John Hughes, the Doolittle Raid and Globalization

[My sources in Korea tell me that the first project for Mr Hughes in his new studio will be a Bruce Beresford film about the aftermath of the Doolittle Raid in China].

It has been announced that John Hughes is forming an effects studio in Beijing with Chinese money. The first project will probably be one that dramatizes the support the Chinese people gave to the allied war effort in World War 2, in particular the support that the Chinese gave to the Doolittle Raid of Tokyo, and the Japanese response which was severe.

Its an interesting choice of topic for a first project and I wonder who came up with it. My guess is that it was not the visual effects people, as we have learned that to have an opinion in such matters is not our place, and any enthusiasm or intelligence just makes the clients afraid (this is my personal experience). So we must assume that the choice of subject was made by the Chinese and is just a coincidence that it is on such a relevant topic in US / China relations. 

For those who are not aware of their own history, the Doolittle Raid was an improbable surprise attack by Mitchell B 25B medium bombers on Tokyo relatively early in the war.  They were launched by the Hornet, an aircraft carrier which had made a daring and dangerous approach to the Japanese coast.  The bombing itself was of minimal impact. The US had no way to retrieve the bombers or their pilots so the plan was for the bombers to fly on to China and land (or bail out) there.  Then with the help of the Chinese on the ground, the pilots would make their way back to America.  That did work up to a point.  The raid had minimal direct military impact, but it was a giant morale builder for the American people.  What was perhaps not completely thought out was how the Japanese were going to respond to the Chinese support for this activity.

From the article Aftermath: Doolittle Raid Reexamined on www.history.net: 

But the raiders’ choice of haven revealed coastal China as another dangerous gap in the empire’s defense. Japan already had many troops in China. Within weeks, the Imperial General Headquarters sent the main force of the Thirteenth Army and elements of the Eleventh Army and the North China Area Army—a total force that would swell to 53 infantry battalions and as many as 16 artillery battalions—to destroy the airfields the Americans had hoped to use in the provinces of Chekiang and Kiangsi. “Airfields, military installations, and important lines of communication will be totally destroyed,” the order read. The unwritten command was to make the Chinese pay dearly for their part in the empire’s humiliation. 

Details of the destruction emerged from previously unpublished records on file at Chicago’s DePaul University. Father Wendelin Dunker, a priest based in the village of Ihwang, fled the Japanese advance along with other clergy, teachers, and orphans under the church’s care, hiding in the mountains. He returned to find packs of dogs feasting on the dead. “What a scene of destruction and smells met us as we entered the city!” he wrote in an unpublished memoir.

The Japanese returned to Ihwang, forcing Dunker out again. Troops torched the town. “They shot any man, woman, child, cow, hog, or just about anything that moved,” Dunker wrote. “They raped any woman from the ages of 10–65.”

B25B Mitchell medium bombers preparing to take off from the USS Hornet

So it is fair to say that a movie the celebrates the long suppressed or just ignored history of our alliances in WW2 and the sacrifices of the Chinese people on our behalf is to be welcomed.

An article in the Smithsonian Magazine about the aftermath of the Doolittle raid

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/untold-story-vengeful-japanese-attack-doolittle-raid-180955001/?no-ist

Wikipedia page on the Doolittle Raid

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doolittle_Raid

Bladerunner (1982) Convention Reel Found on Vimeo

A 1982 “convention reel” for the movie Bladerunner (1982) has appeared on Vimeo. It is very low quality, probably a transfer from the 16 mm but has some interesting material in it. In fact it contains some of the first efforts of Hollywood producers to destroy the noble art of visual effects by revealing the secrets of the arcane technology which is better held by a trusted elite and not just thrown out to the great unwashed of the filmgoing public.

https://vimeo.com/38950113

This was still in the early days of “convention reels”, when film producers would pander to attendees of science fiction, fantasy and comic conventions. The success of the marketing of Star Wars (1977) could not be ignored and so studios and filmmakers started allocating money for short films describing the film in progress and sending those films along with a marketing assistant and possibly a star or two to the various conventions around the country.

Ridley Scott in front of a Bladerunner miniature

1982 would have been very early in this trend, before the directors and stars started routinely showing up at the convention.

Highlights of this reel include

-- A discussion by Syd Mead of the philosophy behind much of the production design, which is to say, a layered approach on the lower levels of accretions of technology on top of previous, no longer working, artifacts. I am not sure, but it looks to me as though they were building the set to Bladerunner on top of an urban back lot of existing facades, such as the Universal Back Lot, although I am not sure which one this might be.

-- A discussion by Ridley about why he did not want to use the word Android and instead made up their own word, replicant.

-- A discussion by Douglas Trumbull on the elements required to simulate the interior of one of the Spinners (flying police vehicles).

It is the latter that is the most disturbing as this is one of the earliest cases of the use of arcane technology of visual effects used to sell a film.  What a self-destructive behavior this is!  By revealing how the magic is done, the magic is itself undone, and the audience begins to become jaded and critical.  This process which took 30 years is one of the biggest problems the filmmaker has today.  But it is our own damn fault, or perhaps the fault of the producers who encouraged this kind of behavior out of a desire to market their film, in other words, out of short term greed.

How (Not) to Bid A "Rescue" Project

Some of you who read this blog, now or in the future, may have the misfortune of being an independent and bidding your own projects. If so, you have my sympathy or you might not, depending on whether or not you are good at such things. It seems as though there are at least two types of people in this world, those who are good at bidding projects and those who are not.

What makes the difference is not altogether clear to me, but two indicators of those who are bad at bidding projects include being a “nice guy” and having “low self esteem”. But that is not all that is going on because in fact I know some people who are very nice and can bid projects. So its not so simple.

Nevertheless, this post is targeted at those who are self-confessed lousy at bidding projects and consistently get themselves in trouble because of it. In fact, the trouble that you can get into can destroy your career and possibly your life, as has happened to me.

The situation is as follows.

A friend or colleague calls out of the blue. He or she needs your help on a project that has gone south and at the very last minute he/she calls you to help. Of course they do not have any money. This is sometimes called a "rescue" project.  What do you do?

There are three possible solutions.  One is you say no.  But in Hollywood, one is not supposed to say no, unless one of two things is true.  Either you are busy (or committed) on another project or you named your price and your price is too high. In either case they hate you, or they may. Thats just too bad. Thus you set your price high, and if it comes through you live with it.

But if, God Forbid, you dont set your price high and you try to do their project, then you will be in a situation where you are late and do not have the resources to complete the project. Then you will be called irresponsible and quite possibly crazy. That is what has happened to me.

