VFX Houses in Trouble

My first impulse was to post my thoughts on yesterday's Academy Award winners and I will get around to that in my next post, but instead I thought of sharing my thoughts on a topic close to the hearts of fans of big popcorn movies like myself, and it's the fact that a number of our beloved visual effects vendors appear to be in some serious financial trouble.

It was a sad moment when the visual effects crew for the film Life of Pi went up to receive one of the film's four Oscars, and the leader of the team and designated spokesperson Bill Westenhofer, during his acceptance speech which was unfortunately cut short, disclosed that the visual effects vendor for the film, FX house Rhythm & Hues (previous Oscar winner for Babe: The Gallant Pig and The Golden Compass), was facing bankruptcy, similar to what happened to Digital Domain, the vendor that James Cameron started, not too long ago.

Movies, especially the kind that make a billion dollars at the global box-office, owe a lot to their visual effects crews. As another blogger pointed out, without the effects work of R & H, Life of Pi would just have a kid on a boat in a water tank. There would be no open sea, and no tiger. Ang Lee has talked at length in interviews about the challenges of adapting a fantastical novel once deemed "unfilmable." Well, had it not been for R & H, Life of Pi would have remained unfilmable, unless Ang Lee had dared to actually put his star at sea in a boat with a man-eating tiger for company.

VFX are hugely important, even in movies without fantastical creatures or giant robots, because they make possible things that would otherwise not be possible without building enormous sets or putting the actors or stuntmen in peril, among other things. Life of Pi is an extreme, and therefore appropriate, example of just how important VFX has become over the last several years, but there are many, many others.

For all of that, apparently paying the vendors is one of the last things on some studios' minds. Apparently, unless an effects vendor is Industrial Light and Magic, they're not worth paying up front. Truth be told, I don't even known if ILM get paid up front.

Of course, some vendors have seen the writing on the wall, particularly the simple fact that labor is cheaper overseas, and outfits like Sony Picture Imageworks (the Spider-Man movies) and even the aforementioned ILM have set up shop in Asia, with SPI having offices in India and ILM setting up in Singapore. As an Asian I may yet see my countrymen benefit from this trend as VFX houses come flocking to this region looking for cheap labor. The technology transfer and transmission of know-how may yet mean top-class VFX coming from the Philippines someday.

What saddens me, though, is that these men and women are clearly the unsung heroes of today's blockbusters, and Hollywood, a multi-billion dollar industry, has clearly not been giving them their due.

Anyway, if all the VFX houses in Hollywood have to pack up and move to Asia, I hope they are able to keep their heads above water, and that above all else, they maintain their standard of quality which, over the years, has made Hollywood blockbusters so much fun to watch.