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arts / rec.arts.sf.tv / Inside Hollywood’s Visual Effects Crisis

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o Inside Hollywood’s Visual Effects CrisisUbiquitous

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Inside Hollywood’s Visual Effects Crisis

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From: web...@polaris.net (Ubiquitous)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv,alt.hollywood,rec.arts.movies,rec.arts.sf.tv
Subject: Inside Hollywood’s Visual Effects Crisis
Date: Fri, 05 Aug 2022 12:03:56 -0400
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Summary: https://defector.com/inside-hollywoods-visual-effects-crisis
Keywords: https://defector.com/inside-hollywoods-visual-effects-crisis
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 by: Ubiquitous - Fri, 5 Aug 2022 16:03 UTC

A head of hair is a wild, unreliable thing. It never stays the same length.
It never stays in the same place, unless you have Doctor Strange amounts of
pomade on you. Look in the mirror right now and you�ll inevitably find not
one, but many stray hairs poking out this way and that. It�s unavoidable but
also quite natural for hair to behave this way.

It is also a massive problem if you happen to be making a film or a
television show. When you shoot an actor in one location but have to
digitally relocate them to another, which happens quite frequently, you have
to bring along every last follicular imperfection with them. According to a
compositor who worked on the first Avengers movie, this is not an easy task.
Far from it.

�The heli-carrier sequence was shot on a runway in New Mexico. Scarlett
Johansson had this curly red wig on. We had to figure out how to get sky
behind her head instead of mountains. That was a huge pain in the ass.�

The compositor�s job is to merge all the elements from a movie, from the
principal photography to the special and visual effects, into a single, final
shot: the one you see in the theater or on your TV at home. For Johansson�s
wig, the compositor and their team struggled to seamlessly blend the
actress�s fake tresses into the finished background. They digitally cloned
her wig. They feathered it. They blurred the edges to more easily integrate
it. They even tried getting the original wig Johansson wore on set, so they
could shoot the wig by itself on a green screen and then marry those shots
with the original footage. In the end, they spent over two weeks working on
that single head of hair, for an expository sequence in The Avengers that you
almost certainly don�t remember.

�If I looked at the shot now,� that compositor said, �I could probably point
out to you all of the morphs and dissolves that most people don�t see when
watching it casually.�

That�s not the only time wigs have caused VFX artists headaches. Another
source working on a period TV show said that they blew �80 percent� of their
effects budgets fixing visible wig lines in the locked picture. This is the
cost of filmmaking now. It�s not just in the battle scenes. In today�s
Hollywood, compositors, along with all of their colleagues, are often left to
clean up all of the messes left by writers, actors, directors, producers, and
all of the other name-brand talent.

Those messes can be enormous�sometimes the crew on the set will outright
forget to shoot something�and they can also be tiny, as tiny as a strand of
hair. What matters most, though, is that those messes are forever growing, as
more and more of what doesn�t go quite right on set is being left to a post-
production workforce that is disparate, overworked, confused, and exploited.

In the process of reporting this story, Defector talked to a dozen people who
all work in various aspects of post-production: compositors, supervisors,
technicians, generalists, VFX coordinators, colorists, editors, and more. All
were granted anonymity due to signing nondisclosure agreements, as well as
fear of retaliation within the industry. And all described experiencing
similar problems with their work, across projects of various budgets and
sizes, including The Walking Dead, Moon Knight, a terrible sequel to 300, and
Guillermo del Toro�s upcoming Netflix series, Cabinet of Curiosities.

These workers are part of a beloved art form undergoing a rebirth, on the
fly, across a global patchwork of studios, effects houses, boutique shops,
and freelance contractors. Visual effects departments didn�t even exist,
particularly in television, until roughly a decade ago. Now they, along with
secondary effects houses, are being tasked with a sizable portion, if not a
majority, of post-production duties on shows that have hard premiere dates
which rarely, if ever, get moved. One source told Defector that studios
almost never take post-production staffing into account when they set a
release date. �It�s so low on the pole that it�s not a consideration.�

Once the time comes to do that post-production work, the crunching begins.
These are workers who, similar to video game developers, will work more than
14-hour days for days on end, on long-gestating projects and on emergency,
two-day turnaround jobs. Many of them work freelance. Others work for mammoth
VFX houses like MPC, which in July announced that it was freezing pay raises
for all employees, according to the Animation and Visual Effects Union. (MPC
did not respond to a request for comment.) Some work in Los Angeles, others
work in effects hubs like Vancouver, and still others move to whichever city
has enough tax incentives for Hollywood to plant its flag and make it the
next effects hub. There�s a cycle to this, as laid out by one compositor:

�When you say �Hollywood,� you�re talking about a culture that had over a
century to build itself in one place, and that�s not really happening with
effects right now. Artists move to the next place, then to the next place,
then to the next place.�

But no matter where they ply their trade, and despite the technology they
have on hand, these artists can�t always fix everything they touch. And what
they cannot fix becomes a problem for the consumer, who ends up getting
lower-quality visual effects for their dollar. Audiences have been exposed to
enough shoddy digital effects this century that the term �CGI� itself now
implies poor craftsmanship. This problem is so widespread in Hollywood, not
to mention accepted, that producers have their own acronym for effects work
that passes muster for them but might not for audiences: a final approval
note of CBB, for Could Be Better. And producers aren�t the only ones to both
acknowledge the problem and let it slide. Oscar-winning writer/director Taika
Waititi recently felt free to mock the visual effects in his own movie, Thor:
Love and Thunder.

https://youtu.be/QYl48TKSAcE

That Waititi would so playfully deride work done by his people, in a film he
directed, shows how strangely disconnected he is to those people and, by
extension, to the work they do that eventually bears his possessory credit.
That disconnect is rampant. Not just at Marvel, but everywhere. One
coordinator I spoke with said the show he was working on was using 15
different effects houses at the same time. One former VFX producer told us
that his house would routinely outsource their own assignments to other shops
without telling the client they were doing so, a practice that they say is
common within the industry. It�s just not that you can�t see how your effects
have been sourced, but that many of the people in charge of the movie you�re
watching can�t see it either, until it�s already been released and they feel
free to mock it.

As one post-production manager told Defector, �I think that this is a pinch
point economically for studios where you can achieve savings by, honestly,
mistreating employees.�

Every project in Hollywood begins with an idea. Whether the idea is original,
recycled, or stolen is beside the point. What matters is that this is the
freest part of the endeavor: the moment where anything can be anything,
because what creative person ever wants to limit their own imagination? After
all, George R.R. Martin, a former TV writer, deliberately wrote his A Song of
Ice and Fire novels to be unfilmable. What Martin couldn�t have known back
when he started was that visual-effects technology would soon catch up to his
vision, allowing his epic to be fully realized, not to mention completed, by
its namesake HBO series (although that series itself had a couple of highly
memorable visual fuckups). So if HBO was able to make Game of Thrones, who
doesn�t want to believe that Hollywood magic can make any idea, big or small,
live in full on a screen?

It can be done, but then the question becomes who will be creating those
impossible visuals, and how much time and money they�ll have to do it. In
Hollywood, the people who make this magic happen are broken down into two
camps: visual effects and special effects. Special effects, also known as
practical effects, cover effects done in camera, like models, stunts, and
riggings. Visual effects cover all of the digitally generated effects that
are inserted into the project after shooting is complete. For the majority of
the film industry�s existence, practical effects were the dominant form,
spanning from the stop-motion monsters of 1933�s King Kong all the way to
George Lucas creating miniatures for Star Wars in 1977 that, when put on
celluloid and projected on the big screen, turned into breathtaking Star
Destroyers.

There was one old Harrison Ford project where they made him up, but
we had to remove his double chin. He was old and flabby, and so we
gave him a facelift. It was no big deal. It was just funny.

However, at the turn of this century, when Lucas relied almost entirely on
green screens to film his Star Wars prequels�using non-sets that limited his
actors� ability to get into character�VFX emerged as the preferred way to
make the unfilmable filmable. Studios today don�t have to manipulate clay
figurines or build miniatures if they don�t want to. Or, more accurately, if
they don�t want to pay for it. And why would they? Why risk saddling Steven
Spielberg with a broken mechanical shark for Jaws, forcing him to engineer
creative story solutions to an on-set crisis, when they could simply farm the
creation of that shark out to post-production instead? Those guys can make
anything, can�t they? After all, as one source told me, �There�s really
nothing else in the VFX world that hasn�t been done yet.�


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