Tuesday 26 February 2013

"Will Matte-Paint for Food"


The ominous sound of John William's "Jaws" theme creeped up on Bill Westenhofer Sunday night. When the crescendo hit, the mic was cut - and the sound of an industry collectively burying heads in sand was overwhelmed only by the audience applause.

Feb. 13th, 2013. Oscar nominated Visual Effects house Rhythm & Hues files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Reports had been leaking out about unpaid wages and decreasing working conditions for the artists involved. Fresh from some of the best work seen by the industry in years for the Ang Lee feature "Life of Pi", you can imagine the artists involved taking a moment to pause and ponder how this happened.

This is not an isolated incident. Companies across the world have followed the same trajectory. Studios demand breakthrough, cutting edge work on ever decreasing budgets. Companies under-bid for fear of not paying the overheads for that month, wilfully blind to the foreboding issue of wages. Studios simply wait for the lowest bidder.

This is a simple capitalist model. But as expected, the losers are at the bottom. The artists, technicians, engineers and administrators that actually do the work end up without. Pixomondo are the next to go. It was confirmed Sunday that they are closing their London and Detroit offices. They won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects last year for "Hugo".

I know of another London based VFX house that has moved to a three day week because of cash-flow issues. And another that has been closed for over a week because of studios withholding payment. One of the largest houses in Europe recently let go a large percentage of their workforce, ostensibly owing to a scheduling conflict.

So what's the cause? You'd think the free market would decide and the houses producing the worst product would falter, and the cream of the global crop would triumph. You'd be wrong. Sunday night Rhythm and Hues won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects, to add to a haul of most of the awards in the film and visual effects industry. London, a city that was producing some of the best frames in the world only a year ago, is now free falling into a wasteland of empty houses and unpaid workers.

To meet the demands of the studios, houses are utilising the wonders of globalisation and outsourcing their work to India, China and Singapore, laying off artists that have trained for years and worked in the industry for decades. Anecdotal evidence  assures me the quality of the work suffers - but when wages are that low, you can have quite a few stabs at a shot before getting it right.

It begs the question, would that tiger in "Life of Pi" exist in the beautiful state that it does if not for the sacrifice of those artists? Surely the problem is that the cost of VFX is too high. They need to find a way to make it cheaper to produce this art to increase their margins. Much like the world of fashion - the money is not spent on the physical materials, but rather the work of all the people involved. The people that produce the material, design the clothes, manufacture, advertise, ship and retail the product. Visual effects is the same; it is a human industry. People design software that is sold to the houses, where people use it to create art. And this all takes a very long time. The cost of the computers is negligible against the cost of the people.

So to make it cheaper means to pay the artists less. These aren't premiership footballers or skyscraper straddeling bankers - you seldom meet a rich visual effects artists. They do the work because they love it, because they have a natural talent for it, and more often than not because they believe in film as a form of expression. After his win for Best Director at last night's presentation Ang Lee said:
“I would like it to be cheaper and not a tough business [for VFX vendors]. It’s easy for me to say, but it’s very tough. It’s very hard for them to make money. The research and development is so expensive; that is a big burden for every house. They all have good times and hard times, and in the tough times, some may not [survive].”
Houses do have good times, and they do have bad times. R & D is expensive - because it involves a lot of very talented people working very hard. VFX should not be cheaper. People should be paid fairly for the work they do, and not have their Director saying any different. I would describe "Life of Pi" as a VFX film from head to toe. Lee was right about one thing: "It's easy for me to say".

So Westenhofer rushes through his speech at the podium to squeeze in a comment on the fact that the people who actually did the work that got the film the awards and the box office (currently $583m, with an estimated budget of $120m) are being made redundant and that there is a problem in VFX that needs addressing. And with the quiet threat that instilled fear in millions back in 1975, the "Jaws" theme silenced him, and everybody clapped.

