> experience of working on a film or television series that is underbid, understaffed, subject to unreasonable, inflexible deadlines, and endless directorial nitpicking: "pixel fucked"
This feels like working for a video game company. People overworked, underpaid, and doing it for the love of the creative arts and working on a name brand project. Similar things have happened at Electronic Arts.
There's a lot in modern day life that seems to depend on an endless supply of naive young folk who don't yet realize they're being taken advantage of yet. They have that belief that their situation will be different.
It's one of those things you can't tell people either, they have to experience it unfortunately, so the cycle continues.
Not sure how you fix that beyond regulation / protection for those folks.
In the film industry everyone knows they're being taken advantage of, it's very explicitly discussed at the lowest ranks of production. It's just that it's the only entrance to the field if you aren't wealthy or heavily connected. You have to suffer until you build your network and credits enough to pull yourself up. There's little to no delusion, just embracing the suck.
People will always be willing to suffer (maybe even enough to skirt paternalistic regulations that were enacted to protect them) when there is such an imbalance of supply vs demand. “Everybody” wants to be a movie director or actor or make AAA games but few such positions are available. It’s not a delusion if it’s a known gamble. I admire them for it, tbh.
> “As we’ve seen in other industries, in the early years, companies will burn through 20-year-olds like fuel to grow whatever business they’re in,” said Andrew. “But after a certain point, you’re going to either run out of people, or those who have been in the industry for a decade and now have kids just won’t stand to be treated that way any more.”
Union movements are on the rise because the status quo is a result of a power imbalance, not from necessity. If there are less movies with better VFX made by healthy staff, then so be it.
And, of course, there is no way for everybody to pull themselves up. You have to hope that you are one of the lucky few, while the rest are ground up and spat out by the machine.
I don't know much about VFX but that's certainly true in much of the scuba diving industry. They find young people who love to dive and want to make it a career, and sucker them into paying for training to become dive masters and instructors. Then those people get stuck working long hours for miniscule wages, always under constant pressure to cut corners on safety while trying to sell more equipment and training courses to customers. There are good dive shops and instructors who don't play that game but they are a minority.
In general be cautious about getting into any industry where people are there more for love than for money. That tends to create exploitive situations.
Or they have an understanding that they're being hazed (for lack of a better term) but if they make partner/finish residency they have a not necessarily cushy life but are, as you say, going to be well-paid and have a decent professional life if they like the work.
Sounds like working on a software project of literally any kind, minus one's ego necessarily driving the burnout truck (I know that's probably about 50/50)
Just to point out one of the threads talks about "From 3 potential job offers, to all of them on hold." from 1 day ago. This may be because the actors guild, and the screenwriters guild are both on strike right now and so nothing can really be produced at this point.
I think I remember reading that that season overall wasn't changed much - they just refilmed the last few scenes to resolve the plot immediately and end the season early, instead of going for a full season length.
One of the things that was said at the time was that the show was meant to be an anthology series where every season had a substantially different cast and so some of the strange actor reuse in Season 2 was alleged to be completely strike-related. (Though in practice how much was strike related and how much was contract related in that they apparently didn't actually correctly contract the actors for an anthology series and how much of it was meddling to keep well regarded cast members busy due to public reception/studio notes is all kind of up in the air, and probably entangled.)
Given that Ronald Moore has driven shows he’s worked on to similar absurd and horrid endings, like the similar religious subplot woven into the last season of DS9, I think we have a better culprit for the terrible last season of BSG.
Say what you want, but a series that actually wraps up its plot lines with any sort of coherent conclusion is miles above today's prevailing standard of one or two good seasons, followed by a bunch of filler-based mediocre seasons, followed by the show getting cancelled.
Is there an overproduction of artist hopefuls compared to the movies being made?
