They say it’s about protecting IP. But watch this video (made by a Chinese creator on Douyin), and you'll see the real reason Hollywood is panicking: Survival. A CGI shot of this caliber used to require a massive VFX studio and a multi-million dollar budget. Now? The cost is practically pennies.

I just came from a meeting and they are fully deep into ai workflows. Im an experienced blender 3d artist that got called to do a product commercial they couldnt do using ai. The budget has already been halved because they spent 2k usd already on ai seedance2.0 credits. Doesn't make business sense for me to take on this project.

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They got another project for a famous entity where they already spent more than the budget they had in ai gen credits trying to get the model to do what they want. Itinerating over and over...

Just know the project is basically a rippoff of a uber famous animated series on top of it.

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Us animators and 3d artists are outright not getting the jobs, meanwhile the ai bros also can't do the thing because all the budget goes on credits.

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The ones getting rich are the data centers, at this point not even the ai users in this company make business either.

I really do wonder where is this gonna go...

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Probably staying strong as a 3d artist is the endgame?

and when all the venture capital subsidized data centers is gone and credits become even more expensive, they might come back crying for our help?

A glimpse of hope... I guess.

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Anybody else thinks the entire creative industry is far too quiet, too polite against these Gen Ai companies and Ai future minded CEO's telling each person that this is now how we should run our own creative industry now?
This feels like the piracy stage of creative work at the moment.

We now have a choice of how the future is looking together.
Did we all forget why we went into this industry in the first place?

The same folks who set deadlines as tight as possible, made effieciency a number one priority, made outbidding eachother normal, fire artists on a whim, made us work as late as possible, all to fill their wallets bit more ? We shutting our mouths again for them? really?!

Something needs to happen here, Im tired of acting like data scraping if fine and we all put our head in the ground like we always do.

WE collectively are the INDUSTRY and we all have a CHOICE of how our industry is ran.
Without us there is no INDUSTRY left don't forget that.

As of this week, my studios concept art team was made obsolete as our boss decided a Kling / Midjourney subscription was sufficient to replace a team of 5. Absolutely sucks to see people I love and care about get booted like this. Just writing this as a warning, that this shit is happening everywhere.

Concerning that these dipshits are advertising in a way that ‘you don’t need an art director’, ‘you don’t need a whole team for VFX’, it’s so fucking insulting and laughable meshing the entire landscape down into some dogshit prompt that some normie exec deems ‘good enough’

They announced today in a company meeting that they are closing doors in a couple of months.

With the way things are at the moment, earthquakes have more predictable stability than the VFX industry

Multiple departments are seeing huge layoff announcements. They won't be recovering from this one. Here's to looking at you, outsourcing.

Be kind to each other.

With the reduction of the Montreal VFX tax rebate, this news doesn’t come as a major surprise, but it’s still very unfortunate. More and more companies have been scaling back or leaving Montreal, and it’s tough to see so many skilled artists impacted by this. It also follows the shutdown of Scanline’s German operations earlier this year, as the company shifts its focus toward growth in Asia. Hopefully those affected will find new opportunities soon.

An idea for those in the UK being asked to take pay cuts and take out a loan at Dneg (wtf)

The people who came up with this plan know everyone is exhausted with the strikes, and scared about having no job at all. They’re relying on it. They think you have no leverage, and will have to do pretty much what they say.

However, if everyone at UK DNEG refused the change in contract then signed up to the Bectu vfx union, you could organise a series of one-off strikes. It could just be one day a week, or every two weeks. Until this is resolved.

Because you're part of a union you would be protected, because it's illegal to fire people for striking. It would also mean you would have legal backing, as well as someone doing the hard work of negotiating for you.

There would be some publicity. Shows would not be able to deliver those days. Clients might suddenly start to prefer vendors who treat their workers better.

Worst case scenario, you’re not working for one of the days you weren’t going to get paid for anyway 😜

https://bectu.org.uk/get-involved-in-the-union/vfx-branch

Once enough have joined and decided what to do, you’d be able to to organise a ballot to strike in 7 days. Holding a ballot to strike would be a first in vfx and enough of a story to get press attention.

Edit: This is about the London brach only because I’m more familiar with labour laws there. I believe joining the union is a quicker process here than some other places. If anyone knows how IATSE/ labour laws work in Canada / other locations and can organise there that would be even better. Also clarified that it would take 7 days for the ballot, not for first day of strike. But the point is it could be relatively simple - that’s all you need to start to build pressure.

