http://www.thejuniorcompositor.com/2009/01/25/industry-the-state-of-the-visual-effects-industry/

It seems like some kind of agreement has been reached with the artists getting 70% of their wages.  That’s right, 70% of their wages for producing A-level visual effects for a major VFX studio which was in turn part of the Discovery group.  That is to say, Discovery are not exactly hurting for cash.  There are more than a few galling aspects to this case, least of which is working for 3months and not getting paid.  There is the fact the artists got shafted and not paid just before Christmas.  That pretty much sucks the big one, but how about Meteor effectively shutting down and opening again with the same muppets running the business with the same equipment on the same premises?  This is what happens with limited liability companies.  They can go bankrupt/insolvent and wind up and there is nothing you can sue them for.  They sell the equipment and facilities to another $2 company for cents in the dollar and start again as a “new and different” company.

I bring the whole topic up again as I have seen and heard similar stories since begining my professional career in CG and it makes me so goddamned angry that CG artists are treated this way.  We are a young industry and at the moment we have no sort of union protection whatsoever.  I am not suggesting that a union is the only answer, but at the moment, artists are treated like disposable rags and the companies play us off against each other.  Given that there is a perception that CG is a “glamour” and “fun” industry and that the schools are pumping out students like there is no tomorrow (because CG students are fish in a barrel for fees, see last post), the attitude seems to be “You should be thankful that we are paying you $18/hr to play with computers all day.  It’s fun and if you don’t want to do it, we’ll get that 17 year old to take your place.”

Now, as someone starting in the industry you might be tempted to think “Whatever old man, if you can’t take it, get out and give me ago”.  That might be fine while you are living with your parents and just starting out.  $18h/r making CG cartoons might seem like mana from heaven compared to working for McDonalds, but what happens in 5 years time?  You have moved out, you have rent to pay, you bought a car, you have bills, thinking about taking a world trip or saving for a house.  You have moved up the payscale a bit and then the same thing happens to you . . . “Well we can’t afford to pay you what you are worth.  How about a pay cut and you can keep your job?” “Errr, no, I have 5 years experience”, “Hmmm, yeah, well, we have this 17yo who will work for $15 an hour, sooooo, seeya!”

The fact is that work in CG is almost *all* contractual, unless you somehow land a gig where you have ongoing full time employment (often smaller studios or if you are some kind of coding/TD guru).  That means you generally count on not working at least 3mths of the year and making up for it the other 9mths.  It also means it is very hard to get loans as you can’t show consistent income.

So, what we have is an industry where if you have 5 years experience you *might* be earning decent coin, but your job is usually not safe, you are often treated as disposable and you have to constantly watch out for up and comers willing to work crazy longer hours for less money.

If the VFX industry continues the way it is going now, there won’t be many old-timers, like their are on the live-action production side (camera ops, gaffers, riggers etc).  What we will have is an industry full of people with 5-10 years experience who eventually give it away after being kicked in the guts too many times.

Take care of yourself as nobody else in the industry will do it for you.  Sad but true.

ETA:  No images today as something happened with my hosting and FTP.  I am currently looking at moving the entire blog to Squarespace as it is becoming too much of a hassle to troubleshoot each week.

I will start by saying that there are a few threads on various forums, so feel free to check them out, but this post is a distillation of those threads and personal experience.  I will also keep this reasonably general, as obviously different reels will focus on different things.   These are the basics that I believe you should cover.

Actually, this is a resume not a demo reel. D'oh!

I remember reading a couple of long threads about what you shouldn’t have on your reel.  To my mind, if you didn’t put on everything that someone mentioned, you wouldn’t have a bloody reel!  For example, it is routinely stated that you shouldn’t do light saber battles.  Fair call.  Fair call, that is, unless you do something like Ryan vs Dorkman, which is a pretty damn cool low budget saber battle.  Same thing for spaceships: “Don’t put spaceships on your reel unless they are better than ILM’s work”.  O RLY?  Are you not supposed to put anything on your reel that is not up to the standard of the worlds best VFX studios?  Well that’s great advice if you work at ILM and have a team of people to make your shots look amazing, but it’s not really that helpful if you are starting out and need to show your hard-surface modeling chops.

