Current Events > "I'm a VFX Artist, and I'm Tired of Getting 'Pixel-Fucked' by Marvel"

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https://www.vulture.com/article/a-vfx-artist-on-what-its-like-working-for-marvel.html

Its pretty well known and even darkly joked about across all the visual-effects houses that working on Marvel shows is really hard. When I worked on one movie, it was 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. Ive had co-workers sit next to me, break down, and start crying. Ive had people having anxiety attacks on the phone.

The studio has a lot of power over the effects houses, just because it has so many blockbuster movies coming out one after the other. If you upset Marvel in any way, theres a very high chance youre not going to get those projects in the future. So the effects houses are trying to bend over backward to keep Marvel happy.

To get work, the houses bid on a project; they are all trying to come in right under one anothers bids. With Marvel, the bids will typically come in quite a bit under, and Marvel is happy with that relationship, because it saves it money. But what ends up happening is that all Marvel projects tend to be understaffed. Where I would usually have a team of ten VFX artists on a non-Marvel movie, on one Marvel movie, I got two including myself. So every person is doing more work than they need to.

The other thing with Marvel is its famous for asking for lots of changes throughout the process. So youre already overworked, but then Marvels 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, its 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.

Part of the problem comes from the MCU itself just the sheer number of movies it has. It sets dates, and its very inflexible on those dates; yet its quite willing to do reshoots and big changes very close to the dates without shifting them up or down. This is not a new dynamic.

I remember going to a presentation by one of the other VFX houses about an early MCU movie, and people were talking about how they were getting pixel-fucked. Thats a term we use in the 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 theyll be like, Can you just try this? Can you just try that? Theyll want you to change an entire setting, an entire environment, pretty late in a movie.

The main problem is most of Marvels directors arent 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 dont know how to visualize something thats not there yet, thats not on set with them. So Marvel often starts asking for what we call final renders. As were working through a movie, well send work-in-progress images that are not pretty but show where were 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 dont 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 cant show something super pretty when the basics are still being fleshed out.

The other issue is, when were in postproduction, we dont have a director of photography involved. So were coming up with the shots a lot of the time. It causes a lot of incongruity. A good example of what happens in these scenarios is the battle scene at the end of Black Panther. 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 havent happened in the rest of the movie. It all looks a bit cartoony. It has broken the visual language of the film.

Things need to change on two ends of the spectrum. 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 other thing is unionization. There is a growing movement to do that, because it would help make sure that the VFX houses cant take bids without having to consider what the impacts would be. Because a lot of the time, its like, you get to work on a Marvel show, and youll work on that for cheaper just because its cool.

Well that certainly explains the rushed shitty CGI in every single movie since the Hulk

All we get are Marvel movies anymore and as the industry demand for big budget movies dries up, the artists might be out of a job more often than not. It's either quit or unionize and hope for the best but again, Disney is the only company that's consistently making these things

The main problem is most of Marvels directors arent 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 dont know how to visualize something thats not there yet, thats not on set with them.

I can 100% believe this. I'm convinced that, outside of a few exceptions, they would hire anyone to direct their films.