I hope it bodes well for me since I'm living back in Ireland after an ultimately unsuccessful jaunt to Montreal, and we have plenty of productions filming in Wicklow and the like that just instantly leave the country once we get to post.

Granted this wont do anybody any good who would need to move here because Ireland is expensive as hell.

But sure who knows, knowing our shambolic government it wont go far enough or they'll screw it up some other way unless there's ridiculous amounts of money to be made like the tech companies.

Also this is exactly the kind've thing to happen once I had finally made the call to look at doing something else for a job 😂

All us vfx artists know you can say you worked on an Oscar winning film but if your name wasn't on the award you obviously can't say you won it. Despite that this person is getting huge praise on twitter for pretty much lying that they officially won one

I've been an animator working in North America for more or less 10 years.

The industry can be so shit.. and the amount of terrible animators creating online classes or school and pretty much predating on students eager to get into the industry with terrible advice is triggering to me. Especially knowing these guys couldn't even land a job in any of the big studios.

One other thing that is pissing me off is knowing that one "famous" high ranking of a studio is pretty much wannabe John Lasseter 2.0 (in the worst way) and is getting away with it. So many people know about it. So much so that everytime 2 animators meet for a drink in the city you can be sure at some point they end up gossiping about him. And after so many years nothing came out.

I was never directly concerned by his attitude but last week I've heard a new one and its honestly getting tiring. Even people overseas have gossips on him...

The job isn't that bad and most people are awesome to work with but between the frauds, that fuckface, AI feeding on our work so we can't even enjoy the most basic thing which is posting our art online and mass layoffs. It get depressing sometimes.

Fuck that guy. Fuck AI and all the execs that wants to replace humans. Fuck the frauds.

A salty animator(not "real" the one).

No8 has closed it's doors this morning, according to linkedin posts by it's employees & partners. Sad to see small post studios continuing to struggle in London.

It is heartbreaking to hear that DNEG is struggling big time financially right now. They have just declared a second wave of layoffs and pay cuts. During this period they have lost some irreplacable talents as well. It is very sad to see the struggle they are going through. I hope they get through these times for the sake of the whole vfx industry.

Referencing to : https://youtu.be/ZR2xbcf3Xyw?si=gEsZb4uTI5gqWHp6

As a concept artist in the Film industry worked at many places like ILM, Dneg, TheMill, I think they are losing the essence here overall. I recently seen the Epic games using Gen Ai to "improve concept artwork" to be Pushing efficiency to get to your endgoals as quick as possible but if thats the endgoal where does each studio draw the line here, what are we actually doing?

Often the best ideas as a concept artist will stem from spending time with the project and slowing down, not by speeding that part up as quick as possible and focus on efficiency alone. The thought process is whats important at this stage. Its how good of an idea can your artwork be, not how nicely shaded it can be. Some of the best concept artist never had incredible frames. Thats for another department to pickup who have more expertise in modelling and lighting space and can take your work further to a whole new level of refinement.

I do see how transforming a Day to Night scene can be usefull with Ai (Like in the Epic concept art video example) but truth be told that can be done with the push of a button if you have a setup going, sure it will take a bit longer to set that up but now every artist would be able to use this or re-use it for future projects and your results with be consistent and creatively controlable over the entire board.

I think we loosing focus here on the tools that we already build and gathering some dust now, the software, hardware and realtime playback advancements rather then letting an AI handle it as an afterthought. If only a portion of this AI cashflow was spend on proper tools, new workflows and software we would be much further ahead. If shading or turning a scene from day to night is slowing you down, maybe we need to have a much closer look at our workflows or build better software and tools to do these things and end up with all the control, speed and creative possibilities. No need to let control out of our hands then. Sort of the same how DLSS5 is an afterthought filtering device rather then working on the hardware or software front.
Ai as a filter system to overlay ontop will always remain a temporary solution to a problem that can be solved more eloquently in the near future.

What it says in the title. 10 years after a much trumpeted opening and name change... Went through several GMs and also went from trying to establish a world class VFX studio to being a local sweatshop. This marks the end of DDs presence in China. A really terribly run company and a miracle it lasted this long.