Also, I will categorically state that my current reel is in no way perfect.  Reels should always be looked at with an eye to revise and cull, but they do take a bit of effort to organise, so you don’t want to be fiddling every week on the bloomin’ thing.

The Creative

Don’t put anything on your reel that you feel is not top quality.  If you don’t think it was good work, why would anyone else?  The reason for this is that even if you have something good, if you have something bad next to it, it will actually negate or bring down the impact of the good work.  This is a big one with student reels, and I am still a little guilty of it.  You want to pad out that reel and show off all you have learned, but I guarantee you that you have some real crap there.  Come on, admit it.  It’s time to be honest

Following on from that, HR and lead artists would rather see a reel with one amazing 10 second shot than a sub-par 5 minute reel.  Actually, any 5 minute reel will probably get dumped on general principles.

Speaking of time, show your stuff quickly.  I have watched demo reels where it takes, honest to God, 30-40 seconds to show work after all the fancy mo-graf intros and fade in and outs.  Such reels would be instantly binned.  A few seconds for you contact details and the straight into it!

Focus.  If you are an animator, don’t feel the need to do an amazing lighting/texturing setup .  Seriously, you could have just the rig and it would be fine.  They will be looking at your animation.  Ugly texturing and lighting take away the focus from what you are trying to show.  Same with modeling, show your models and meshes.  If you are a great texture artist as well, great, but don’t feel the need to pretty it up if that is not what you do.  It’s like the suggestion of not showing bad work next to good.  If you have a mega cool mesh and it is textured with a couple of bad procedural textures it is going to look terrible.

If you do specialise in several areas, consider have separate reels for separate job applications.  Of course, if you are a generalist it is a different story.

Keep it to around 2 minutes.  Mine is a little long (I feel) at around 2:20, so some more cutting might be in order.  No one wants to watch a 5 minute reel.  This means no short films.  Most studios have a backlog of reels and want to get to the good stuff fast.  Investing 5 minutes to find out where the story is going is not your passport to success.

The Technical

The main focus with the technical side of things is to ensure that your reel and details are seen with the least amount of effort or problems.  If someone has to scratch around to find your contact details or, heaven forbid, install software to watch your reel, you are going to be binned faster than Superman folding washing on laundry day!

Quicktime.  That’s it.  Don’t faff about with crazy codecs.  You can’t be sure that studios will have DivX orXVid on their computers.  Almost all facilities will have Quicktime on their computers.  H264 is pretty popular these days and gives excellent files sizes although it seems to gamma up the video a bit.

PAL or NTSC.  Unfortunately some places still want actual DVD reels, which is frankly a pain in the arse.  Granted they are easier to watch as you just take it into a meeting room and slap it in the DVD player to watch, but the quality is very average and you have to faff about with postage, which if you live in Australia, starts to get expensive (errr, because we are very far away from everybody).   Soooo, set up two reels and save the projects so you can quickly burn a PAL or NTSC DVD.  Unfortunately a bid hard to test them if you don’t have the other format DVD player, but oh well.  Also, keep in mind that you can create DVD’s with data folders, so I use that to put a very high quality Quicktime and PDF copies of my documents with a note on the DVD menu to check the disc on a computer if HR wants to see better quality copies.

PDF or plain text.  Don’t send your resume and breakdowns as Word files.  Firstly, you can’t be sure the people receiving it will have Word, secondly Word files are often treated as suspicious virus carriers by IT.  Pretty much every computer will have Acrobat Reader or failing that, Notepad.

Music: Up to you really.  In my experience most reels are watched with the sound off.  Obviously if you are an animator and showing some lip-sync work, sound will be needed.  Perhaps note this in the intro to your reel so those watching will know to have the volume up.  As for synching all your reel to beats in your music, well, it takes an awful lot of effort for not much result.

