Green Shirts

We're informed they will be worn at a certain speech.

As President Obama visits DreamWorks Animation’s Glendale campus on Tuesday, visual effects artists, frustrated by the outsourcing of jobs to foreign countries that offer generous subsidies, are planning a rally outside the DreamWorks Animation campus in Glendale.

An effort also is under way to get those attending the speech — largely restricted to studio employees — to wear green shirts in solidarity on the issue and to call the president’s attention to the problem. The green shirts represent a blank greenscreen — the message being “This is your movie without visual effects.” The green color has been adopted as the symbol of protests over runaway vfx production.

Digital artists move freely between animation and visual effects companies, and many current DWA employees have worked at companies that are now shrunken or defunct as vfx work has followed subsidies abroad. DWA itself had layoffs in February, and those laid-off employees had fewer alternatives with vfx work gone from California. ...

One of the organizers of the demonstrations, former Digital Domain topper Scott Ross, said via email that the point of the green shirts is to raise the issue of “why are we letting vfx, one of the great American creative industries, be bought by foreign subsidies?” The goal among organizers is to get hundreds of artists at Obama’s speech to wear green. ...

This isn't complicated.

The goal here is to neutralize governments' abilities to bribe movie/visual effects companies into working in their jurisdiction. Corporations love financial incentives, but governments should be induced to not dole them out. The incentives should be the quality and talent of the work force. The rest should be up to the magic of the marketplace.

(Other articles on the same subject here and here and here.)