Tim Wilson
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COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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If you’re looking back at this thread remembering a bunch of posts here that aren’t anymore, yeah, that was me.
A reminder of Rule #1 here: no postings about posters.
Overall, I think the thread reads better with the detritus excised, with apologies if you feel that I’ve overstepped. Maybe I’ve gone a post or two too far. Nothing personal. Inevitable to pull a few carrots when you’re trying to pull weeds.
Drop me a line if you want to talk about anything. tim at creativecow.net
Don’t make me stop this car,
Tim
Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW -
[Shane Ross] “Yup. Let’s not do the right thing an combat the CAUSE of the issue, but go after the symptom.”
As Shane’s link to Deadline reminds us, this is a Chapter 11. R&H is still around, still expanding. The reorganizing is to protect them from people chasing them for money too aggressively…presumably including the artists who hadn’t been paid in over a month before being let go.
R&H is going to be going on in some form, including a merger that could have the same herd-culling effect, with the same potential for current patterns to calcify even harder.
[Andrew Kimery] “There certainly is a lot of upheaval right now in part because ‘good enough’ knowledge and good enough tools are available….. “
Very true, and one of the most frequent topics in this forum…but for someone like Digital Domain or R&H, “good enough” is NOT good enough. It has to be miraculous, it has to be massive, and it has to be insanely fast.
The problem is that there are half a dozen companies who can deliver massive miracles on time, and about that many customers, for a dozen or two movies a year. The studios have exerted massive downward pressure on the houses because they CAN. The VFX houses have exerted massive downward pressure on artists because they HAVE to in order to compete at prices that studios are willing to pay. There’s no friction to stop it.
To come at this another way, the problem isn’t outsourcing. It’s minimum wage.
In the Hollywood corner of the industry, that has historically been set by unions. For example, ACE has negotiated that a full time week is around 56 hours, and the minimum wage is around $46/hr. (One of you will correct me faster than I can look it up. LOL) I doubt most people reading this are working for prices that low, but that’s the floor, period, no discussion, doesn’t matter where your editors work.
There are obvious workarounds (shoot non-union, move productions to Canada or whatever, but even THAT trend is reversing considerably, thanks in part to a wicked strong Canadian dollar) – but by and large, outsourcing editing is irrelevant because on a Hollywood picture the wage is the wage.
There have been talks about unionizing VFX for years, for the express purpose of trying to take at least a little control of setting minimum wages…but entertainment unions’ backs have been broken so consistently of late, it may be too late.
Part of the issue is, who’s in the union, and who are they trying to protect themselves from? The individuals working at big VFX houses from the owners of those houses? Traditional labor/management stuff? It would be impossible to get concessions from house management when studios aren’t changing THEIR practices. So would it be some kind of trade association of the VFX houses trying to push back against the studios? Not likely when there are dwindling numbers of them fighting for the same handful of contracts.
It’s insane that this is happening on the heels of Hollywood’s biggest year ever…and yet, in the current scheme, inevitable. When Ang Lee was asked about R&H after the Oscars, he began his answer by saying that he wished VFX cost less.
“Hey Ang, sorry we helped you earn all those Oscars. We’ll try to do WORSE NEXT TIME. And can you pay us less? That’d be great.” Indeed, for the 4th year in a row, the movie that won the Oscar for Best VFX also won for Best Picture.
The larger issue, and why DD, R&H and others still feel like (with all respect and sympathy) a small story to me, is that 99% of the industry IS fighting the “good enough” fight…which of course we in our 40s and 50s were the ones to start when we were coming up in the late 80s, early 90s, when we were using Media Composer, After Effects, Media 100 and UVW Betacam, most of which came along in 3 or 4 year span, and all of which had us pitching “good enough.” We distrupted in a couple of years what had been working just fine for 100 years in film, and 60 years in TV. Hasn’t stopped either. It has gone around and it is coming around….and around and around….
But I think that the economic impact from the pain of millions of individuals, and artists in SMBs, local TV stations, etc. is far greater than that of a couple of major VFX companies, if also a much harder story to tell. “From an individual in Alabama to a boutique in Zagreb” isn’t as compelling or well-contained as “winners of the VFX Oscar.”
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a) We’ve got major coverage of the state of the VFX industry as a whole, should be ready next week.
b) It’s being talked about in other forums than this one, which tends to be very editor-focused.
c) Not to sound insensitive, but there are 2 million people coming to the COW every month. While we very definitely have a regular group of folks from R&H and other VFX houses who are active members…there are hundreds of thousands of VFX people in the COW who’ll never work in a house anything like the Hollywood ones. Those folks have often been hurting for many years before it touched Hollywood….also true of editors, which HAS been discussed here many times.
