Fuck yeah! Looks like they're organizing under IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees)!

FUCKING GET THEIR ASSES MARVEL VFX PEOPLE!!!!

Anyone else seen this? It’s a really thorough and sad deep dive into the working conditions of VFX companies and the extremely outsized negative impact that Marvel/Disney has had on the industry. Some excerpts: 

As terrible as Marvel is to work with for these companies, with an incredible amount of work (basically all of their content has some level of animation), fast turnaround for low pay, etc, they create so much content the VFX studios have little choice in working for them.

Marvel movies are a nightmare to work on because they are intentionally made to be tweaked and adjusted till the last minute. With VFX that increases the workload astronomically, but there’s no adjustments made in the budgets. And the raw footage the VFX artists are given to work with is...well, ugly!

Not only are their demands and expectations unreasonable, the producers are often total assholes to the VFX artists. There is no central creative vision so they will constantly get entitled and scattered notes on the smallest things.

The artist are forced to perform under an extreme amount of pressure, with shifting deadlines, sudden changes, and being forced to move to new cities or countries because of studios attempting to underbid for the next gig.

The Disney/Marvel machine, and the abuse of VFX artists in general, needs to be addressed. It’s really shameful how they treat their artists, while entirely depending on them to make their low quality footage of an actor covered in dots talking to a floating ball in a warehouse comprehensible in any way. The article gets into why it’s so difficult for the artists to unionize, but hopefully this comes to a head soon because it is not sustainable. Even fans of Marvel should want to see changes here, because it keeps films from reaching their full potential when artists are overworked, underpaid, and exploited.

NEW UNION JUST DROPPED

LET'S GOOOOOOO

September 13: Marvel VFX Workers Unanimously Vote to Unionize With IATSE

Huge news! Congrats to the newly unionized Marvel Studios VFX workers.

Spider-Verse Artists Say Working on the Sequel Was ‘Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts’

Why don’t more animated movies look this good? According to people who worked on the sequel, Across the Spider-Verse, it’s because the working conditions required to produce such artistry are not sustainable.

Multiple Across the Spider-Verse crew members — ranging from artists to production executives who have worked anywhere from five to a dozen years in the animation business — describe the process of making the the $150 million Sony project as uniquely arduous, involving a relentless kind of revisionism that compelled approximately 100 artists to flee the movie before its completion.

While frequent major overhauls are standard operating procedure in animation (Pixar films can take between four and seven years to plot, animate, and render), those changes typically occur early on during development and storyboarding stages. But these Spider-Verse 2 crew members say they were asked to make alterations to already-approved animated sequences that created a backlog of work across multiple late-stage departments. Across the Spider-Verse was meant to debut in theaters in April of 2022, before it was postponed to October of that year and then June 2023 owing to what Entertainment Weekly reported as “pandemic-related delays.” However, the four crew members say animators who were hired in the spring of 2021 sat idle for anywhere from three to six months that year while Phil Lord tinkered with the movie in the layout stage, when the first 3-D representation of storyboards are created.

As a result, these individuals say, they were pushed to work more than 11 hours a day, seven days a week, for more than a year to make up for time lost and were forced back to the drawing board as many as five times to revise work during the final rendering stage.

"For animated movies, the majority of the trial-and-error process happens during writing and storyboarding. Not with fully completed animation. Phil’s mentality was, This change makes for a better movie, so why aren’t we doing it? It’s obviously been very expensive having to redo the same shot several times over and have every department touch it so many times. The changes in the writing would go through storyboarding. Then it gets to layout, then animation, then final layout, which is adjusting cameras and placements of things in the environment. Then there’s cloth and hair effects, which have to repeatedly be redone anytime there’s an animation change. The effects department also passes over the characters with ink lines and does all the crazy stuff like explosions, smoke, and water. And they work closely with lighting and compositing on all the color and visual treatments in this movie. Every pass is plugged into editing. Smaller changes tend to start with animation, and big story changes can involve more departments like visual development, modeling, rigging, and texture painting. These are a lot of artists affected by one change. Imagine an endless stream of them."

"Over 100 people left the project because they couldn’t take it anymore. But a lot stayed on just so they could make sure their work survived until the end — because if it gets changed, it’s no longer yours. I know people who were on the project for over a year who left, and now they have little to show for it because everything was changed. They went through the hell of the production and then got none of their work coming out the other side."

Visual effects crews at Walt Disney Studios have taken a significant step to unionize after filing with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for an election to unionize.

A supermajority (over 80%) of the 18 in-house VFX crew members at Walt Disney Pictures signed authorization cards signaling their desire to unionize.

The historical move is the second time in history that VFX professionals have joined together to demand the same protections and rights as their colleagues. Earlier this month, VFX crews at Marvel Studios voted to unionize beginning Aug. 21. Ballots are due on Sept. 11, and the vote count will take place on Sept. 12.

Unions Work, Unionize.

Source: Variety, August 28th 2023

FRASIER — 01.16 - "The Show Where Lilith Comes Back" (1994)

Visual effects workers for the first time in history will have union representation. On Wednesday, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) announced that Marvel VFX workers successfully passed a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ballot and will now join IATSE. The vote comes after a supermajority of Marvel’s internal VFX workers first signed authorization cards with the union on Aug. 7. IATSE says that because Marvel had declined voluntary recognition of the union, a vote with the NLRB was necessary. With the vote passing, it’s the first time any people who work in the visual effects space across Hollywood will have any sort of representation from a union. A simple majority of Marvel’s internal VFX staff was required in order to IATSE to represent them, but the union was of course seeking a strong number of votes to strengthen the resolve of the new branch within IATSE. The vote was 32-0 out of 41 eligible voters. 7 votes were challenged. The next step for the union is to engage in collective bargaining negotiations with Marvel to draft their first contract, or collective bargaining agreement (CBA). As of this writing, no negotiation dates have yet been scheduled.

LETS GOOOOOOOO!!!!

In January 2023 Marvel guru Kevin Keige pronounced that there was no such thing as Superhero Fatigue. Less than a year later Marvel Studios is going through its worst crisis in it short history.

In February 2023 “Ant-man Quantumania” opened well below expectations earning $125 million less than its break even point. And its 46% Rotten Tomatoes score is one of the MCU’s worst.

Sam Jackson’s “Secret Invasion” was poorly received by fans.

“The Marvels“ cost $250 million and its tracking to open with less than 1/2 box office than “Multiverse of Madness”

“The Marvels” requires four weeks of reshoots to “bring coherence to a tangled storyline”

Marvel VFX workers voted unanimously to unionize

Iger publicly acknowledging the Marvel TV glut

Actors and Writers: Please treat us like human beings

Studios: F*ck you! We'll just replace all of you will robots and vfx!

Computer and vfx people: Please treat us like human beings

Studios: F*CK!

[ID: tweet from Discussing Film @/DiscussingFilm that says, "VFX workers are looking to unionize at Marvel because they currently get paid on a weekly flat rate. This means they don’t get paid extra for overtime hours/days and have no protections against tight turnarounds. (Source: https://ign.com/articles/we-want-to-save-this-job-inside-the-marvel-vfx-workers-fight-to-unionize)"