Take for example a project where my “friend” calls up with six weeks left in a two year schedule. He wants a solution crafted from the GPU, this is in the years before programing the GPU was as straightforward as it is today. You can read all about it in this post: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished in Computer Animation.

I got no money for my efforts and my friend slandered me for 10 years and does to this very day. My friend has worked at all the very best companies, including Disney Imagineering, Google and Nvidia. I have not had the pleasure, no doubt because of his slander. Or not, I will never know.

What should have happened is that I should have said something like (a) I would love to work on this project, (b) but it will take at least 16 (sixteen) weeks and cost not less than $100K, of which half of that is due up front, and which is not refundable. (c) After examining the project, I may determine that it will take longer and cost more, which the client is free to accept or not, but if not, the project is over and any moneys are not refundable, (d) we will use my contract, not theirs, and (e) it is up to the client to allow enough time after my deliverables to integrate the GPU code into their system. (f) If they need my help with that integration or if they need any modifications then that will necessarily be extra, and (g) the client will own all rights to the delivered code but I retain the right to do similar work for others without restriction.

And finally (h) I make no warranties about the fitness of any code delivered for their project and payment will be due whether or not the code is useful to them.

If I had done this, then probably the client and myself would have been better off.

Its just business you know.

One more thing, that I think needs to be emphasized.  Its their project.  They got themselves into this crummy situation, its not your project.  You have no obligations unless you let them sucker you into it.

Now of course many of these same principles also apply to non-"rescue" projects as well, as we will discuss in later posts.

Should We Abandon the "Rational Actor Model of Filmmaking"?

Is there too much bad computer animation in today's movies?  Is that even possible?

I continue to see people out in the world, on Internet forums and blogs, complaining piteously about the alleged overuse of bad computer animation in film. Here is a recent example pointed out to me by the people at www.io9.com.

Six Reasons Modern Movie CGI Looks Surprisingly Crappy

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-expensive-films-end-up-with-crappy-special-effects/

Is it possible that there is too much CGI, particularly bad CGI, in modern filmmaking?

No, of course not. Everything done with computer graphics in visual effects is exactly as it should be and the audience should agree if they know what is good for them. But sadly, some among the audience, a pathetic few, have not gotten the message. Two messages in fact.

The first message that these whiners have missed is that the modern art of filmmaking is all about the bad use of computer graphics: that is its very raison d'etre. That is its highest goal, second only to maximizing shareholder value, of course. When the audience sees computer generated garbage, that so-called garbage is nothing less than the manifestation of the new art which demands new artists and perhaps new audiences as well. Some of these filmmakers, like Michael Bey, may be far ahead of their time. But it is the duty of the real artist to lead and society will follow along eventually.

The second thing to realize about the tsunami of shit that we see in computer-generated visual effects is that it is not merely a lack of skill on the part of the effects providers, although that is often true as well.

Those who kvetch must look further into the heart of the madness itself and realize that it is almost certainly the filmmaker's vision that is up on the screen. If it is ugly, it is the ugliness that the client wanted. Bad computer animation has been incorporated into the filmmakers body of work and sensibility: it is an element of their style made manifest.  Admittedly, sometimes unconvincing or sub-par work is the result of a lack of skill on the part of the VFX supervisor or facility, but even then it may be that this apparent lack of skill is why these specialists in the computer arts were chosen. Their aesthetic matched that of the filmmaker's and a perfect harmony was found in stupid visual effects. It is not accident that things look the way they do.

To paraphrase a gem of wisdom from our friends in Communist China, “The fish stinks from the head”. In other words, when something smells bad to understand why it smells bad, you must look at who is running things because what you are seeing (or smelling) is probably what they asked for or represents who they are in some manner.

Yes, there are details in this vision that we can be critical of. It does seem that many do not realize that a camera must act like a real camera or it will cause the failure of the suspension of disbelief. The failure to embody the characters with appropriate gravity or weight is often cited, although that is but one example of the bad animation which we are regularly exposed to. The failure to realize that visual effects is about sleight-of-hand, it is about making the audience see what you want them to see and not about number of pixels or “photorealism”. The failure to realize that too much of anything is counterproductive.

But in our new Globalized and virtual Hollywood, nothing succeeds like excess. There is something about visual effects done with computers that can cause a producer and/or director to lose all sense of proportion and just throw 3D computer generated shots at their movie in lieu of thinking.  Perhaps this is a way to compensate for their own sexual inadequacy?  Perhaps the filmmakers have developed an anxiety disorder associated with working with a writer?  In the future, will 3D animation be classified as some sort of dangerous drug that causes the victims to peck without restraint at the lever that releases a 3D CGI pellet to the drug-crazed pigeon-filmmakers?

Should we now abandon the "rational actor" model of filmmaking, which says that those who are making this expensive entertainment product are reasonable and talented human beings doing what they think is best for the kind of entertainment they are trying to make?  Have our artists been driven mad by the opportunities which 3D animation have revealed?

Or is it something else.  Could it be that our overly-critical audience swine, who the Germans refer to as negativenpublikumschweine,  must look within themselves to find the real problem?   Perhaps it is not "bad" computer animation per se that they are reacting to, but their own provincial point of view that is not sophisticated enough to understand the director's vision?

What Should we Learn From The 2014 Box Office?

This post is an essay in transition.

When we review a year's worth of films, what criteria should we use as a basis of analysis?   Should we care, as the news media does, for how much money these projects ostensibly made?  Should we discuss the content of the films, their artistic merit? Should we take a practical stance and ask what we can learn from the last year in order to propose our own films successfully?

For those who laugh at the idea of someone who reads this blog making / producing their own film, don't laugh so hard.  It is perfectly feasible for one of our readers, or a group of them, to make a film of one sort or another.  Obviously they do make films, short films that is, already.  In fact, they make longer commercial films all the time, just in a specific role, such as VFX supervisor or art director.

It is perfectly plausible to make a full length film and even possible to get that film seen, although it is much more difficult to actually make money at it.  If we ignore the point about making money for just a moment, which generally requires a distribution deal, and just focus on the process of making a film, many people reading this blog could make a film.

All they would have to do is want it more than just about anything else in their lives, and work as hard as they can with as much cleverness and practical problem solving as they can, for the next 10 or so years, maybe more, probably not much less.   And spend every dollar they make or will make on that activity.  And call in every favor.   And work as hard as they can for years and years.

Then once the film is made, assuming you do not have a distribution deal, you then must work for years showing the film at film festivals and somehow getting the money to attend and for submission to those festivals.

