The challenges of the film industry have been well documented as of late, characterized by high-profile bankruptcies at major award-winning VFX houses.
As the industry searches for a new business model, we ask could a distributed VFX production model replace the large facilities? VFX Legion certainly thinks so–they’ve built a successful VFX business without the overheads of a traditional facility, running a global workforce of freelancers from their headquarters in Burbank, Calif.
“What we’re doing at Legion is empowering a new way of working for those on the frontlines of the creative industry,” Legion founder James Hattin recently told us. “There’s no reason why, in the next five years, what we’re doing won’t be the standard.”
So, what is distributed postproduction? Essentially it means accessing artists, technicians, and supervisors wherever they are in the world. Rather than building a facility and housing all staff in one place, staff and contractors work from their homes, or from small satellite offices in their local towns and cities. This can be ideal for VFX professionals–whereas the current industry norm sees artists and supervisors forced to move to wherever the work is, which can be expensive and disruptive, they can stay in one spot, working via the cloud.
And it works both ways–VFX companies can bypass issues surrounding the negotiation of visas and relocation costs, accessing a global talent pool in the process.
However, is it practical?
There are many success stories we could point to that highlight the benefits of remote post. There’s capital T, who work on the biggest projects in Hollywood–from Ant-Man to Avengers–all from a beach house on the shores of Hawaii. There’s Feet n Frames, a foley company based in remote outback Australia, while creating the acoustic soundscape for the likes of The Hobbit and World War Z. And then there’s VFX Legion taking the idea to its extreme, hiring individual artists on a shot-by-shot basis from all across the world. “This is the disruptive model to what we’re living in, and I think it’s what VFX needs,” Hattin told us.
Of course, there’s a flip-side. Without a large facility, it’s difficult to amass the resources for proper R&D. And the current environment of rebates and incentives – a necessary evil in the current industry – also becomes much harder to navigate. Crucially, supervision of dozens of individuals in separate locations and timezones can also become impractical on some projects, without the right systems in place.
And yet, with technology evolving rapidly to support remote collaboration, remote supervision, and secure sharing of distributed assets, the opportunity is there for facilities to embrace the possibilities of distributed post. It’s all about choosing the right approach for the right project, and certainly facilities that offer flexibility over work location can seem more attractive to workers. Is remote production the future? For those that have already dived in, it’s a future that looks very exciting indeed.
Rory McGregor is CEO of Cospective, an Adelaide, Australia-based creator of innovative software solutions to visual communication challenges. The company’s products include cineSync Pro, the Academy Award-winning synchronized review-and-approval tool used for major film productions, and Frankie which is used for real-time video review using standard web browsers and is ideally suited for short-form content produced by ad agencies, production companies and post houses.