So while it’s news, and our coverage will be the best you’ve seen yet…there’s a sense in which this is OLD news, and R&H is one more sad data point of what will surely be more to come too soon.
Which is to emphasize, yes, this is tragic, and we will be covering it thoroughly.
Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW -
[Dan Asselin] “Now this might annoy you that I put this here… “
Nobody who’s been coming to this forum for any length of time will be annoyed. We’ve talked about chairs, dieting, exercise, mice — I’m surprised this hasn’t come up before. Thanks for the tip!
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Once you’ve asked for permission and they come back with a quote, fair use is out the window. It’s a commercial transaction that you’re either going to participate in, or knowingly dodge.
Where fair use comes in is if you’re making this particular newspaper the subject. That is, fair use covers short quotes or visual instances when being used for scholarly purposes or criticism OF THAT THING.
So if you’re talking about The XXX News’s coverage of an event – fair use. If you’re using it to illustrate that such a thing happened in history and are using a picture of the front page as b-roll so to speak — not.
You can sometimes skirt the edge of this if the use is fleeting, but you’re talking about dozens of shots. Even if they lose the argument on “news coverage is subject to fair use” aspect of the argument, they won’t lose the “fair use requires LIMITED use” argument.
Or the “he asked and we told him” argument.
This is music rather than media, but in 1998, you couldn’t miss this song. It was nominated for every major award you can think of, and sold bazillions. One of my favorites from the era.
It includes a sample of a Rolling Stones song, which the performer licensed, signed a contract and paid for — but he was found to have used “too much” for it to be called a sample. (The strings.) I just read that the court found that, as such, Jagger-Richards should be listed as the co-authors, and as a penalty for overstepping the bounds of his contract, the lyricist/performer would get zero, and all rights for the song would be held by the Stones publishers.
We can argue all day long whether this was an example of the big bad corporate meanies representing The Rolling Stones crushing a smaller artist – but in fact, the artist had a contract that HE didn’t keep, and the Stones were well within their rights to go after the guy.
A great song though, and a cautionary tale: you’re officially on the radar now, Aaron. Pay up or find another source. Or heaven knows, you can consult lawyers who actually know what they’re talking about. LOL
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Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW -
[T. Payton] “…include any word that if you said it while you were 10 in front of your mom you mouth should be washed out with soap.”
That was a pretty long list at my house, but I see what you’re saying. 🙂
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The “f-ball” word is a new member of our spam filter family, having been an overwhelming spam word over the past few weeks. We suspect it will die down soon enough…but it has been a real problem.
The other word has been among the most common spam words from the very earliest days of the COW, second only perhaps to a drug whose name is likely in your spam filter every day. We’re still constantly inundated with the “c” spam word, so the one or two regular uses of the word we flag in a month are worth it. Sorry. 🙂 My own use of that word — as in, “are you on…” surely accounts for half of the ostensibly non-spam volume. LOL
Our standard for general language is, generally speaking, US basic cable, an admittedly low-ish bar, but one we can work with. 🙂
Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW -
[Mark Suszko] ” the Founding Fathers and the biblical ancestors”
Not to go too far down this road, but, feeling a need to clarify a misapprehension that was already taking hold, the Senate voted unanimously, and President Adams signed into law in 1797 a proclamation that included the observation, “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
That said,
[Mark Suszko] “There is nothing wrong with a baseline level of civility”
Quite so. 🙂
I save my incivility for my Twitter feed and my posts in the Film History & Appreciation forum. LOL
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[Nick Griffin] “Some men talk to other men using four letter words. “
The only people who drop the F bomb more than me are my wife and Kylee Wall. LOL And I drop it a LOT. The times, they are a’changing Nick. LOL
Not that I think that people should be flinging it all over prime time or anything, but I confess I didn’t do more than chuckle a little. I liked Joe’s exuberance.
Got some thoughts on commercials coming up, but there are my priorities at a glance: taking a break from a thundering deadline to lend my hearty endorsement to the F word on TV, saving something on topic for much, much later….
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[Kylee Wall] “No thanks, I don’t want your sweaty old hydrocodone pill you stole from your grandma’s medicine cabinet that may be a roofie instead.”
If they were bartering “do this edit for me and I’ll put this pill in your drink,” yeah, you should probably skip that one.