All this time you will have had to make a living somehow unless you inherited enough money that you do not need to work.

And when you are done, the most likely result is that you are broke, have some people who like your work, a lot of people who do not like or are indifferent to your work,  and have to figure out something to do with what is left of your life and probably how to make a living.   Although it is possible you could make a second film, it may even be easier than the first, but it will still be a lot of work and unless you are very clever, or lucky, or talented, it will be hard to make money on it.

Its not supposed to be about the money, now is it?  Its supposed to be about the art.

But in the world of the "real" or mainstream film industry, it is mostly about the money.  And to play in that game is also possible, but it is all the more difficult because of the even greater competition.

And that so-called mainstream industry, "show business" we might say, has a series of ever changing rules and conventions that are renewed from time to time.  They do not go in cycles exactly, although there do seem to be patterns that repeat.   (2)  But one of the things that the industry has always done is to review what has happened this year and use that to predict what the audience liked.  What stories, what stars, and so forth.   But its not quite so clean as saying "this is what worked in 2014, lets do that in 2015" because movies these days take years to create.   Even if you had a portfolio of scripts ready to be shot and with attached stars and directors, you still need over a year in most cases to create film, and very often much more than a year.

So what is the point?   Two things, first.  What happened in any one year will have a diminishing effect over several years in the future.  Second, in a similar way, the lessons of one year will inform what will work as a "pitch" to a studio or producer, in a diminishing way over the next few years.

So now, we get to the heart of the matter.   What films did well in 2014 and what can we learn from those films and their performance.

As you read on, you will see sarcastic comments regarding the content of these films.  That theme is actually the topic of a later post as the films this year, the ones successful in a gross sense at the box office, had no content.  It is one of the most pathetic years I can think of, although I am sure there are others.

So ... back to our post, what happened and what can we learn.

I want to bring to your attention a graphic by Reuters that reveals the total 2014 box office of the top grossing films.  This graphic also shows the production costs and the portion of the box office that was generated in N. America vs the portion generated overseas.

http://blog.thomsonreuters.com/index.php/highest-grossing-films-of-2014-graphic-of-the-day/

There will be a trace of sarcasm in what follows.

1. Almost all the films on this list made more money overseas than they did in N. America. That means when you pitch a film to a studio or write a spec script that it should have significant locations and protagonists in Asia, particularly China.

2. The revenues shown here are just the box office numbers in first release, and do not reflect the real numbers coming to the studio (which will be significantly less) nor does it include revenues from licensing or such future revenues as video sell-through. The films on this list that have major licensing opportunities are therefore more profitable than they might at first appear and it is not an accident that the studios make so many films with licensing potential.  That means when you pitch a film you want to explain or make obvious how there are lucrative toy tie-ins and indicate what the studio cut will be on such matters.

3. A few of the films on this list may be only barely profitable, or just now becoming profitable. To determine this, apply the 2.5 times the production cost for the rough break even point.  There may be and probably are films that did not gross as much but actually had a better rate of return for their investors because their production costs were so much less.  (1)    Therefore, add more scenes with nearly naked women, bankable stars that do not charge too much up front, and otherwise keep your production costs down.

4. Three of these 20 films are animated films (with computer generated animation). There are no 2D animated films on this list.   Therefore do not pitch a 2D animated film.

5. Fifteen of these 20 films, including the top nine, are either fantasy or SF films with major visual effects.   Thats the way to go.

6. Seven of these 20 films are sequels of previous films and two more are not exactly sequels but had a predecessor film of some sort (Godzilla and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles).

So clearly, any film you want to pitch should be based in America and China, be based on an SF or fantasy property, have great toy potential, have relatively low production costs, and would make use of 3D animation. Nothing really new here.

_____________________________________________________

1. This is why it is said that Roger Corman never lost money on a single movie. He knew that if he made a film with certain elements for a certain cost, that he could sell that film, usually in overseas distribution, and make a profit. An “element” here might be a bankable star, or a film about certain topics, or based on a book by a certain author, or a sequel to a film that did well in a certain country, or a film with many young women in bikinis. That sort of thing.

2. The joke about Hollywood is that everyone wants to be first to be second.  They wait for a successful film about a giant monster, and all of a sudden everyone is making a film about a giant monster.  There are other patterns or cycles as well.  Every year or so there is a genuine labor of love, an independent or studio film with heart that does some business as well, particularly as judged by its production costs.  And every year there is one or two of them.  But some years there are more than just a few, or some of these films do very well indeed, and then we hear about how the studio system is dead and it is now "the decade of the independents" or some such silliness.  Well maybe it is or maybe it isnt, but I suspect it isn't.   But for a year or two, an entity like Miramax may indeed be able to bring a handful of independent films to the world.  It seems to come and go.

Good Visual Effects in Really Bad Movies

What should we think of excellent visual effects or other exploits of difficult technical filmmaking in the service of a bad movie? Should we hate it? Applaud it because it gives work to our friends? Keep our mouth shut because often the problem starts with the script and it is not our place to say?

The question comes up often in visual effects because of the recent trends in filmmaking that have wisely chosen to reduce costs by eliminating the screenwriter (or any writing of quality) in return for having more pointless, visual effects shots. Furthermore, when in preproduction, when there is still time to turn away from Satan and rewrite the script, who is going to tell the director that his or her ideas are really bad?

Recall that the visual effects industry, if we may flatter it by calling it an industry, is a very competitive work-for-hire, production service business. If anyone were so stupid as to criticize the content of a screenplay when asked to bid on it they would rapidly get the reputation for being “arrogant” and in very short order not be asked to bid on anything. It is not the visual effects facility's job or privilege to judge the director's vision.

Nevertheless we all have our moments of outrage when an expensive Hollywood film or cheap television knockoff egregiously or outrageously abuses our willing suspension of disbelief and we crash to the ground, taken out of the moment, by some appalling or ludicrous cinematic plot point or creative choice. At such times it may be useful to remember that the Hollywood entertainment industries are about, well, entertainment, not about presenting reality. True, the appearance of realism is often used as a technique to make a story more appealing or involving, but it is always in the service of making a project more dramatic or effective and in the service of entertainment. It is rarely, very rarely, about showing “reality”.

As an example of this I want to describe three films with “something that flies” in an unrealistic fashion: two of which I found completely acceptable and one which irritated the hell out of me the first time I saw it and every time since. And yet all three are clearly fantasy movies intended to be entertaining. Why do two of them work for me but the third does not?

