 2023 03:37
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Most Americans I met went to SCAD, a ridiculously expensive school but good at preparing students.
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Oct 23, 2023 19:16
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This reminds me how good Sheridan's placement rate is, everyone i graduated with found jobs within 6 months and are still in the industry. A number of us working on big vfx or feature films, others all now leads or supervisors in tv.
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Oct 27, 2023 17:06
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Another thing to note about vfx is that its nearly all left America. And the ones that remain in the UK and Britain are working as fast as possible to move everything to India. Its the stated goal of 2 of the largest vfx studios that by 2025 80% of all shots will be done in India, and the only people left in Canada and the UK will be seniors and supervisors. Which they kind of have to do because between debt load, interest rates, and the gap in work due to the strikes, if they can't get that business plan working then they're gonna go under. Virtual production and previz are probably the last jobs that will leave the west, as they need to be near where things are actually filmed, or near the creative people who call the shots. Lately there has been a big push at the largest studio to get previz all in the UK though instead of doing any in California, as at least the UK has tax credits they can utilize. And the large places like offering clients previz in addition to finals so they know they got the project sooner and can use previz as the first round of layout, and avoid a lot of annoying ingesting of files from outside vendors.
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Dec 15, 2023 05:29
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ILM opened in Mumbai and all their new Jedi Academies are are in Mumbai. Framestore is also increasing their Indian footprint in addition to their existing studio in Mumbai. My old department manager went to framestore and said every meeting is about how they can get more to India, and she has had to take on a team in Mumbai in addition to her canadian crew to manage.
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Dec 15, 2023 17:40
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So this is making the rounds at work today https://openai.com/sora#capabilities The artists under 30 I work with are saying this means we all won't have jobs in 5 years. Maybe I'm delusional or maybe I'm just jaded by so many cycles of tech hype (i worked with a lot of bitcoin bros at my first job and the bosses at my third studio were NFT hypers) but this reminds me of the amazing papers at Siggraph every year. Looks super cool! When can I expect it to become part of any workflow? ... *crickets* Anyyyway, I'm sure it will further degrade the stock video market. And also make the general public assume that vfx work is all done by computers.
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Feb 16, 2024 01:01
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This is a convincing argument about why its not the end of the world, but i don't actually know if its right. Because AI is a black box to me and unless you're an AI researcher who isn't up themselves with their own hype, it's hard to know what the AI is actually doing.quote:
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Feb 16, 2024 02:46
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BonoMan posted:I'm not sure that quote is saying much of anything. Yes we all know they're trained on models and that limits spontaneous results, but I don't think that's the threat. Could be, could be. I'll probably be a skeptic until suddenly studios downsize a whole bunch due to AI. But honestly if AI is able to accomplish what people fear it could, I expect things to go this way- my job is outsourced to India in a few years, then AI gets good enough a few years later, then the Indian guys lose their jobs too. Outsourcing is a much bigger near term threat to my role and labor arbitrage isn't a magic technology with trillions of new datacenter investments behind it.
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Feb 16, 2024 04:18
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I guess I won't need to imagine very long how long it will take AI to make or break certain industries because of the amount of investment its getting and how much CEOs are salivating over it. I'm used to annoying tech hype being nothing but bluster, but occasionally a piece of tech will come along that will really amaze me. I was on one film where we had to match faces to actors exactly using facial action coding system rigs and so for months it was animators laboriously matching every motion on the actors faces and then cfx artists coming in a doing shot sculpt to match bits that the rig couldn't hit. Then at some point that was getting so costly that they introduced a tool that just automated it. Completely automated it. Everyone could go back to focusing on body mechanics and their other tasks instead of dealing with the faces anymore. It was incredible. It happened in like the last 2 months of the project when things were super super crazy. Then a couple years later i was on a project that needed that exact same thing at the same company. And I asked if anyone knew about that tool. But apparently the developers left and the tool was discontinued and there wasn't enough documentation for anyone else to pick it up. So we went back to matching by hand....