The artists that made the Tiger, sculpted the sea, painted the sky and crafted the fishes, won't be seeing any of that $463,000,000 profit. And VFX houses will continue to exist based on Government subsidies and tax breaks rather than fair contracts. The current city to tempt the industry is Vancouver, offering staggering benefits for productions and houses working in their city. A large percentage of London jobs are being cut and moved to Canada, and in a few years they'll probably all move again. Incidentally, if there's a trade lawyer out there who knows about these things, isn't there some kind of WTO competition treaty to stop Governments 'poaching' industries like this?

Regardless, 'Fair Trade' Film is probably a distant dream. And while studios make huge profits they'll keep chasing lower and lower bids, and houses will outsource more and more work to sweatshop studios. But next time someone tells you that piracy is killing the industry, that your illegal download takes money from the pockets of a poor technician and his family, remember that it's the industry killing the industry, first and foremost.

Never one to end a rant on a downer, I spotted this tweet Oscar night from one commentator named 'Piers Morgan':

The only reply to which I can fathom would be to quote "Argo", another big winner of the evening:
"Hey Piers; Argo fuckyourself!"

Thursday 7 February 2013

House of Cards

Watching over everything: Frank Underwood played by Kevin Spacey

Francis Underwood, expertly played by Kevin Spacey, infects whomever he touches. He exploits any situation to his own gain and, like a chess grandmaster, always has three moves in mind, and a couple up his sleeve for good luck. He anticipates and reacts. Success is not so much something he works towards, but something he expects. And no one can argue with confidence like that. They are not permitted to.

Similarly, 'House of Cards' permeates it's audience. This seems symptomatic of modern American television - the box-set effect - where audiences prefer to store up episodes, sometimes whole seasons, and gorge over a weekend in one mammoth sitting. It almost seems as if the traditional weekly episodic schedule acts as a promotional tool for the eventual DVD release. It's how we wish to consume. And it can become addictive.

Netflix have cut out the middle man and foregone the week-to-week model. As of February 1st, if you are so inclined, you can press play and 13 hours later come away living and breathing cut throat Washington politics. This is why I characterise the show almost as an infection. I came away after a few hours with the mental swagger of Underwood. Bolstering about my flat thinking I can overcome any situation with Machiavellian malevolence. A sudden desire to start wearing clean white collared shirts and talking in that tempered South Carolina drawl that Spacey accidentally dips in and out of.

The same can be said whenever you suspend reality for that length of time in one sitting. Whilst I won't be joining the CIA any time soon, I did come away from a weekend of 'Homeland' playing espionage in my head. My axe-wielding days are long behind me now, but the August Bank Holiday of 'Game of Thrones' got me as close to LARPing as I ever wish to come. And this is just after two seasons - I started drafting legislature and composing speeches to the DNC after the third run through 'The West Wing'. I'll never dramatically put on a jacket in the same way again.

Thankfully it's really more passing infatuation than overwhelming infection, and now I've gobbled up all 13 episodes I can go back to regular life. However Netflix's concept has left me with a distinct feeling of seeing the future of media consumption in it's infancy. As an ageing curmudgeon trapped in the body of a mid-twenties reality-escape-artist I am fearful of change, but I do hope this idea catches on. No artificially inserted moments of tension half way through an episode to keep you thinking over an ad-break; No fixed episode length that forces mid-season instalments to play more like a bullet-pointed list of plot points rather than a natural progression of the story, and no having to bite your lip while you ignore months of TV spots, trailers and talk-show appearances to keep yourself pure for the box-set. If this is the way TV is headed then i'm excited. 

However like the pawns being fondled by Francis Underwood's menacing touch, I feel like I might be being played - A well produced, intelligent show, with no commercials, seemingly no artistic compromise and the involvement of heavyweights like Spacey, David Fincher and Eric Roth? And for £6 a month on a cross-device platform from my phone to my projector? Where's your move, Netflix? What's your play? I must get back to The Hill to devise a stratagem. Call all the Congressmen! Quickly, I need Season Two!

House of Cards is available in HD on Netflix. £5.99 a month subscription, with a one month Free Trial. www.netflix.co.uk