I would also guess differentiation is low. Any VFX studio is as good as the other, so every studio is paranoid about losing a movie deal, over not accommodating the directors whims?
this is one of the places I feel generative AI can do a lot of good. It can get rid of the routine VFX like changing an actors pant etc that VFX artists are inundated with and leave only the artistic work for VFX artists which is hopefully not as taxing and not as requiring of crunch
> Is there an overproduction of artist hopefuls compared to the movies being made?
Yes.
Hollywood in the general sense is also an industry packed to the brim with ego and wishful thinking. Nobody wants to rock the boat because, heaven forbid, an artist may never be allowed to live their dream working on the next Avatar or the next Toy Story for crossing the wrong person.
For better or worse, most young artists I've known are wishful thinkers. They each had a dream of working on the next Jurassic Park or the next equivalent to 2001 A Space Odyssey, or the next Frozen or whatever. Although the software industry is filled with aspirations of working at The Google or Meta, unlike programmers, artists in entertainment are willing to work for peanuts because they can't have their grand vision shattered.
The fantasy of being important is what fuels the entertainment industry. It's numerically infeasible for every artist to work on The Next Big Hit, but everyone is required to believe they can in order for there to be enough fresh artists to be chewed up and spat out.
I'm so glad I left animation and became a programmer. The worst coworkers in software pale in comparison to the giant throbbing dicks that exist everywhere in the entertainment industry. I can refuse to work weekends or, even more drastic, quit my job when the deal gets bad, and it's unlikely to permanently damage my career if it even does at all. My career isn't founded on a combination of free work and brown-nosing.
> this is one of the places I feel generative AI can do a lot of good.
I seriously think that studios aren't far from having their lunch totally eaten by small groups of individuals using various forms of AI. No doubt that GPT has been used in Hollywood already, but VFX and animation are stuck in the past in many ways. These studios are afraid to experiment, which is why they resort to using old school methods that are outclassed by individuals with deepfake tech.
Programmers have plenty of comfortable fallback options if they don't make it to FAANG.
Screenwriters and VFX artists, not so much. There are more people wanting to do these jobs than there are positions to be filled. That means anyone who isn't willing to put up with being used and abused can be easily replaced. It's why nearly every skilled trade in Hollywood has a union, because collective bargaining is often the only way to guarantee any sort of stability or fair treatment. VFX artist unfortunately don't have a useful union, so they get to experience firsthand what Hollywood was like for everyone else 90 years ago.
The unions/guilds set some floor for wages and conditions while working. But they don't really do a lot for the aspiring actor waiting tables between auditions for bit parts however much he believes he could be the next Tom Cruise.
> Programmers have plenty of comfortable fallback options if they don't make it to FAANG.
FAANG is pretty much US focus, although they happen to have a couple of sites outside.
So by definition programmers have to work elsewhere anyway.
Also not every culture sees programming as a worthy job, rather as kind of low level stuff that one has to endure for the real job, being a manager.
Naturally one can say since this is about Hollywood, outside US doesn't matter, even though the cinema working conditions is pretty much the same everywhere.
I'm not in the industry, but from talking to people that have been, VFX is one of those things that gets squeezed the most. It typically happens after principal photography is done, and the release date has been set in stone by the management and marketing machine at the studios. When you add the wide numbers of VFX houses, the lack of labor protections, and the ability to outsource to all corners of the world, there's so much competition that it's a race to the bottom with pricing and delivery dates.
You are correct in that the industry as a whole is not union. Most of the smaller vfx houses are not union.
However some of the larger vfx houses like ILM and some of the feature animation houses like Dreamworks are are union. (ILM is IATSE...not sure about others)
In my experience, whether or a vfx shop is union or not has little impact on salary and job stability.
I was 7 years at Rhythm & Hues, leaving the industry during the production of Life of PI. It gets this bad for several reasons, including: each VFX studio has between 3-5 feature films moving through it, at different stages of production, at a time, and often a few commercials as well; that equals between 1200 and 2800 digital artists and their support staff all working on the same corporate campus; by necessity, these technical artists have a range of experience, so there is also an education department, a constant flow of new software, and software freezes for a given production that may last 18+ months; so by necessity the staff is managed en mass with cafeteria food, around the clock render completions and hence 3-5 "dailies" per 24 hour period. One production's compute going over expectations, or production changes, or staff changes easily ripple in impact through the entire studio - all productions.