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Feb 16, 2024 16:57
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cubicle gangster posted:Thats definitely a thing but I was talking about people using creative work as an escape. I think there's a generational shift where the modern gen want to make something cool and do music videos for marshmellow, but I came from an era where we were just not very well socially adjusted and used our time in front of a computer to escape from real life. Theres a patience and pace to people who came to this industry as an escape vs those that were sold it as a way to do super cool poo poo for a living. We all wanted to do super cool poo poo for a living but there was a different level of ego to it. We were thankful to be in the room, in awe of all opportunity I mean, I like the meditative aspect of it but you really only get that after enough time in the industry. Most people start on lower budget projects that has a huge "get the poo poo out the door" mentality, and then after enough experience might move to a studio with bigger budget projects that actually give some time. My career went from having to churn out 3 shots a day in tv to sometimes spending days polishing fingers in vfx. But that was only after lots of tv productions and then on vfx projects that had the "get poo poo out the door" mentality until after a couple years finally landing on a project that had a good schedule. As for Unreal Engine's new pricing, that sucks. Tons of tv animation studios rebuilt their pipeline around Unreal with the thought that although hiring Unreal developers and training their whole crew on lighting in Unreal was an expensive upfront cost, they would save on licenses and render times. Now they'll really only save on render times, and end up with worse quality than if they had stuck with a traditional rendering engine.
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Mar 13, 2024 04:13
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German VFX facility RISE just posted this "press release" on linkedIn which I'm 90% sure is an April Fools prank, but almost indecipherable from real AI promoters: quote:"REMIX AI will allow RISE to massively reduce production costs on state-of-the-art visual effects for feature film and episodic content by harnessing the power of data that is "publicly available".
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Apr 1, 2024 22:46
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Slothful Bong posted:Lmao that may be a joke, but exactly that happened at a studio I worked at last year. They decided to go all in with ML/AI stuff, and laid off the entire CG department (I think like 20 people total) while we were in the middle of multiple shows. What, like full vfx for tv and movies type shows? I wasn't aware AI was at a place where it could conceivably meet client demands to do that. Do you mind me asking which studio was it?
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Apr 2, 2024 02:19
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If it's a Toronto studio, I think I know who it is. But who knows. There's so many medium sized vfx companies. I haven't seen any of the big guys like Framestore, ILM, Weta, or DNEG say anything major about AI. And maybe the mid sized companies are selling their investors on the idea of "we're nimble, our pipelines can adapt to AI faster than the big guys!" Anyway I hope that company burns all their bridges with clients by delivering bad work and learns their lesson.
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Apr 4, 2024 01:31
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Colleagues at work were just talking about this last friday as there was a townhall with our CTO where he was celebrating how AI combined with the Omniverse will transform what we do. But then I actually talk to the software devs working on this stuff and they're like "oh yeah, well vfx companies right now have no money so maybe we'll be able to integrate some AI into some departments in 5 years, and Omniverse requires a USD pipeline, which we're not sure we'll ever be able to transition to," and so... This is a very legacy vfx company though. Maybe a new vfx company with no debt and a giant infusion of irrationally exuberant investor capital could get a pipeline full of AI tech and Omniverse USD interactive workflows off the ground?
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Apr 10, 2024 02:48
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The fact that no one makes money on vfx is what probably exhausts me the most. But it's been amped up to 11 in the past 6 months as studios stop winning projects and have to somehow afford upkeep with only the current shows. More than just deadlines, the fact that everything is always a push for approvals as fast as possible just so they can get than next payment and keep the ship afloat. Like its not about working on a shot to get it to the point that we say "yes, this is good, the client will really like this," it's more like "alright, we gotta get something out, just send it, maybe they'll approve it and we can afford to keep someone for one more week." And if quota gets missed, well, then they have to let someone go because they just don't have the bank balance anymore.
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Apr 12, 2024 02:39
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