This week’s Chat Room is with Scott Leberecht, a staffer at Rhythm & Hues, and director of the short documentary Life After Pi, which chronicles the massive layoffs at the company and its Chapter 11 bankruptcy declaration in January 2013, a mere 11 days before several artists there won the Visual Effects Oscar for Life of Pi. (The studio has since been bought and remains in business.)
Life After Pi is part of an industry movement to raise awareness of the plight of VFX houses, particularly in California. Amplifying a good deal of what is conveyed in Life After Pi is a recently released 2013 Feature Film Production Report from Film L.A., the regional film office serving the City and County of Los Angeles.
Film L.A. labeled as a misnomer the belief that while California may lose out on principal photography due to runaway production, the state is still the beneficiary of the bulk of postproduction and VFX work. The Film L.A. report found that the U.K. and Canada have both usurped California (and the U.S.) as global centers for VFX work. This is a concern for California because the biggest budget features spend much of their production budgets on post and VFX. An analysis of the top 25 live-action movies with budgets over $100 million reveals that almost half of the total jobs on these movies went to VFX artists.
Historically, the bulk of the VFX industry and the major VFX houses were concentrated in Southern California, but this is no longer the case, noted Film L.A. Most of the major VFX houses now operate with multiple satellite locations all over the world. The hot locations for VFX work are all outside of California (and the U.S.). Vancouver, Montreal, London, Singapore, India, Australia and New Zealand are just some of the locations booming with growth while California’s VFX sector withers away.
Leberecht agrees that the U.S will continue to lose VFX business and jobs unless the playing field can get at least a little closer to being level when it comes to incentives offered by other countries. Still, there’s something else to consider as he explains in more detail (see our Chat Room column). “A lot of people in Vancouver and the U.K. where incentives are strong now probably feel safe,” he said. “But if they watch our documentary, they should be more concerned about the [VFX] business models and what they will ultimately mean for them.”