In the first example, we have the X Wing and Tie fighters from the original Star Wars (1977). When this movie came out, there were some who criticized it because these spacecraft made whooshing noises as they went by the “camera”. Whoosh! But this never bothered me in the least because I, as a devoted reader of science fiction, knew that in the classic space opera it would be quite normal and correct for such fighters to make whooshing noises as they went by. It worked in the context of the film and the genre.

In our second example, we have the flying carpet in Disney's Aladdin (1992). Now it might be a surprise to you to know that this is pure fantasy, but it is. Flying carpets do not exist in real life. Dont get mad at me, its true, do your own research. But if there were flying carpets, I have no doubt that they might work like the one in Aladdin and it certainly was completely believable to the audience.

But our third example is not so happy.

This is a remake of a French film, a romantic comedy, about a secret agent whose family does not know what he does for a living and think he is boring. Of course, through dramatic and unbelievable plot twists, they discover that he is a secret agent and his daughter likes him again and he has hot sex with his wife. The American remake of this important dramatic masterpiece was called True Lies (1994) of course and it is even less believable overall than either Aladdin or Star Wars. Given this fantastic nature, surely one would not be upset when our hero has a magic carpet of his own, in this case a Harrier jet.

In the movie, the Arnold flies the Harrier right up to the side of a skyscraper to kill the bad guys. Bang ! Bang ! You are dead! At another point in the film, his daughter falls from a crane or a bridge or something, but is able to hang onto the wing of the Harrier. Arnold yells to her, “Hang on!”

This irritated the living bejeesus out of me. I still want to spit whenever I think of it. Why?

Because a Harrier, which is a very cool airplane, is a very loud jet. Very loud. If you flew it up to a skyscraper closer than 50 feet it would blow all the windows out, and you would probably lose control of the vehicle. You would certainly not be able to calmly shoot out all the bad guys. Maybe you could do something like that by standing off about 500 feet or more, that might work.

Or when the daughter falls to the airplane and hangs on. First off I doubt you could hang on. Second, if you did, you would almost certainly be hurting yourself terribly and you would let go and hopefully die. Third you would probably get burned all to hell. Fourth, and lastly, the Harrier is loud, really loud. Like really damage your ears loud. LIKE REALLY FUCKING LOUD. You would not be yelling to anybody “hang on” because no one would be able to hear a thing.

But why does this irritate me so much? The movie is clearly a fantasy. In fact, I might go so far as to say that the movie is a cynical, derivative, stupid, inane, worthless piece of shit. What difference does it make? I am not sure. Maybe because the Harrier is a real airplane and a very cool one, but its limitations should be respected? Maybe because the movie expects me to take these ridiculous developments as reality and I know it isnt even close to what is possible?

All I can tell you is that whenever I see these sequences from this movie, I start jumping up and down because I can not believe how unbelievably fucking stupid they are.

Not even Jamie Lee Curtis doing a striptease can redeem this horrible movie in my eyes.

But the visual effects are very nice.

Aladdin (1992) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103639/

True Lies (1994) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111503/

Star Wars (1977) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076759/

Le Totale! (1991)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103103/

Underbidding in Visual Effects: Conclusions and Recommendations

In three previous posts we discussed the practice and mythology of underbidding a project in visual effects, something that is alleged to happen quite often and is commonly believed to be a major cause of instability in the visual effects industry.   You can read these posts here, here and here, or you can just read the next paragraph.

In these posts I argue that (a) there are some legitimate reasons for underbidding,  (b) it rarely happens by mistake except in the case of a new production company,  that (c) sometimes when a project is underbid it was done so because of politics or because a grave misunderstanding or breach of trust between the client and the visual effects facility occurred, and finally (d) when we hear retroactively that a project was underbid, it is often just spin on the part of the client to pin the blame for whatever occurred on the visual effects company and cover their own ass.

In fact, very few people realize that the origins of the word "underbid" contains this meaning of "under appreciated".  "To underbid" comes from the German compound verb unterbitte: unter meaning under- or sub- and bitte meaning "please".  Thus "under please" which we might say in English as "under appreciated" or "no good deed goes unpunished".   

If a production company were to stupidly give a client a deal and got screwed for it, then we might say that they have unterbitte the project.

If you are a potential worker, artist, supervisor, or facility owner in visual effects, I think you should keep the following in mind:

1. Do not throw your pearls before swine.

2. Be sure to charge a lot of money.   In Hollywood, getting paid is the most important sign of respect.  If they pay you a lot of money, they respect you.    Its the only way you can tell what they think.   So charge the studios a lot of money and at the end of the day, you will probably say to yourself that you still did not charge enough for the work given what your time is really worth and how stupid the project really is and unpleasant the people really are.

Otherwise you may become the next victim of the unterbitte.

The End of the VFX Community in Los Angeles?

As all historians know, when the final knife goes in and the body slumps to the ground in a pool of blood, the murder victim has in fact been threatened and dying for a very long time.   The final event, the slugs of hot metal that rip through the body, so to speak, are just the final acts of a much more involved process.

For example, the nominal date of the end of the Roman Empire in the west, 476 CE, was in no way the end of the Roman Empire, east or west.  It is just a convenient date used by historians who need to pick a date for the history books and chose one when the city was occupied briefly by a Germanic warlord for failing to pay a ransom.   The empire had certainly ceased to be very effective in the west  long before this, and the senate continued to meet for long after.

So when we review the end of the Los Angeles visual effects community, we may as well pick an arbitrary date, but one that is at least symbolic, just as with the nominal date of the end of the Western Roman Empire.

I propose that this date is last week when Sony Imageworks announced that it was moving its headquarters to Vancouver, Canada.  In fact, there is still going to be some people working at Imageworks in Los Angeles, including Ken Ralston, ASC.  And there are other visual effects companies such as Digital Domain that seem to linger on as well as many of the smaller shops.

In fact, the Sony's announcement, which can be read here in the Hollywood Reporter, is confusing.  Are they moving people from LA to Vancouver? Or are they just not hiring more people in LA and hiring in Vancouver?  It isn't clear.  What I hear indirectly is that they are moving people up north, however, or maybe perhaps they are just expecting people to move up north on their own.   Like I say, it isnt altogether clear.

But we can certainly say that the Los Angeles visual effects community which used to be several thousands of people, is a remnant of itself, never again to be the avant garde of a form of filmmaking that it helped to invent.

Rest in Peace.

Underbidding in Visual Effects: Coercion, Communication and Trust

In our previous two discussions of “underbidding in visual effects” (here and here) we discussed the reasons why a facility might intentionally underbid (for example, to drive a competitor out of business) and we discussed why a facility might underbid by mistake. But we have only scratched the surface of what the glamourous and rewarding motion picture industry means by underbidding in visual effects.

