... Rhythm & Hues must find a buyer by mid-March if it is going to recover out of Chapter 11, the company said in a court filing this week. The El Segundo-based effects studio ... tapped Houlihan Lokey two weeks ago to help with a sale as it continued to operate in the short term.
Out of 80 entities contacted by the firm, at least 16 have signed nondisclosure agreements and commenced due diligence ahead of a sale hearing proposed for March 19. But according to court documents, the $17 million DIP loan from Universal and Fox and additional $4.9 million from Legendary allocated toward projects for each respective studio will run out by mid-month. If a buyer is not found by then, Rhythm & Hues says it will be unable to offset overhead costs and maintain staff necessary to secure and execute new work. ...
Employees not getting paid (or fed?) is old stuff for many scarred veterans working in visual effects. The company tanks, the paychecks bounce, and you clean out your cubicle and move on.
I was talking today with an IA staffer who makes his living organizing and negotiating. He said:
The visual effects industry is shaking out. I think it will end up like production coordinators on live-action shoots, where one guy has the truck and rents the equipment and hires crew. And the studio pays him.
That's how the visual effects industry will be: One guy with the software and hardware, hiring the crew to do the digital effects. The houses will be gone. It will be studios directly paying coordinators and crews. ..
Well, his guess is as good as anybody's. I tend to think it won't be so simple. There will be different models, and corporate conglomerates will use different approaches, depending on the size and complexity of the movies and their accompanying effects.
Handing responsibility to some effects wrangler might work on mid-level productions with a limited number of scenes needing work, but for big ticket blockbusters with wall-to-wall effects and hard release dates, it's going to take large staffs working lots of hours.
The conglomerates will move work to Vancouver or Montreal where subsidies are abundant and they can keep tabs on the crew, but they won't be shipping their high-budget darlings to some vfx sub-contractor in Mumbai, because face it: Diz Co. won't be willing to risk the worldwide holiday rollout of Star Wars X with an Indian sub-contractor who can't deliver elements on time.
No matter how you slice it, visual effects for high-end movies aren't going to become cheap or simple because Robert Iger or Sumner Redstone wills it to be so. The only way to ultimately control costs is have directors who know what they want, own the ability to communicate their desires to the effects staff before principal photography, and understand that fifteen do-overs of exploding rocket ships or rampaging space aliens will cause effects budgets to balloon ... regardless of how generous state subsidies are.
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One guy with the software and hardware, hiring the crew to do the digital effects. The houses will be gone.
No more VFX houses suggests the end of VFX symphonies like Richard Parker, Hulk and Gollum. Those VFX took a seasoned crew and years of infrastructure to pull off.
Perhaps the large animation houses like Pixar, Disney and Dreamworks can continue to carry the VFX torch..? Big-budget animated feature films often boast amazing VFX (ex: Merida's hair, Rapunzel's hair, Puss in Boots tornado...).
The animation studios are already crunched for time delivering their own movies. They don't have the resources to spare to do VFX work.
The animation studios are already crunched for time delivering their own movies. They don't have the resources to spare to do VFX work.
I do not expect animation studios to create VFX for future live-action films.
I was thinking animation studios could continue to break new VFX ground in their own films if the VFX shops disappeared.
I don't think that VFX studios will go away. They're necessary for the complex visual effects of big budget studios (five guys in their garage -- or a little store front -- won't be able to pull it off.)
No, bigger organizations will be necessary, but the business structures that have existed until now will have to change.
It's distressing to me to read this kind of thing when VFX is more than one can shake a stick at because of the substantial effort and talent that goes into it. I just don't understand why a profession that is so involved is vastly under appreciated. I don't think the VFX houses will go away either. The job is really huge... It does make sense to have the directors have a better understanding of what they want... It is after all why storyboards are around...
I just don't understand why a profession that is so involved is vastly under appreciated.
Two thoughts:
1) Almost no one outside of VFX knows what VFX artists do. My own parents couldn't tell you what I do for a living outside of naming one or two software packages.
2) If VFX artists do the job right, the audience does not notice the VFX. Not everyone who saw Life of Pi realized that the tiger and ocean were digital.
I do not think a lack of appreciation is restricted to VFX artists, though. I think the Big Six would love to pay the rest of the entertainment industry subsistence wages if those pesky folks weren't organized.
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