There’s a joke in the visual effects industry that goes like this: Someone hears you work on films, so they ask you, “What movie made you cry?” The artist will respond, “In theaters or in the office?”
In 2013 the visual effects studio Rhythm and Hues won the Academy Award for Best Special Effects for work on Life of Pi. (The studio was also nominated in the same category for declare bankruptcy.
“Essentially, partway through the movie, the director [Ang Lee] made a big change to the tiger [in Life of Pi], so Rhythm and Hues had to go back and redo almost all their work. And it cost them so much money to do so, and they were already working on such a thin profit margin, that it bankrupted them,” said David, a VFX artist. “So the studio literally went bankrupt just before they won the Oscar for Best VFX.”
However, another source, Jeff, who was involved in Life of Pi disagrees. Blaming any single person or decision would be reductive. “Client-side production (ie: Ang Lee, Producers, etc) put the show on hold partway through post production… because the third act of the film was being re-worked, and Toby Maguire’s role in it was being replaced as part of a series of reshoots.”
In a gamble that didn’t turn out, the founder of the studio, John Hughes, attempted to retain his staff and contractors during the pause rather than attempt to staff up again when work resumed. “I respect them for what they tried to do but, in hindsight, they avoided a small problem only to cause a monumental one in its stead. All of that being said, [Rhythm and Hues]’s collapse was due to a series of unfortunate circumstances and decisions, and no one show—even one as large and important as Life of Pi—was the single point of failure.”
Marvel Studios, like just about every other production company, hires studios to produce VFX. And in order to work for Marvel, or any of the five or so production companies out there that are offering big-budget VFX work that keeps VFX studios afloat, studios continuously underbid each other in order to appeal to an increasingly-small client base.
It works like this. First, the production company sends out a dossier of shots that need VFX work. Studios might get a shot description that simply reads “an alien spaceship appears.” A bidding producer at a studio will review those shot descriptions in order to create an estimate for the bid, but this is more of an art form than a science.
“It’s a race to the bottom,” David said. “Because when the big [production companies] say they need work done, [the VFX studios] undercut each other so much that by the time they finally get that contract, they’ve bid so low they’re lucky to break even. And so that forces these VFX studios to operate at very low margins.”
Why are we only hearing about Marvel?
Marvel is so prolific, and has so many projects going on, they have to hire dozens of studios at a time, all over the world. So, not only is underbidding happening based on domestic competition, but also based on the assumption that other countries will be exploiting labor loopholes and tax incentives.
“For example, the UK doesn’t have any paid overtime in any industry,” said H, a production coordinator, “and because they don’t have to legally pay anyone overtime, when they bid a show that might cost them $15 million to do the work, a UK studio might say, ‘Well, we’ll do it for ten.’ So if they rack up 200 hours of overtime a week in London, it doesn’t affect the bottom line… It’s not costing the studio any money to force you to work through this crunch delivery.”
A Senior VFX Artist, Sam, who has worked on six Marvel films across their career, agrees. “Those London companies are awful. All of the British companies that I’ve dealt with have been really brutal.”
Location-based tax incentives also drive down bids across the industry. If Marvel spends $10 million in a location with a 30% tax credit, the government will pay Marvel $3 million after the invoice is paid, so it only costs Marvel $7 million to purchase $10 million dollars worth of work from a VFX studio. (This is an oversimplification, but is, generally speaking, how it works.) So, instead of bidding $10 million for the shots, which is what it actually costs to produce the work and make a profit, a company without access to these credits will bid $7 million in order to underbid a studio located in a place with favorable incentives.
“I’ve seen the books,” said Hector, a VFX Artist. “Despite working on major motion pictures, the profit margins for these VFX houses are in the single digits.” And then, after all that, the VFX studios will bid for the next project… Probably another one of Marvel’s.