> this is one of the places I feel generative AI can do a lot of good. It can get rid of the routine VFX like changing an actors pant etc that VFX artists are inundated with and leave only the artistic work for VFX artists which is hopefully not as taxing and not as requiring of crunch
And the last decades' exponential increases in productivity could have lead to keynes' famous 15 hour workweek - except they didn't.
Instead, productivity got directed to more output and more profit and working hours stayed the same if not increased.
As such, I'm more predicting this will simply lead to less VFX artists being employed by the studios than for there being a substantial improvement in working conditions.
You’re right about the productivity. And many movie studios already own VFX studios. Netflix has Scanline, Disney has ILM, etc. But it is not super common.
I was more thinking about employment by the VFX studios themselves - i.e., if the article is right and VFX companies are already in a race to the bottom with respect to the movie studios (their customers), this race would likely swallow all productivity benefits that generative AI could provide.
It is more efficient for the business to hire the same guy for 45 hours than three guys for 15 hours. If we assume that all of them get their turn eventually, then this can only be done by rotating who gets employed.
I would rather businesses take a hit on efficiency and have our 15-hour work weeks. Maybe that'd provide an incentive for businesses to pursue making project management and hand-off among staff more efficient.
VFX has been turbo-fucked for a long time. I don't know quite why. Part of it is the employment law specific to the geography, e.g. comp time after 50 hours, overtime after 60 hours in Culver City (this seems to have changed since I worked there in 2005 though).
The studio I worked at lost a ton of money on films but did them for prestige, then tried to break even on grueling commercial and episodic work, all while pinching every penny imaginable--like firing a staff artist when his twins were born and bringing him back as a contractor to avoid paying his health insurance.
Around Superbowl time artists were forbidden (not physically, but by threat of e.g. "leave and you're fired") from leaving the studio for the weekend until all the Superbowl commercials were finished and rendering.
> Is there an overproduction of artist hopefuls compared to the movies being made?
Yes, this is true literally everywhere in the arts: there are far more aspiring artists in any given field than there is money to support as full-time artists, and the way the market for art works you end up with a very small number of artists making lots of money, a modest number of artists making barely-adequate money, and a whole lot of people making occasional incidental money but unable to devote themselves exclusively to the field because of lack of funds unless they have unrelated support, where the skill/quality differences between being in the top category and the bottom may be very narrow for individuals, even if they are notable on average, because there is so much volume that a lot of the filtering mechanisms that exist in practice are rough.
Hollywood in general has a surplus of hopefuls. But Hollywood is largely unionized. VFX is a glaring exception.
My friends who work in animation describe a constant back and forth between the union and the studios over demands for more work for the same pay. Generative AI will just make it easier for directors to ask for even more ludicrous tasks.
> But Hollywood is largely unionized. VFX is a glaring exception.
And, in fact, this one of the reasons why VFX gets so heavily overused for stuff that you could do in-camera.
Is the actor wearing the wrong pants? Well, reshooting that requires paying union actors, gaffers, camera operators, etc. to shoot it again. Fixing it in post means you pay a couple of ununionized VFX artists.
The problem is that when you start relying on this too much, then you eventually start shooting entirely without the pants. “We’ll fix it in post!”
It doesn’t happen with the actual costume department quite like that, but properly lit sets have definitely been widely replaced by expanses of greenscreen awash in nondescript lighting that hopes to vaguely match whatever the rendered surroundings turn out to be.
The Avengers films did exactly that. They filmed characters with random costumes because they hadn't done the designs yet. Then replaced the costumes with CG later.
They even did fakeouts by the trailers using even further different CG costumes.
Some of the reason they gave for that at the time wasn't just saving on real world costume designers by outsourcing it to "cheap" VFX teams, but also for added "security" to avoid "spoilers" leaking to the press in tabloid photos.