The first thing to realize is that most of the time the label of underbidding is applied retrospectively to a job. Oh, something went wrong, it must have been underbid. For example, suppose the client turns out to be an asshole who says one thing but wants another but doesn't want to pay for it. Then if you are in a big fight with this client, it can be said that you underbid the project, because frankly it wasnt worth the trouble to deal with that asshole at the rate you are charging. In that circumstance, you may say that you underbid the project, it is a judgment by the facility after the fact.

But lets take another scenario. Lets say that the client is being unreasonable, doesn't know what they want, change their mind constantly, yet wants more and more but doesnt want to pay for it and wants you to pay for it. Then the client will want to pin the blame on the facility and will say that ha, you were incompetent, you underbid the project and therefore it is your responsibility to bend over and do whatever the client wants.

There are also a number of types of underbidding by coercion.

Here are two case studies from the 1990s in which the names have been changed to protect the guilty.

In scenario #1, a large motion picture studio has built a very expensive visual effects studio on their lot in order to keep all that big money spent on visual effects internally. A large special effects project is scheduled and the director, who is known to be insanely difficult, wants a deal on the visual effects in order to use the on-lot facility. He refuses to do the picture unless he gets a deal, and the facility, therefore does make a deal, they agree to do a certain number of shots for a fixed amount. That was a big mistake because the director had every intention of packing as much into that limited number of shots as he could in order to ream the effects studio a new asshole and basically help finance his film by making the vfx studio lose money. And thats what happened, after a lot of screaming, the vfx studio did as they were told and lost their shirt on it. But since it was a part of this larger studio, that financed the film, it was really the studio that got fucked but blamed the vfx studio. This project was “underbid”.

Keep in mind, the last thing a producer or director wants to do is to use an in-house effects facility.  As long as the vfx is outside the studio, then the director and producer have complete control.  But when it is in-house, then studio politics come into play, on both sides.   You get to complain if the facility is too expensive or too slow or not doing the quality of work that you want, but they get to complain too.  That you change your mind, that you want them to work for free and so forth.  They are inside the kimono, inside the sacred square, they know where some of the skeletons are buried and they can fight back.  So you would much prefer to work with an established reliable off-lot facility that you have relations with, that you have worked with before.   And from the facility point of view, working with an in-house film means that they have to navigate all the forces that are applied to them from the studio to lower prices, etc, that is outside of your judgment of how much time and money it should cost.  In other words, you are being coerced. 

In scenario #2, a director has a limited amount of money for their film, and awards it to a very competent smaller effects studio, very little money very little time. This was basically a favor by the vfx studio for the director, but they also wanted to do this movie, so it was mutual.  In other words, the director did not have enough money but the vfx studio offered to do what they could for the money available and the director promised to work with them to get it all done.  But the director had every intention of demanding the most expensive work no matter how long it took, and fucked the effects facility as hard as he could. Then the studio pulled the job and gave it to ILM, forcing ILM to manage the director because they, the studio, did not have the balls to do so. The movie did come out and was a big success. The original vfx studio was no doubt damaged by this bullshit, none of which was their fault. When ILM did the work, they charged an arm and a leg, why not? And the studio that made a huge amount of money on the film, it was a big hit, had not forgiven ILM 10 years later. 10 years later they were still complaining that ILM had charged them real money for a movie that was in trouble because of the choices that the director and the studio had made. Oh yes, it goes without saying, that when ILM was involved, the studio found the time and the money needed, the time and money that was not available when the little vfx studio was involved.

So what is the real problem here? Is it underbidding by the VFX studio? No, I dont think so. Sure thats part of the problem. But maybe the real problem is incredibly difficult clients who want the world for nothing combined with asshole visual effects studios who are always trying to undercut each other and put each other out of business, in a business that is fundamentally a work-for-hire production service one the facility can not be profitable most of the time anyway.

And why can't visual effects be profitable? That is a topic for another time.

Mysteries of Underbidding in Visual Effects: Underbidding for Effect and by Mistake

Part one of this series is here.

In part one of our series on the “mysteries of underbidding in visual effects”, we discussed some of the reasons why a vfx production company might deliberately underbid a project where underbidding is defined as charging less money than they theoretically “ought to” have.

I realize that I had left out a very important type of “deliberate underbidding” in part one and that is “underbidding for marketing” or perhaps "underbidding for effect".  It is the phenomenon of bidding at one price but fully intending to spend more money than budgeted in order to achieve a certain level of quality. Robert Abel & Associates was famous for doing this. Every year, at least one project and generally more than one, was given this special attention. The studio would work extra hard on that project and of course it would go over budget, but generally when we were done we had done work that no one else in the world (or very few) could do. The result was that we had excellent, recent work on our reel which we could use to get the next year's worth of work. And of course we had a very happy client, one would hope. Another fringe benefit of such a project is that it helped with recruiting and keeping artists and technical directors as they knew there was a good chance that they would be working on some of the best work of its type in the world. Of course, Bob was considered crazy for doing this, but it worked well for him for many years.

But there are three other categories of “underbidding” and they are (a) underbidding because of a mistake (misunderstanding the scope of work), or (b) underbidding because of coercion, or (c) the project was not particularly underbid at all, except maybe in retrospect, because there are politics going on above and beyond merely getting the work done.

We discuss the “By Mistake” phenomenon in this post.

First, lets recall what a “bid” is. It is essentially an estimate for what a facility thinks they can do a project for, in conjunction with a schedule and other terms and conditions of a contract. It is the facility's combined judgment about what it will take them to do the work described by the client in storyboards, the script, discussions about the project and knowledge that the facility has about what it is like to work with this client and do this type of work. That judgment includes calculations of overhead, of labor, of capital improvements (e.g. computers) as well as opportunity costs and so forth. If the new company has to move during a project (and many new companies have to move), that is also included implicitly in the budget and schedule. It also has built in ideas about the kind of service that the facility will provide and the client will receive. It will not surprise you to hear that a new company will rarely be able to charge the same sort of fees that an established player with many projects to their credit can charge.

Now when a facility is new, they may not have their costs and production processes completely understood. Often new facilities are started with “enthusiasm” and “optimism” which usually means that they have naively underestimated what some of the costs are. Or they may have made some clever arrangements to keep their costs under control but discover that those arrangements do not work out in the real world as well as they do when they are being conceived. Or any of a hundred things that can occur when you are doing a startup.