Put your contact details everywhere:  This is a major bugbear of HR people.  Put your name and contact details on your resume, put them on the physical DVD, put them on your reel at the start and end.  And, for the love of God, name your files something useful.  The number of online reels I have scene name “reel.mov” or something similar is astounding.  Name it something like “your_name_animation_reel_0904.mov”.  If someone sees it, they know exactly what the file relates to.

By now you almost certainly know that a work print of Wolverine has hit the bit torrent sites.  You might also know that on one section a major Australian studio’s name is apparent.  Now, allegations have been flying and conspiracy theories abound about how or why this happened.

Copyright 20th Century Fox

I have to say, I am more likely to believe the studio in question when it said they it almost certainly wasn’t related to them as they didn’t even have a full copy of the workprint.  As far as I know, each VFX house is rarely, if ever, given a complete work-print of the film.  You usually get just the sequences your studio is working.  FYI, the work-print is an edit without all the VFX and extras added.   It will often still have green screen or very rough slap-comps to give the idea of the shot.

In any event, it has been quite interesting seeing people’s reactions.  The first reactions were overwhelmingly along the lines of “Why would anyone want to watch an unfinished movie?” to which I respond “Are you so completely off your gourd on bad crack that you haven’t been on the internet in the last 5 years?”  People will watch stick figure storyboards with fake voiceovers if they think they are on the cutting edge of downloadzzzz and if they feel like they are sticking it to the man.  Heck, even I would be interested in watching a copy if it was included on the Blu-Ray release.

Some people suggested a marketing campaign from Fox to which I say “Is it possible that you might actually be considered barely mentally competent to stand trial for your obvious crimes against humanity?” (I find it’s best to spice up these posts every now and then).  I mean, sure we are all aware of cynical viral marketing from the super corporations.  Sony seems to be particularly guilty of this, however I think that most sane individuals with any shred of common sense and non-moron infused genes would say that, on average, it would be an exceedingly bad idea to have your studio’s name on a leaked version of a $150 million film.  As one less than sharp tool suggested: “Lots of people know about the studio now”, as if studios need to get their name out to the 14 year old loser nerd bit-torrent community.  Obviously where the bucks are . . . 

Others suggested someone working at the studio.  I guess that could be possible, but you would have to really not want a future in the industry if you thought that stealing and uploading a copy of an unreleased movie was a good move.  This of course assumes that most people in the industry are of at least average intelligence, but I guess there are always what can be politely called “outliers”  Of course you have couriers and a myriad of other people, however the drives etc are usually pretty secure.

We may never find out what really happened, however Fox have said they have digitally watermarked all their prints, so it should be interesting to see how it play out.

Last Friday we had a casual meetup of like-minded computer graphics folks in Brisbane.  It was my first (and unfortunately last as I am moving) Brisbane meetup and it was a great chance to have a few drinks and shoot the proverbial with some interesting new people.

These drinks meetups aren’t really regular and they are organised by whoever decides to get things moving from an Australian mailing list (the DLF) , but they always seem to get a good turnout and it is a great way to put names to faces, network, drink, eat and generally have a good time.

Beer is good. Belgian beer is better

Now, these are casual drinks, but there are also other events you can attend.  Is there a SIGGRAPH chapter near you?  Membership is usually quite cheap, especially for students, and they usually have monthly events and screenings.  These are a great way to here about new techniques, see shorts, hear about courses and meet people.

Are there any chapters of computer graphics groups around your area?  Websites like CGTalk and VFXTalk have strong communities and there is a good chance that if someone took the initiative you could get a meetup organised.

What if you don’t really like going out and hanging out with people?  Too bad!  Get off your bum and get out there!  If you haven’t realised yet, this is a small industry and most of your jobs will come from friends or people you know.  The more people you know and get along with, the more likely you are to get a job.  I realise that socialising is not for everyone, and it is tough when you don’t know anybody at an event, but you are more than likely going to meet some interesting new people and have a good time if you put in a bit of effort.