(Spoilers of a sort: My favorite meta-joke on all this was Spider-Man: Far From Home's "primary" Mysterio costume which had tabloids and fans doing all sorts of speculation what the CG composited costume on top of it would look like, given the Avengers situation, only to find out that was actually the outfit for many of Mysterio's scenes because it very well fit the character in that medium.)
You could just assemble a cast, bring them into a greenscreen studio, and shoot a complete matrix of poses and angles and lighting variations. Then synthesize the film from that when someone decides what it should be about.
This is ridiculous and completely untrue. They filmed the actors in special suits that could be tracked more easily. They added the suits as CG because the CG suits look much better and let the actors actually move around. Not only that but if the iron man or war machine masks go down and obscure their face they can transition to a full CG character and have them fly off.
this is one of the places I feel generative AI can do a lot of good. It can get rid of the routine VFX like changing an actors pant etc that VFX artists are inundated with and leave only the artistic work for VFX artists which is hopefully not as taxing and not as requiring of crunch
What are you basing any of this on? I have seen demos that would be incredible for previs and animatics but nothing that would pass for final quality.
Computer graphics research, software and hardware continues to march forward, that's a reason visual effects have progressed so much in the last 20 years.
From what I can gather and have read, two things can be true at the same time:
1) Viewers can tell the difference between good and bad VFX and have a lot of complaints about the quality of VFX on a lot of projects.
2) Studios don't seem to care. They care about price and about tight deadlines.
Marvel is getting criticized a lot for the quality of its VFX, which has been poor at times in recent years, and a bit culprit of that is that release dates are set with schedules for work. But rewrites and reshoots happen, which push back when VFX can do their work, but the release dates don't move. So this leads to a lot of rushed work.
Thank trash software. Keeping the ship afloat becomes more important, than wondering where the ship is heading. Thats what trash software does to ppls brains.
Its so bad, it allows (and requires) 600 ppl to sit together and produce a few seconds worth of mindless forgettable sensory over stimulation, to keep a 14 year old glued to his seat. I mean Bill Waterson does a better job with just a pencil.
On top of it, there arent enough over stimulation requiring eyeballs on the planet to sustain such a mindless mega machine(see Odlyzko Content is not King), that the trash software enables. Its natural the whole thing keeps breaking down regularly.
It will only change when people step back from keeping the ship afloat and ask where the ship should be heading.
The documentary "Jurassic Punk" tells a story about Steve Williams, a VFX artist who was central to the animation presented in several blockbuster films, including The Abyss, Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15095920/
Williams did not receive credit, nor benefit financially.
He did receive credit and he was paid by ILM. He also became a visual effects supervisor. Maybe he feels he didn't receive enough of the credit compared to Dennis Muren and Phil Tippet, but he was also not in charge of the show. He did end up in many behind the scenes interviews. If anyone didn't get enough credit, it was probably the texture painters, lookdev artists, shader writers and lighters who actually made the dinosaurs look realistic.
Honestly, I'm a little curious why VFX work has so much allure. It's a decent wage, but I don't see why that job specifically is worth it. Surely there are other jobs demanding less work while paying more money. Is it just because it's art? I feel like that sort of corporate "spend two weeks making a realistic fire which will be on screen for 3 seconds" can't be that fulfilling as art in itself, when you have essentially zero creative control.
The problems that you work to solve are not the usual "I need a new parameter for this API endpoint" type of work. It's fun (for a while) and crazy and even glamorous (watching something you've worked on in a theater with the public is great). Another nice thing is that, while most software written is very evanescent (almost every bit of software I have worked on in my 38-year career is gone), my name in the credits of some very popular movies will be around 100 years after I'm dead. That's pretty cool.
I worked in VFX for almost ten years. It's incredibly fun! I absolutely loved making movies and I worked with some amazing artists. It pays terribly, but it was the most fun I've ever had in a job.