Also, all leading edge companies in visual effects and other types of advanced media are doing R&D at the same time. If they are not, then they are in the process of going out of business, or at least ceasing to be a leading edge company. Some of this R&D is leaking into the production process in what is hopefully a sane and rational way, but sometimes not always. Some of this same R&D is then lied about, I mean used, in the marketing for the film. Why it may even be that a famous director will claim to have invented some technique that has been in use for 20 years. The point is that a new company in particular is doing R&D and writing software and so forth and that is part of who they are, and has to be paid for.

In terms of startup capital, visual effects companies come in three categories: No startup money whatsoever, a few million from an inheritance, or giant gobs of money from a large corrupt, international media corporation.  For examples of the "startup by inheritance" look at MidOcean Motion or R. Greenberg and Associates and a probable few others in the early days of computer animation that I am less certain of.

Those without any money pay for everything out of production fees, which is a particular form of semi-insane self-destructive behavior. Extraordinarily hard to do, yet always unrewarded, these companies pay for everything out of their fees, and if there is a problem with getting paid they are out of business.

But if they are financed by a large corporation, see for example Sony Imageworks, Digital Domain, the Secret Lab, WBIT, etc, they may gleefully dump millions, possibly hundreds of millions, down the toilet having nothing to show for it but a bunch of cold machines and hot people. Those lucky companies (not me, folks) can now proceed to try and make a profit paying back the interest and principle on those millions of dollars. You see, that money they spent turns out not to be a gift, it was a loan, and intended to be paid back.   How could they have known?  (1)

Therefore, if an unfinanced production company new to the field, bids on a visual effects project and by mistake underbids it, they are faced with some grim choices very quickly. They can either return the project to the client giving them all work done to date, apologize, walk away, and hope they do not get sued. They can try to finance the shortfall through other projects going through the shop which happen to be more profitable. They can try to get the client to accept lesser work. They can fire everybody and the founders can try to finish the project on their own in their garage without pay (usually the founders are not paid anyway).

Therefore, I think you will agree with me that the unfinanced production company rarely makes that kind of mistake twice. It would be better to not get the job than to underbid it and have to make it up somehow. Life is too short.

Of course, the well-financed company can simply choose to spend money they have received for startup purposes in getting the client's work done. To the best of my knowledge, every single well-financed visual effects production company has done exactly that when starting out. I don't think that is a particularly good use of their investors' money, but that is just me.

Therefore, I propose to you that underbidding by mistake rarely happens outside of a new production company, at least in the case of one that is not well-financed.

The real reasons you often hear about underbidding in the context of some sort of problem during production probably is not because they made a mistake bidding the project, except in one glaring circumstance, which is the subject of our next post.

________________________________________

1. Now you are a vice president of another division at the company, only you are expected to make a profit with the money you are allowed to spend, whereas the idiots in visual effects, just *spend* the money and never make a profit, not a profit as it is defined in real business.   Do you suppose that some ungrateful wretches at such a company might try to kill the stupid visual effects department that just loses money?  What do you think?

Mysteries of Underbidding in Visual Effects: Deliberately Underbidding

This is the first in a series of posts on the psychology and process of bidding in visual effects.  In this first series, we look at the issue and problems associated with the so-called "problem of underbidding in visual effects" in which it is alleged that visual effects companies go out of business or get in trouble by underbidding a project.   There are at least four different categories of underbidding that does take place, perhaps, and they are when a visual effects company deliberately underbids, when they are coerced to underbid, when they accidentally underbid and finally, when they have not really underbid at all but the client is being an asshole.

A studio executive recently asked me why visual effects companies underbid projects. The context of the question comes from the commonly held belief in Hollywood that visual effects companies go out of business because they underbid projects and if they didn't do that then they would not go out of business.

Could it be as simple as that?   I guess all those visual effects dummys would have to do to avoid going out of business would be to raise prices.  See!  That wasn't very hard and now the problem is solved, right?

No, not really.

Usually the next words out of a typical director's or producer's mouth, after glibly talking about underbidding that causes industry instability which annoys them,  the next thing that they complain about is that visual effects is way too expensive.    “Oh my god, I cant believe how expensive these nasty awful ugly horrible visual effects companies are”, they say.  "In fact, what should happen is that the visual effects company ought to do the work for free.  Its the least they could do if they werent so ... well... greedy, awful, selfish!"

So we are going to examine this thing called "underbidding" and when we are done I think you will agree with me that it is a symptom of a much larger problem, that problem being that visual effects is a stupid business to be in.  You may quote me.

The first fact of life that one must realize about bidding on visual effects is that the visual effects facility is a “work for hire production service facility”. The facility bids to do certain work for the production at a fixed price and the money it receives on delivery is generally the last money that the facility will see for that project. When the project is over, if the facility does not have another project it must live on its profits and reserve, or just lay everybody off.

So what does underbidding mean?     Rather, what does underbidding mean to people who casually throw that word around?   It means that they think that the facility deliberately and willfully charged less money than they "should" have, and then got into trouble.   Are there any reasons why a facility would in fact deliberately charge less money?    Yes there are, and here are a few of them.   I think you will see that while not necessarily a good idea, that there are legitimate reasons that it happens from time to time.

It might be because they are using the project to get the work and expect to make a profit on other parts of the project. The technical term for this is “loss leader”. If you are bidding on a $1M compositing project and the film needs a few visual effects elements from your 3D group then you very well may underbid those shots to get the whole package.   In an area distinct from visual effects per se, pretty much all digital intermediate facilities are associated with a film lab and "back in the day" would do the DI work for less than cost in return for getting the work to make the prints for exhibition and other services.

Or one might underbid a project in order to break into a different part of the business, perhaps this might be your first feature film project, or your first character animation project. You might underbid the project to give a deal to the production so they will go with you although there are other facilities with a track record in that area that are also bidding.

Or it might be that you bid the project at more or less break even to be certain that you will have any work at all going through the shop because otherwise you will have to lay everyone off.   Running a visual effects or computer animation production facility is a lot like juggling for months or years at a time.   It is quite an art to keep enough work going through a shop so that you don't have to fire everybody.   Thus, a facility might bid a project at less than its full rate to guarantee that it has a certain amount of work going through the shop during that period.  

On a darker note, one might want to drive a competitor out of business so you take their work away by underbidding the project, knowing that you have other lucrative work to make up the difference and they don't. Then of course when you drive them out of business and steal their people, you raise your prices again. This doesn't happen all that often, only just when a facility thinks it will work, then they do it.  (Yes I am being sarcastic again).  In fact the business is filled with nasty players and people do this all the time, as well as using other techniques to try and drive their competitors out of business such as slander.  Every fucking day of the week.

