The Ninth Annual VES Awards held at the Beverly Hilton this year was a wonderful evening. The men were dressed in fineries ranging from the most formal to interpretations of Edwardian garb all the way to elegant Goth. The women were all pretty and covered, sometimes barely, in shimmering golds and soft greens. Fresh faces sat at each table woven in among the time-tested faces of the pioneers and near-pioneers of our business. If the VES performed no other role other than to bring us all together as a family once a year then they would have had reason enough to exist.

We are now engaged in a great change that has swept our old notions of our business out the door along with a fair number of ourselves. While the volume of visual effects work worldwide has increased a very large portion of the work is done overseas and unless we can find some way to stop electricity from being produced in China we can expect to face a continuing drain of the work - certainly out of California and largely out of the U.S. in general. Unionizing will not help unless the state and local governments put into place a large and sustained incentive program to keep the work here, mirroring what our competitors are doing. 

Certainly we must do what we can to adapt but realistically, only a certain number of us will be able to make the transition successfully. Others will drop into the visual effects past uncertain as to whether they jumped, were pushed or simply let go.

True Grit fits into the Coen Brother’s expanding body of work. Their scripts are not scripts of painful labor, deadlines, script-writing programs or marketing demands but of self-amusement. At the end of their day, they can be satisfied not only with the product but the process undergone. Within this body there is a consistency of world-view. To sit and watch one of their films is to lean forward with a combination of bemusement and apprehension. True Grit does not disappoint. It’s a lot of fun.

The first imperative for a producing company is that a film be profitable, preferably obscenely profitable, but for a viewer and lover of films the most important criteria of a movie is to transport us to other worlds and into the lives of other people in an entertaining fashion. An American film director once said: “a film is an immensely likable group of people doing an impossible task”. The producers of TRON: Legacy failed to embrace any element of this quote.

The piazza in San Donato, Italy is about 800 feet long and exists on a saddle a mere 75 feet wide. A road passes through it and it marks the divide between the old part of the village, located higher up the hill and the new part, which lies below the plaza. Along one side of this plaza is the small market, a butcher shop, a newsstand, a few coffee shops and a cigarette machine that is open to the elements so that smokers can access cigarettes 24 hours a day. Throughout the day the locals come and go. The older citizens move from one end to the other in steady conversations that can have only been held thousands of times before.

I go to the piazza every day to get an espresso or use one of the only two Internet connections in town. There is a dog that wanders the piazza and being a dog person I make an attempt to get to know him. I call him and he looks at me but makes no effort to approach me. I step closer. The dog doesn’t move an inch but keeps an eye on me. I approach closer still and he holds his ground while considering me only indifferently.

I came to Paris to reset. Thoreau once wrote that it is best if one moves every seven years. If life consists of doing the same thing as a matter of habit over and over again, perspective is lost and the opportunity to truly know oneself never realized. In adversity is truth. Thoughtless patterns are numbing. Time to re-discover. It’s good to be uncomfortable. Good to be uprooted.

Many great adventures start with a journey of some sort. Not much happens when one stays in his rutted path and hopes the phone to ring. The visual effects business has been quiet for me these past two years and frankly I must consider that after thirty-two years in the saddle this horse is no longer prepared to carry me. This is something that many are currently facing worldwide. I’m not alone in this nor are you. One must also consider if the battle to remain within is ultimately worth the struggle required as wages spiral downward and competition becomes more extreme in its willingness to make any sacrifice to compete.

The calls for the creation of a visual effects union are coming from all quarters, but how do we really go about this and for what purpose? The idea of a union brings to mind a period of time when the American economy was based on industry and the worker realized the importance of his place in the great machine. He then flexed his muscles to assure that he was given an equitable piece of the pie. How have we lost that power? How has that other part of the machinery, “business,” so gotten the upper hand that we are bidding on jobs that we know will cost us more to complete than we make? Add to that the human cost of stunningly difficult hours and circumstances that leave us reeling after delivery and wondering what hit us. Together they combine into a perfect storm of insult and injury. It’s more akin to an addiction than a career.

A discussion of some of the ways various visual effects artists fill their time and their wallets while waiting for the current shortage of entertainment jobs to be over.

CafeFX going on hiatus is just another example of how the state of California sits by and watches a great and green business fade into the sunset.

Film and television particularly are the paramount mediums of abandonment.  Despite our best efforts sometimes our work is connected to a film or show that sinks like a bag of kittens.  It’s all part of the whole picture. Blessed is he who goes unscathed. You have to just learn to let it go…