I would add that there are really challenging problems and continual technical development. And since each movie comes with its own new set of requirements, each one is a fresh slate of new, crazy problems. For me personally, I love the short iterative cycle between math and an output image.
I worked on tools for artists and you're totally right. The fast iteration was so great; it felt more like good ol' fashioned stay-up-all-night hacking for the joy of it than anything else I've ever done professionally.
I'm sure it's pretty fun to see the stuff you worked on in theaters, and from what I've seen on the 'VFX Artists React' show that Corridor Crew puts out the VFX artists actually do have some amount of creative control - depending on what they're doing.
Maybe the industry will eat itself and we can go back to film making where it's the story that drives the film.
Edit: watched "Life After Pi" linked to here in the comments section. I feel my comment above is too abrasive now. The VFX guys don't deserve this crap. I still dislike the modern "Blockbuster" however.
My Cousin Vinny did it. Honestly I don't think VFX has ever truly helped a comedy.
Imagine what that movie could have been with cheap gratuitous CGI. Instead of Vinny getting covered in real mud, you could have slow motion closeups of glossy mud drops with fluid simulation flying through the air, the camera spinning around the mud in three dimensions before it cakes Vinny. But would such a visual spectacle make the movie funnier? I don't think so.
And quite frankly, She Hulk would look a lot better if they simply found a buff actress and painted her green.
Not in general. In the context of modern tv, particularly on the marvel side. The finale is she hulk complaining to marvel / Disney that the show was becoming a heap of generic spectacle garbage with a big superhero fight even though the premise of the show was light legal comedy.
It’s a good observation. Marvel has flubbed the landing on almost every tv series even if the original premises and pilots were good. I don’t think they executed on the bit very well, but props for trying I guess.
Edit: I don’t agree with it being better with a green woman though. It did benefit a lot from it clearly being the same actress in both forms. There’s a time and a place for practical effects. That wasn’t it.
> Edit: I don’t agree with it being better with a green woman though. It did benefit a lot from it clearly being the same actress in both forms.
I think it should have been done with the same actress. A buff actress can be made to appear more or less buff with clever wardrobe, camera angles, lighting, etc. In some scenes you hide her muscles under loose clothing or flat lighting, and in other scenes you emphasize them. Forced perspective can make her look taller or shorter when needed. Playing with the focal length could change the apparent shape of her face as well.
CGI muscles completely ruins the whole deal for me. At the very least they should have done the opposite; hired a buff actress and slimmed down her muscles with CGI when necessary; I think that would look less fake than what they did.
Maybe not the best example and maybe I was misinterpreting it, but Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness was VFX-heavy and it was the funniest movie I'd seen in a while when it came out. Not strictly a comedy and maybe I am too easily amused.
Best hedge funds write their own software so should VFX studios. If you are using the same tools as guys from Poland you can not expect to compete on anything but project management skills and price
I suspect that many here will disagree with me on this, but CGI has become so irritating to me -- right in the middle of the uncanny valley -- that it is one of the reasons why I've tended to avoid modern movies. Watching that stuff is like the visual equivalent of hearing fingernails on a chalkboard.
(I know that not all CGI is that way, and I see quite a lot without knowing it's CGI, but most movies have at least some bad CGI in them too).
I work in the VFX business, formerly managing a VFX house and now negotiating contracts with studios and production companies.
A few random thoughts…
There is a massive industry-wide labor shortage and a massive surplus of work to be done. Artist rates are way up, there are more junior artists than ever, there are more shows with more VFX than ever, VFX shops are turning away tons of work, new shops are springing up, investment groups are buying and consolidating VFX houses to try and become big players, etc. This is a boom time for VFX.
This is absolutely a (labor) seller’s market. Individuals and companies that are not taking advantage of this to create a better environment for themselves are missing a huge opportunity. There’s never been a better time to quit a job you don’t like and find a better one. Or to start a company!
> That said, there are a number of (very large) companies where it is absolutely normal to work 6 days a week 10 to 12 hours a day. This is not a secret, it’s been very common for a very long time. Personally, I wouldn’t work for a company like that.