Or one might deliberately underbid because you want to give the filmmaker your best price because you want to work with him/her, or you want to help them get their movie made.  Yes its true, there are such situations where a services company will try to help a small film production.  Pacific Title used to do this all the time, I believe. 

Or one might underbid (or bid at cost) because the client asked you to, promising that one can make it up with overages and change orders, a topic we will discuss in more detail later.  Again, this is very common.

Or you might underbid the project also because the client asked you to, but promised to work with you to keep the costs down and make it work for that amount of money.   Ha.

Or there is the ancient tactic of lowballing a project to get it in the door and then nickle and dime the client in order to make up a profit.   A facility that does this will get a reputation for doing it, and I have one or two in mind as I type this paragraph.

All of these reasons exist in the real world and I have seen all of them in play at one time or another.  I personally, or facilities that I have managed, have bid a project less than we should have for three of these reasons (because the filmmaker was a friend of the partners and we wanted to work with him and help him get his film done, to be considered for a project when we were new in the business and because the client promised to work with us and make the project work for the money available).

You are probably bored by this topic already, but that is just too bad.  Because now we go into the actually interesting stuff: when a facility is being coerced, when they actually make a mistake and what they should do, and when the client is just being an asshole and trying to drive them out of business or put the blame on the production company when it properly lies with the director or the film.

revised 4/25/2014
revised 5/9/2014

Apparently Not Everyone Realizes that Poetry is Down Market

I have often said on this Blog and in real life "everyone who goes into the business of writing sonnets or the short story pretty much knows that it is going to be a hard way to make a living".   This has been part of an argument that people who go into Computer Animation do not in fact know that their employment possibilities are limited (in other words, if they go into computer animation they had better be rich because otherwise they are destroying their lives).

Well, I was wrong.  And when I am wrong I freely admit it, because I am an idiot...  no, wait, its because I am fearlessly honest with myself and with my readers!  

Apparently not everyone knows that studying and writing poetry is a very non-economic thing to do, and I cite as evidence the following article and comment from the Chronicle of Higher Education: The Danger of Victimizing PhDs by Elizabeth Segran.  The article is about whether or not PhDs who can not get a tenure track position but must labor away at being an Adjunct have only themselves to blame. The article correctly points out that the whiners could get a job doing something else that they are qualified for in this depression economy, such as cleaning sewers, for example, or programming web sites that sell violence and pornography.  There are plenty of things for them to do in our dysfunctional society that only favors the rich and lets the others fend for themselves as best they can (as long as they don't break the law that favors the rich, of course).  The free market is not only always right, it is just (as in justice) as well, Dr. Segran seems to be saying.

 Doomed to the life of an adjunct?

But it is a comment to this article that I found so interesting. Quoted below without permission:

Christina Hitchcock  miamisid • 2 days ago 

The simple answer to your question is that our undergrad professors and advisors listened to our plans and never once told us that we might be going into a field that will have no jobs for us. I specifically asked some of my English professors if I should pursue an M.A. in Literature or an M.F.A. in poetry writing. Not one of them instructed me that an MFA was a terminal degree and would help me to get into the job market whereas an M.A. would be a worthless degree. I, for one, did want to teach. And I am, indeed, a career adjunct now teaching online. I received my M.A. at the age of 50 - an age when other options were not that available. So, yes, there is a big problem with the use of adjuncts, and I'm glad that the writer was, indeed, able to get a full-time tenure track job, but each year it gets harder and harder to break into academia, yet schools accept graduate students and even scholarship them through.

So clearly we were wrong in thinking that students-of-the-sonnet would know what a bad career mistake they were making if mere employment and making a living was a requirement.  Choosing to go into pig slaughtering would almost certainly pay better and have greater opportunities but these innocents did not know this, just like our typical computer animator does not know how badly their choices have fucked up their lives.

Destined to a life of poverty and unemployment in the modern globalized economy?

Apparently the business of education is willing to lead pretty much anyone into self-destructive poverty whether the subject is trendy computer animation or poetry.  And what is the alternative, surely not everyone can or should go into Business Management or Typing school? 

At Global Wahrman, we are fearless at pointing out our mistakes.  We admit them, we dont exactly cover ourselves in glory by doing so, but I am sure that those who are reading the blog now and in the future will appreciate our integrity.

Reply From/To Siggraph About the Visual Effects Disaster

I got a reply from Siggraph about my suggestion to have other points of view on their news article about the layoffs in the visual effects industry.

It is a reasonable reply and suggests that I make use of their Facebook page.  Its a good thought.  Their reply and my reply to their reply will be forthcoming when I return from my little trip.

I find national Siggraph inscrutable.  Do they understand their role in creating the current disaster?   I doubt it.  If they did understand their role, would they change their behavior in the future?  I doubt it but by no means am I certain because, as I have said, I find Siggraph to be inscrutable.

I am still baffled that I was not permitted to run for office at Siggraph.  No one is more qualified than I am to run for office.   I have put in blood, sweat and tears into this field and had an impact and have a point of view.   Better than most, I know where we came from and have an opinion about where we should go.  Having been nominated, it is still up to the general membership to vote for me or not as they please, after all.

It is baffling, but as I say, Siggraph at the national level has always been inscrutable to me.

Thoughts on the Visual Effects Nominations for 2014

Here are my comments on the visual effects nominees for this year's Academy Awards.

To recap, there were ten films on the longer list, and five films nominated for the award. The films which were nominated are Gravity, Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, Star Trek Into Darkness, The Lone Ranger and Iron Man 3.

The films that were not nominated are Oblivion, Elysium, Pacific Rim, Thor: The Dark World, and World War Z.

Many of these films had over 1,000 shots, in fact most of them did. That is an astounding amount of work, I am not sure it is a record for any one year, but it might be. However, quantity is not quality.

Of these, Gravity will win the academy award for visual effects. I have forseen it and so has everyone else. Yes, there could be an upset, but no one expects that so far as I know (I guess that is the definition of an upset...). Although there is some confusion about the various techniques being used, there is no doubt that Gravity is a filmmaking tour de force that uses visual effects brilliantly to bring off their story. Of the people I know who have seen the film, all but one of them declares that it is an amazing film. It deserves to be there. The fact that we will now be forced to endure nightmarish imitations is just a sad fact of life.