Should we work for no monay? No.  And yes.  Maybe.  You may have some suspicions that there is no definitive answer but I think there are a few guidelines.

Surgeons usually get paid

It’s a topic that comes up quite a bit on message boards and mailing lists.  The industry mailing list I am on in Australia has taken the step of marking non-paying jobs differently to paying jobs because of people’s reactions to some dubious unpaid jobs.

There are different schools of thought on taking non-paying jobs.  Some people are against it no matter what, others think it’s okay if you are aware of the situation.

Here’s my rules:

If someone is getting paid on the job, you should get paid.  It doesn’t matter how much and it might only be a token amount.  If the Director is getting money, you should be getting money.  How much is up to you to work out with the person employing you.  If they say it will look great on your reel, that might be the case, but how many people do you know work for free? Even apprentice tradesmen get paid *something* and their work is contributing to their future job prospects.

If you are made aware of the financial situation and you still want to do it, then do it.  This might seem to contradict the first rule, but if you are told up front there is no pay and you are cool with that, then that is your decision.  If you are told that other people are getting paid and you want to do the project, go for it but don’t complain about conditions or the lack of pay.

Personally I think I should charge *something*,even if it is a small amount.  It makes me feel and act more professional, and it let’s the client know that they have to act profesionally as well.  This goes doubly for small projects where clients often have no idea of what the work actually entails and often want to make a lot of changes without paying for them.  Setting a base price and then a price per revision lets the client know that your time and skills have some value.

The problem is that so many people think that visual effects and animation are “fun” that they then assume that because it is so fun you should want to do it for free.  Last time I checked though, my mechanic likes what he does but he is quite clear that he wants to be paid for his work.  My doctor seems to enjoy his career but if I try to leave without paying, there are going to be issues.

You are a professional.  Professionals charge for their professional services.

Stu Maschwitz from his ProLost blog and a co-founder over at The Orphanage just announced that the studio will be closing down indefinitely.  This after The Orphanage was prime VFX house on “The Spirit”, with Stu supervising most of the VFX.

Again, I have to say that at this point I am having trouble seein how our industry is sustainable.  After speaking with a lot of different people who have worked at many facilities, it sems to me that many major studios, including the big guys, are operating on razor thin margins, and if a job doesn’t work out or they don’t pick up the next contract it is “See you later, don’t leave any assprints on the door on your way out.”

Given that VFX houses are constantly asked to produce the impossible with severely limited budgets and time constraints and you have an industry that is very precarious at the best of times.

Depressing, but I think the Visual FX industry is facing some tough times, and it will take something drastic for the major film studios to treat us with some respect.

Just a quick post today as this is a long weekend here in Australia and I have friends down to hit the pool and the BBQ.  Let that be a lesson to us all: while our jobs are great fun, drinking beer and hanging out with your friends is more conducive to a rounded lifestyle than sitting in front of a computer screen all day!

Here are a couple of links to message board threads and interviews with some senior guys in the visual effects industry on how the whole system operates.  If you are not yet in the industry, then this might be a bit of an eye opener.  There has been growing discontent amongst workers over pay and conditions and it found an outlet around a year ago when Meteor Studios in Canada folded after completing work on “Journey to the Center of the Earth” in 3D.  The problem was that they folded owing most of their workers a lot of money . . . money that they are still fighting to receive.

I will edit this post later this week with some of my thoughts, but to get you started, check out the following:

Discussion thread with Dave Rand (one of the Meteor artists) on CG Talk
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=2&t=652434&highlight=meteor+studio

Podcast interviews hosted by FX Guide with Dave Rand (Jul 30 2008) the Animation Guild (Aug 27 2008).
http://www.fxguide.com/fxpodcast.html

Screencast interview with veteran matte painter Harrison Ellenshaw hosted by FX Guide (Dec 31 2008 – WARNING – LARGE FILE SIZE!)
http://www.fxguide.com/fxguidetv.html