Says the former manager of a VHX house who now negotiates with studios… he’d literally be one of the people responsible for this situation.
It’s a shortage of employers willing to pay workers. Thats why they cant get enough artists
Not really. I’ve never worked for a studio that treats people like that, and wouldn’t. And I’ve been in a unique position to see how these situations unfold. It is very complex, very fluid, and difficult to manage. I think the bottom line is just that it is too difficult to do correctly for most studios (people).
However, you are correct in that people in my position are often at fault - but executive leadership ALWAYS signs off.
The labor shortage situation has changed a lot since then but it was never a wages problem. I knew people at studios offering double their standard rate who still couldn’t find enough qualified people.
There are similar comments in OP about salaries and changing expectations/demands by labor discovering its negotiating power, but it's buried at the end so no one is reading that far.
> Now, not only were VFX houses responsible for conjuring vast fictional cities, bustling crowds of tens of thousands, and cascading waterfalls, but they would also spend months fixing mistakes: digitally erasing visible wig lines in period dramas, inserting absent props, snipping away errant strands of hair, tucking in double chins.
Take with a pinch of salt because I don't work in the industry, but I'm not convinced this "VFX for everything" approach is cheaper or results in better films. I still think a lot of old films blow the modern counterparts out of the water.
The very fact that they had to use practical effects and physical film was expensive meant you couldn't just shoot unlimited takes without burning through money (unless you were Kubrick who was notorious for doing takes from every angle). The whole "fix it in post" mentality leads to sloppy, rushed work and a lack of thinking and commitment on behalf of the director and producing team. See here[1]:
> Even after shots are exhaustively delivered, Marvel is allegedly "infamous" for requesting "tons of different variations" until one earns the green light.
and even worse:
> We've literally made up entire third acts of a film, a month before release, because the director didn't know what they wanted," one source said about Marvel in general.
You would never have had this back in the day. You planned out your big set piece in advance and you shot it, and you better get it fucking right because your head was on the chopping block if you didn't. Instead, the directors and producers are now offloading their responsibility to get things right on to the VFX artists. Maybe the demands of HD and 4K means that such work is necessary compared to back in the old days because stuff like wig lines and errant hairs wouldn't be visible due to the resolution. But some of me wonders if it is overproduction, which I think a lot of contemporary music nowadays also suffers from.
Another evil is film companies refusing to create a "everything-in-one-place" content model like the music industry has done with Spotify, with the end result being an endless churn of content in an attempt to justify the subscription over their rivals. I imagine this is a contributing factor to the rushed "fix it in post" mentality but I can't see why film would be any different to any other industry - where taking your time to get it right the first time ends up being faster over the long run.
Often there is a choice between not showing a thing happen on screen because it wouldn't be practical/economical, or using VFX. Now suppose for instance you're making a disaster movie about a tsunami hitting NYC; your options are doing it with scale models (which will look fake or limit you to very quick shots of the disaster), doing it with computers, or not making the movie at all. That sort of effect for that sort of movie isn't really negotiable.
But when the effect isn't critical to the movie and not having the effect was a perfectly valid choice? Like for instance, a character throws a cigar and the director thinks it would be cool to have the camera follow and spin around the cigar as it's flying through the air. Maybe you could do that for real with a sophisticated robot arm holding the camera, but that's expensive. In a previous era, the director would forget about that idea, it wouldn't get into the movie and nobody would care that it wasn't in the movie. But now that computer imagery is cheap and abundant, a director can have that gratuitous effect. And if it doesn't look like crap when the movie is released, it will almost certainly look like crap a few years later. The movie would have been better off without the effect in the first place. But because VFX is so cheap, it is now used for nonsense like this all the time and it makes movies worse on the whole.