We’re all just sick and tired of superheroes.” But studios, he said, rely on superhero work–and Marvel–in order to make ends meet. “These studios keep feeding from the same trough because the work is so abundant, and [Marvel] needs so many people, and artists need jobs. Where do you think these studios are going to go?” We’re hearing about Marvel’s treatment of VFX studios more than any other production company because there’s just so much of it, regardless of specific relationships to vendors. “Marvel has a different production team every single time,” explained Conrad, a production coordinator who has worked on multiple Marvel projects. “So sometimes you might have a really, really good working relationship with them, and other times you might not.”
From a dream job to a working nightmare
At first, working for Marvel was a passion project for a lot of artists. It was cool to get to work on Iron Man or Thor. Studios and artists gained a lot of clout with those films. This helped drive down the bid prices, especially during Phase One. David said that when he started working on Marvel projects, it was exciting. “I was still kind of nerding out a lot of times, getting to see these movies being made and being part of that whole process. But yeah, there are definitely quite a few long days” he chuckles, admitting to something that has become, at this point in almost every VFX artist’s career, very normal.
David describes Guardians of the Galaxy as being one of the Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame were coming out. They actually bumped up that release by a month but they hadn’t told us. I remember being on the floor with my team and one of my artists comes to me and says, ‘Hey, you see this?’ and he shows me the article saying Marvel bumped the release date up a month.”
Marvel failed to tell the VFX team working on the film that the release date had changed. David went to his supervisor, who also hadn’t heard anything about it. Marvel eventually got back to the studio and said that they had “forgotten” to tell them. “So we found out from a press release that we had one less month to work on all these shots.”
“[Marvel] is the worst example of a lot of the problems in the industry,” said Sam. “It would be one thing if sometimes it was really bad, sometimes it wasn’t… But with Marvel, it seems like every single time it’s the same thing. So, one, they tend to be as bad as you’re going to get and they’re consistently that bad.”
Hector recalled that during the last Marvel project he worked on, “from my very first day on the project, up until we delivered the shots, we were working overtime and weekends. It was just months of literally being nailed to my desk.” He laughed as he said this, almost like he hated to admit it.
“Even up until the last week or so they still weren’t sure what they wanted this gigantic set piece to look like. We were still doing concept art.” Hector said. Concept art is supposed to be the first thing you nail down before you start working on the pieces that will eventually be composited together to make up the shot. “And various parts of this sequence had already gone through the entire pipeline. You’ve got lighting renders, effects simulations, matte paintings, and animation.” All of this, ready to go, and Marvel still hasn’t approved concept art.
This isn’t a fluke; this is part of the process. Many sources stated that Marvel deliberately shoots their films in such a way that they are able to change details, both big and small, up until the very last minute. Very little is shot practically, and even the stuff that is practical goes through touch-ups. “When you get a plate of just someone’s face against a poorly lit screen, there’s really nothing you can do to make it look realistic,” explains H. A plate is the untouched frame, exactly what was captured on camera, mocap suit and all. “That’s something that never gets commented on. Everyone just goes, ‘Oh, the visual effects look shit.’ And I’m like, No, you should have seen the plate. You should have seen what we were given, because that’s what was shit.”
Sometimes changes will occur even up to the final days before the movie is set to be released. Conrad recalls that when “the first Doctor Strange movie came out, it didn’t actually have final VFX on it. They were still working on it after the movie had come out in the UK.” While the film premiered in Hong Kong on October 13, 2016, and opened wide in the UK on October 25, the VFX work wasn’t complete until October 28, when it was released in US theaters. With many production companies asking for more and more changes closer and closer to the delivery deadline, the individual artists at VFX studios are put under immense pressure, causing them to work massive amounts of overtime in order to accommodate these shifting goalposts.
“I didn’t have a day off for five weeks. And those were not eight-hour days. They were ten-plus-hour days,” recalled Sam, speaking about his experience working on a Marvel show. “And that was because they did a reshoot a month before the show was due. So we literally got shots in at the end of December for a show that was due at the end of January.”
These stories are common when you talk to VFX artists, and usually reach the same conclusion: Marvel suffers from a chronic lack of vision that comes from having an entire movie decided by a committee of people, from producers, to executives and directors, to Kevin Feige himself.
