Having gone freelance myself recently, I really feel for what everyone is going through. It’s a terrifying feeling not knowing what to do or to get past those nagging thoughts that you will never work again.
If you’re able I would highly advise giving yourself some time and space to sort out what’s next. While there certainly can be a benefit in moving quickly, if you’re not in the right headspace to do so, that may do more harm than good.
What I can also tell anyone is that my experience has been that as tough as things may feel, there isn’t a better community to turn to for support than the Flame Community. It’s a strange feeling reaching out and asking for advice from people you’ve only met online or maybe in person once. But I can say there are people here willing to help. @Josh_Laurence and @randy in particular were a great help to me I and can’t be more grateful. Although knowing Randy I’m sure he’s probably been a bit overwhelmed by people reaching out already.
I can’t tell anyone 3-months from now you’ll be fully booked, but I would say you can wake up each day, put one foot in front of the other and move forward. And that in of itself is a big step.
Technicolor is (was?) a private equity company that draped themselves in the storied name and did what private equity does. They bought various companies and saddled the debt from those purchases onto the companies themselves.
So you have a profitable company like the Mill, only now they have millions of dollars of debt.
Technicolor pays itself various dividends, consulting fees, and just milks the formerly profitable company until the system is completely unsustainable and then they send out an email like the one on Friday that says, “oh, sorry, all the money’s gone! Byeeeeee!”
There’s a long history of this, Toys R Us being the most famous recent example, but these vultures are everywhere. They’re invested in ambulance services, hospitals, trailer parks. It’s a not insignificant portion of the reason why everything sucks so much.
One thing I’ve heard from folks working in London at the time was that the Mill was the first exclusively non-union post house in London. Paved the way for the other shops to ditch unions and worker protections.
Yeah, when vfx started really gearing up we were entering the age of Reagan and Thatcher and post Reagan/thatcher (a direct result of those two) organized labor has really suffered (to the benefit of a few and the detriment of many).