One of the first movies I noticed this in was Fight Club. At the start of the movie when the MC is in the office, there's a long scene of the camera flying in between garbage in a garbage can. It's all CGI; there would have been no way to get a real camera flying around in between empty cans and donuts wrappers. It's an impossible shot to do for real, but they could do it with CGI. It also looks like crap, completely fake. I saw this movie in theaters and it looked fake then, and even worse now. In an era before CGI, the director could have settled on having a macro camera pan across a pile of trash without flying and twisting around inside of the trash. A real camera filming real trash. It would not have been as dynamic, but it would look real and continue to look real forever.
Basically, the cheapness of VFX seems to blind many directors to cases in which less-is-more. Now we have more-is-more movies packed to the brim with every gratuitous effect anybody can think of and it all ages like milk.
I think it’s kind of natural for artists to demand higher standards than is truly necessary, even for discerning audiences. Something that many people are unaware of is that even for classical music, it’s standard practice to do multiple takes on a given piece and the stitch together the best parts in editing. However, I think I speak for a lot of fans when I say live recordings are just as good if not better than these Frankenstein recordings, so why bother going to all that trouble?
A lot of design work is like that. I'm willing to believe we sometimes notice things at a subconscious level but do we actually benefit from the 10 million (or whatever) fonts in existence or from people agonizing for days over the most subtle difference in colors you'll be viewing on a non-color corrected monitor.
I guess there's no unions for VFX work? They're meant to prevent companies from making unreasonable demands of workers, that are described many times in the article.
So the general consensus from the comments appears to be that there are far more people wanting these jobs than there are jobs available. So the solution should be to discourage people from entering this profession. It's supply and demand. And currently, that balances toward the studios. Weed out the excess supply and the studios will need to pay more to the remaining workers. As for the people that can't imagine doing something else? Welcome to the real world where lots and lots of people do lots and lots of jobs they don't love. At a certain point, you have to give up on the dream job to pay the bills.
you draw some blobs in a 2 or 3 dimensional space and label them and tell the AI to animate a scene with e.g. a pirate talking to his parrot. It sticks the things in the indicated spaces.
The reality is they are actually not as well paid as they think they are. If your employer can afford to pay you $300k or more and still bring in billions in profit, you are generating a whole lot of profit that does nothing but go to the top to pay for another yacht.
Being better paid than the lowest of people doesn't make you well compensated. People need to stop making this a rat race and considering pay only by who they make more than.
But CEOs and Lawyers both have at least informal in-groups that do such gatekeeping. Law school is full of aggressive hazing, and a requirement to burn yourself out to please someone else, and CEO and director boards are the epitome of nepotism. Of course they don't need unions, they are the exact power dynamic unions are an attempt to balance against.
I once used the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement (union contract) as a model for a hypothetical software engineering union at Apple. Pro athletes are a great example of white collar organized labor.
If Apple devs had the same revenue sharing agreement the NBA players do and received a similar share of Apple’s revenue, the median pay would be around $600k. That’s just the median, think about that.
Just because engineers are well-compensated compared to the rest of the economy doesn’t mean that we can’t benefit from organized labor.
I like the structure of that thought experiment, but if anything I’m surprised that the median Apple engineer (pay around $200k?) has within a small integer multiple of the leverage of NBA stars.
I’d expect the latter to be much harder to replace than that.
I don’t really think this is a problem everywhere in all industries. I think that there is something inherently corrupt about the business culture in the entertainment industry that attracts an abnormally high concentration of psychopaths and sociopaths.
What I don't understand is why the VFX industry doesn't follow market dynamics and pay the artists what they are worth given the talent shortage. Or maybe they are and that story isn't getting told?
Wages only go up when employees refuse to work for less.
Sadly, people who work in video games and movies are some of the most overworked and underpaid professionals relative to the value they provide because they have been socialized to see themselves as artists who are "doing what they love" so it's about "more than the money". Which allows studios to exploit them, because for the studios it is very much about the money.
If game developers were just as willing to work for FAANG then conditions would improve for them overnight. Same as if VFX artists were willing to do mobile app UX design. But as long as they stick to only their passion, they fail to exert any financial pressure to improve wages or working conditions.