Hobbit/Smaug was interesting but did not overwhelm me. The 48 FPS was, again, interesting, but I have seen this all before (admittedly projected on film when I saw it before) and yes the same problems that Showscan had, Hobbit/Smaug had as well. Since no one seems to be the least bit interested in learning from the past, I won't bore you with this. There is nothing new under the sun. I had trouble seeing why people acclaimed the visual effects, though. Dragons are hard and this dragon is pretty good, but it never once convinced me it was really there, nor did many of the other visual effects convince me that we were there. If there was a category for visual effects in the service of a fantasy/animated film, it might qualify but in the pure visual effects genre I do not get it. However, obviously the subsection did get it and it was nominated. It was certainly a tremendous amount of hard work, whatever else we might say.

Star Trek Into Darkness was very good, but was it that much better than Elysium or Oblivion to have received the nomination over the other two? I don't really see it. The problem is that there is a very high level of effects across so many films. How can you choose ? I felt that Elysium and Oblivion had elements that were innovative and I did not feel that way about Star Trek. But whatever.

It is the final two films, The Lone Ranger and Iron Man 3 that I take some exception to.

The Lone Ranger reminded me a great deal of Its a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). Lots of car chases, I mean train chases, lots of practical effects. Nothing new. Good solid quality work. Could it be that the more mature members of the subsection united behind the two films that used the most practical and traditional (scale models) effects? (Lone Ranger and Iron Man 3). I think that is very likely what happened.

Best part of the movie.  Could there be some subtle sexual imagery here?

Unbelievably stupid skydive rescue scene.  I don't care how hard it was to do if the idea was dumb.

Of all the films, Iron Man 3 was by far the worst. The classic visual - effects - means - exploding - shit film, par excellence. Loud, but stupid, with none of the charm of the first movie. Just a lot of exploding stuff and improbable physics, the parachute rescue was about as stupid as I have ever seen. How could this have been nominated over Elysium or Oblivion or Pacific Rim? Perhaps it is just nothing more than the factions uniting to support the traditional technology. I happen to like traditional technology, but not on stupid films, please.

For me, the best water was in Pacific Rim, the best monsters were in Pacific Rim, and the best use of scale was in Pacific Rim. Sure it was a silly "monsters eat Hong Kong" movie, but hey, so what else is new at the VFX bakeoff?

Which brings me to my final point. The problem with the bakeoff is that it is all about visual effects films, and that does get tiresome. Maybe we could slip in a little romantic comedy or something now and then just to liven things up ?

The Visual Effects Bakeoff for 2013

Tonight is the so-called Bakeoff  at the Academy for the Visual Effects nominations. The screening is for the Visual Effects subsection but anyone can attend, space permitting. Ten minutes of each film under consideration is shown, there is a question and answer period which guests can only listen to, and then the subsection members vote on which films will be nominated for visual effects.  This is a very long, very loud night.  I find it annoying but useful.

It is always nice to have an opportunity to see old friends.   And I don't really mind seeing the others as well.  

This year Gravity is going to win the Academy Award.   I have foreseen it with my tremendously expanded mental powers and the use of the esoteric knowledge.

The films which will be screened tonight, in no particular order, are

1. Gravity
2. The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug
3. Pacific Rim
4. Star Trek Into Darkness
5. Iron Man 3
6. World War Z
7. Oblivion
8. Elysium
9. The Lone Ranger
10. Thor: The Dark World

This is an interesting list. Not necessarily any great films here, but certainly a few entertaining ones. I have seen worse years.

Obviously everyone wants to win. But winning is very difficult so getting a nomination is much more likely and is also incredibly valuable to one's career. If one is trying to be an effects supervisor, to be nominated for an Academy Award is a big deal and explains some of the politics around who gets to be one of the "four" who are selected by the producer to be in consideration.

There is almost always a surprise that comes from seeing ten minutes from all these films at one time, or perhaps from the questions and answers from the effects team. But in advance of the screening, here is my take on why this is a very important year.

1. This is the year of solid state lighting.

This is the first year that the revolution in solid state lighting completely takes over on stage production in visual effects. Its been coming for a while, and many of the ideas are quite old, but the availability of arrays of LED's at reasonable prices has enabled this in a major way. Using film as a projection map was never very flexible, and using normal wheat lights would generate too much heat to be very practical. But using arrays of solid state lights to project environments brings a whole new level of sophistication to the "blue screen" plate photography process.  Now we can integrate live action photography into the visual effects, and visual effects into live action photography, with a whole new level of sophistication and accuracy.

Historical footnote: wheat lights used to be a significant part of model creation. The Bladerunner pyramid buildings, such as the Tyrell Headquarters, were models made with a lot of wheat lights. I saw the famous Las Vegas model made for One From the Heart years ago. Supposedy the lights on the thing either used to blow out the power supplies or melt the thing down from all the heat that the lights emitted.   Although one could and did build grids of this thing, and one could control them with computers, I doubt it was done much.  It just wan't practical.   LED's are now practical and there are lots of good components around to control them.  And you wont have to wait all the time to replace the damn little lights as they burn out.

A selection of wheat lamps from Bladerunner and EEG

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_lamp

2. This is the second part of the synthetic human breakout

The first element of the breakout was "Benjamin Button". This is the second. There may have to be a third before the tsunami of shit emerges of computer generated lead actors, or this may be sufficient. I am not sure, perhaps I will have an opinion after tonight.

3. Gravity wins and was in part distinguished by its effects

The award is for the film where the visual effects most support the movie and the story.  It is not for the best visual effects per se.  The classic example of that, for me, was the first Matrix movie which was truly enhanced by the visual effects.

For the second year in a row, a movie is distinguished and made notable by its visual effects (last year was Life of Pi). I do not know if this is a good thing or not, but its probably not a bad thing. If visual effects is to be worth all the money, this is a useful thing to have happen. If visual effects people are to rise above being considered commodities, having work that distinguishes themselves and is not just like everyone else's is also helpful.

4. American dominance of this award is completely over

This has been coming for a while.  American companies no longer dominate this award.   No one else beyond ILM or Sony is left except for maybe Digital Domain (I do not understand their status).  This has been true for quite a while now, but this year sets the pattern, I think.   I am less certain what this means for the nationality of the effects supervisor, however.  The award goes to the four people identified by the producer, but the facility that did the work also gets credit in practice.  Every year some films will be done at ILM or SONY, but the vast majority of effects will be done at facilities in London, New Zealand and Canada.

5. The nominations are ...

I think that Gravity and The Hobbit will be nominated.   I am rooting for Pacific Rim to be nominated because I think it is important to have giant mutated sea monsters in cinema from a content point of view.    

I will report back what happens.