VFX Artist Slams Marvel Working Conditions and Is Tired of Getting "Pixel-F***ed" by Them
I’ve been hearing for years from friends who work in VFX that the conditions of working on a Marvel movie is shit. I’ve heard crazy stories that aren’t mine to tell, but one VFX artist is fed up with it and is tired of getting “pixel-fucked” by the studio. He offered some insight on what is going on behind the scenes, and it’s in line with what I’ve heard.
I sure do enjoy watching Marvel movies, but it sure sounds like a hellish experience working on the VFX work for them. This information was shared by Chris Lee and was posted on Vulture. This is definitely going to make for some bad press for Marvel.
The article starts out telling explaining how on one movie he worked almost six months of overtime every day. “I was working seven days a week, averaging 64 hours a week on a good week. Marvel genuinely works you really hard. I’ve had co-workers sit next to me, break down, and start crying. I’ve had people having anxiety attacks on the phone.”
I can honestly say that I know what that’s like. I’ve never worked for Marvel, but I have worked at post-production houses in the past where the pressure was so intense that I would break down and have anxiety attacks. It’s not fun at all. Those experiences really messed me up and have affected me in the long haul, with PTSD-type effects.
It’s explained that the studio has a lot of power over the effects houses, and if you upset them in any way, there’s a good chance that Marvel will stop working with them. So, “the effects houses are trying to bend over backward to keep Marvel happy.” One example involves a visual-effects house that could not finish the number of shots and reshoots Marvel was asking for in time, so “Marvel had to give my studio the work. Ever since, that house has effectively been blacklisted from getting Marvel work."
As for what it’s like actually doing the work for Marvel, it sounds like a complete unorganized mess! “Marvel is famous for asking for lots of changes throughout the process. So you’re already overworked, but then Marvel’s asking for regular changes way in excess of what any other client does. And some of those changes are really major. Maybe a month or two before a movie comes out, Marvel will have us change the entire third act. It has really tight turnaround times. So yeah, it’s just not a great situation all around. One visual-effects house could not finish the number of shots and reshoots Marvel was asking for in time, so Marvel had to give my studio the work. Ever since, that house has effectively been blacklisted from getting Marvel work.”
That’s madness! Does the studio not realize that if they had a solid completed script before shooting they could avoid all of this crap? Marvel is pumping out so many projects now and there are dates set for these projects and those dates are “very inflexible.” But, that doesn’t stop Marvel from doing reshoots “and big changes very close to the dates without shifting them up or down.”
As for the term “pixel-fucked,” this is a common term used VFX industry “when the client will nitpick over every little pixel. Even if you never notice it. A client might say, ‘This is not exactly what I want,’ and you keep working at it. But they have no idea what they want. So they’ll be like, ‘Can you just try this? Can you just try that?’ They’ll want you to change an entire setting, an entire environment, pretty late in a movie.”
Good hell, that sounds awful. What the hell is Marvel doing over there!? The article points out that the main problem with Marvel films are the directors that they hire. They “aren’t familiar with working with visual effects. A lot of them have just done little indies at the Sundance Film Festival and have never worked with VFX. They don’t know how to visualize something that’s not there yet, that’s not on set with them. So Marvel often starts asking for what we call ‘final renders.’ As we’re working through a movie, we’ll send work-in-progress images that are not pretty but show where we’re at. Marvel often asks for them to be delivered at a much higher quality very early on, and that takes a lot of time. Marvel does that because its directors don’t know how to look at the rough images early on and make judgment calls. But that is the way the industry has to work. You can’t show something super pretty when the basics are still being fleshed out.”
The lack of directing experience falls on the shoulders of the VFX houses and that isn’t really fair. Another issue is there is no director of photography involved in the post-production process and this causes major issues. They use Black Panther as an example of how things can go terribly wrong. “The physics are completely off. Suddenly, the characters are jumping around, doing all these crazy moves like action figures in space. Suddenly, the camera is doing these motions that haven’t happened in the rest of the movie. It all looks a bit cartoony. It has broken the visual language of the film.”
Yep! Those Black Panther fight sequences at the end of the movie were crap, and that’s not on the VFX houses, that’s on Marvel.
As for how things can be fixed there are two things mentioned that need to be changed. The first is Marvel “needs to train its directors on working with visual effects and have a better vision out of the gate. The studio needs to hold its directors’ feet to the fire more to commit to what they want.” The second thing is to unionize. It’s explained that there’s “a growing movement to do that, because it would help make sure that the VFX houses can’t take bids without having to consider what the impacts would be. Because a lot of the time, it’s like, you get to work on a Marvel show, and you’ll work on that for cheaper just because it’s cool.”
This is a pretty explosive article, and I’m sure now that all this has been unleashed, Marvel is going to start making some changes. They better! It sounds like they are causing a lot of problems in the VFX industry. What do you think?