Thats very fatalistic.

Makes you wonder why anyone in any business in any industry would get out of bed in the morning if that’s it, fait-accompli. Japanese cars often hold up well to german cars and are more competitvely priced, yet German cars sell record levels across the globe despite a price premium. Things you would do on a home PC now would be a major task on supercomputers at a major studio 10-15 years ago. If the increase in economic development over the past few hundred years, post enlightment and Adam Smith, has been loosely based on a capitalist system or notion of economic freedoms, then it is innovation and increased productivity that has been the driver of increased living standards. Not price cutting and central government manipulation.

I say ‘capitalism’ in a broad sense, since we probably have never seen capitalism in the ‘Adam Smith’ sense of the word. Certainly not in the presence of Central Bank planning, like the federal reserve and Bank of England, private corporations who have always been in cahoots with political aspirations of politicians and kings, yet centrally plan and hold monopoly on the currency you are forced to use by pain of law.

Point being, the further subsidies and political relationships between select groups become the crucial balance in economic activity, the less likely you will see future big strides in innovation and increased living standards. Because it all becomes ‘artificial’ and you end up living in an economic version of the ‘Matrix’. The increase in living standards across the world, post enlightenment, have occured due to falling prices and increased productivity and innovation. Taken to extremes, subsidies and political relationships are the end game for fallen empires like Rome, the Soviets and even the British Empire, which collapsed internally from debt, subservience and overly-political manipulation of economic activity.

But not always.

Everyone is relying on something other than quality to give them an advantage because (when it comes right down to it) the quality is no different from one country to the next? Would anyone claim that VFX done in LA, or London or Canada or New Zealand are superior to anyone else?

So we’re left with an arms race over price and it’s not going to go away unless EVERYONE GLOBALLY co-operates to fix a standard rate.

Which is the definition of a cartel and illegal in most countries.

So this is reality, the world we live and work in and we all better get used to it because it’s only going to evolve around this fact, not change radically.

It simply can’t.

Yes, irony can be a difficult concept. I’ve often noticed British folk confuse sarcasm with irony. Maybe the fella from the article was being sarcastic? Or something inbetween sarcasm and machiavellianism, the German language would have a word for that exact stituation, for sure.

Whichever way, I think Paul above was very succinct in describing maybe how the situation exists in the UK vfx industry ;

“Pay taxes so you can get paid. VFX goes public sector.”

But my point was that many industries operate on a project by project basis, and so their needs for workers ebbs and flows. Theres nothing terribly unusual about VFX in that regard. So when the earlier poster was criticising the practices of the London VFX studio they seemed to be assuming that it was unique to VFX. In fact many industries are similar, as indeed are many VFX houses in other countries.

(Heck, last time i looked Weta was entirely freelancers, there aren’t really any permanent staff)

I’m not really clear how a project-based job is in any way less deserving of government industry than any other form of work.

For what its worth i’m actually a socialist. I think leaving the market to sort things rarely benefits society as a whole. Perhaps thats why i don’t find a government encouraging segments of industry particularly shocking. I suppose the differing political balances in various countries contributes to how we all view how our industry is evolving.

BTW a couple of points: firstly theres no such thing as “food stamps” in the UK. Not sure where you got that idea from. We have a social security system, but nothing called food stamps. I believe thats an American thing.

Secondly the way UK employment law works is that someone on a fixed term, or project, contract has the same employment rights as someone on a “permanent” contract. So if a VFX studio needs to terminate contracts early, perhaps as a result of a film being delayed, its actually quite complicated. I understand this isn’t the case outside of Europe.

Where does it end? Round and Round we go……..into the ground, we all know. At this current rate the VFX industry as we know it will no longer exist in the next 4-7 years.

OK its quite different if you control the demand, if you were a studio say…then things might be different. But no VFX studio, in any country, does that.