Passion-based industries don't ever follow proper "market dynamics", video game programmers are paid less because there's always someone else who will take the job at a lesser rate because they are passionate about it. You try to pay less for a CRM developer and they will just find another gig while you won't find anyone as qualified because that job doesn't have a motivation outside of the monetary transaction for the labour.
Market dynamics is just a model, as with any model it doesn't fit reality perfectly, it breaks down at the edges.
It can be argued that it is a market dynamic, and (if you were to somehow control for everything else) the difference between the pay of an game programming job and an average white-collar boring office programming job is the market's value of that passion.
That comparison may coldly boil down something people feel very deeply about, but I'd also argue the market is already doing that.
Is that the market really breaking down at the edges, or fitting perfectly?
I your examples of the video game programmers being paid less, it is because their compensation is in two parts: the money and the pleasure, astisfaction of passion, & the prestige of working on video games. In contrast, working on a CRM project has no other pleasures nor prestige, so those companies must may more dollars.
Seems the difference in [pleasure, passion, & prestige] could even be quantifiable by measuring the paycheck differences?
> Passion-based industries don't ever follow proper "market dynamics", video game programmers are paid less because there's always someone else who will take the job at a lesser rate because they are passionate about it.
Hammer hits nail on head, bulls eye. I've been a graphics programmer for 45 years, from research in the early 80's, through 3D video games, and years of Academy Award VFX studio work. It is the passion: making the media that captivates imaginations, and an ever visible stream of new applicants whose work looks really appealing - so you better shine or you'll be replaced.
The employee/employer power dynamics are clearly very different than in e.g. software engineering:
> A clause in Angell’s contract reportedly required him to pay a £30,000 penalty should he quit in the middle of a project.
I can't imagine anyone signing that kind of contract in tech.
Employees probably have less bargaining power than in tech, since the skills aren't as transferrable. The employers are just contractors being squeezed by the studios both on cost and on extra work, and pass that squeeze onto the employees. And since the VFX houses aren't the ones making the profits on the final movie, running a VFX studio and trying to get the best people (and best product) by promising better conditions doesn't actually work.
> In 2014, three visual effects artists launched a class action lawsuit alleging that between 2004 and 2010, numerous big studios – including Disney, Pixar, Lucasfilm, DreamWorks Animation, and Sony Pictures – had colluded in setting salary limits and avoiding hiring artists from other studios. (The studios settled the case without admitting liability, paying out a combined £140 million settlement.)
My guess is that the “gig” nature of animation jobs disadvantages workers because they’re constantly needing to look for the next gig, which makes the hiring process a race to the bottom. The lack of job stability increases the likelihood that workers will accept less-than-favorable terms. We see this in game dev, and more recently, the Hollywood writers strike.
It's like game devs and pilots - a cool job lots of kids wanted to do growing up, so there's a glut of new talent eager to be used up and burned out for pennies.
I share the sentiment. It was my wife's (then girlfriend's) explicit wish that I don't chase my passions in such an environment, and I'm really grateful for that after the years.
It's probably also the case that (not so well-paying) passion jobs become less interesting when they're your full-time, perhaps long hours, job and you don't really control what you work on. I was pretty passionate about photography once upon a time but I realized (correctly) that I'd probably end up doing photography for some small-time newspaper (when those still existed), some organization's public relations, or commercial photography--and not Life Magazine.
Market dynamics only works that way in employer/employee relationships if the workers push for it enough. From the ealrier discussion someone linked to above: “The elephant in the room here is that VFX, unlike many other film professions, isn’t properly unionised” – this may play into the situation. It may also/instead be that a lot of VFX work is done (once you get down to the individual workers) in short term contracts, a bit like the “gig economy” situations seen in other industries, which seems to easily create a barrier for worker protections.
This feels like working for a video game company. People overworked, underpaid, and doing it for the love of the creative arts and working on a name brand project. Similar things have happened at Electronic Arts.