Erratic direction leads to erratic results
Feedback on dailies and sequences comes from all over the place, including executives and producers that aren’t in explicitly creative roles, H said. “I’ve had entire sequences get blasted apart by someone who shouldn’t even be a part of the feedback process. Like, why do you get an opinion on this?”
Sam’s had similar experiences. “You get producers that say, ‘I want to be involved in the artistic process,’ and you’re like–” he makes a skeptical noise, “I don’t ask to look at your spreadsheets, man.”
All of this input dilutes the vision, muddies the direction, and ultimately, cracks apart the production pipeline. As more and more people are brought in to provide input across many different studios and many different projects, the changes snowball across the entire project, causing hundreds, if not thousands of hours of work to be redone at any number of studios. All because someone didn’t like a shade of blue, or they needed to change a suit design to help toy sales.
Some VFX studios will push back on these changes more than others, and many sources noted studio culture was the deciding factor on whether or not artists had to deal with this kind of nitpicking from producers. “But in general that power dynamic is so skewed towards Marvel that they can ask for whatever they want,” Sam explained. “And then the VFX house has to just figure out how to make it happen.”
The lack of direction is the biggest, most consistent pressure point for many of these artists. Sam recalls a logo on a suit that he had to redo “almost every week.” Conrad recalls working on a shot for Marvel where they didn’t know what they wanted, so they asked the studio to make two versions. “And then we found out which version they picked when we saw the movie.”
Hector has seen massive sequences scrapped within a week of delivering shots that took two or three weeks to build out. “The entire vision will change completely,” he said. “And I get that. You want your directors to have control of the final product. But from the artists standpoint, you need a direction to go in. And Marvel has this very harsh way of communicating with the vendors where they’re very cynical and very, very rude. As if you should be lucky to be receiving constant revisions and notes from them.”
Sources also stated that this constant vision shift feels driven by the egomaniacal ability to demand changes and see them acquiesced to, rather than considering the kind of changes that will actually affect the story. “Nobody is holding Marvel accountable,” H said. “So they don’t care. They’re like, ‘Fuck you guys. We can make as many changes as we want and you just have to deliver it.’” These changes can be major: Sam described an incident where an actor was filmed in a practical suit and the studio decided it was the wrong suit. “And you have to replace their entire body and just leave their head in every shot.”
All this is done without adjusting the bottom-line of the bid, which means that studios usually can’t hire more artists during crunch time or else risk that single-digit profit percentage going into the red. Continually asking for adjustments, changes, and edits to the shots is called getting “pixel-fucked,” because the edits to shots become more and more minute until artists are literally editing a single pixel in a shot and sending it off for re-approval. And every time an artist gets pixel fucked, it usually ends up costing the VFX studios money.
The erratic direction of Marvel movies leads to erratic results. That’s why you see incredibly sharp and realistic VFX work in one scene, and then two minutes later, the VFX work looks choppy and rushed. Because in a lot of cases, it is. All the VFX studios that Marvel hires are capable of producing incredible work, but very few are given the opportunity to do so because of the way that Marvel directs the vendors. At this point, Marvel uses so much VFX in their films that all Marvel films could be considered animated films.
Disney and its subsidiaries, which includes Marvel, probably account for about half of the VFX work that’s being commissioned right now, Sam says. So if VFX studios want to stay in business, they need to keep Marvel happy.
It’s called show business, not show art
It’s hard to pinpoint when exactly things got really bad for the VFX industry. Some sources said it was inevitable. A frog in a pot. Others recalled specific projects that became flashpoints for the industry. The third Pirates of the Caribbean film, in 2007. Game of Thrones, starting in 2011. And then Life of Pi in 2013.
For Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Sam recalled that Disney made increasingly huge demands on the VFX studios, who managed to pull off the project despite the massive time crunch. “A lot of us in the industry saw that as a really bad thing because we recognized that we were never going to get more than this amount of money or this amount of resources because they [finished Pirates of the Caribbean]. And then that’s exactly what happened.”