After 13 years at a major studio here is my take. This is all purely speculative and mostly anecdotal so if I’m wrong or mistaken then please take me out to pasture. Getting this kind of information out of anyone is like milking a pig but is still incredibly important for the benefit and wellness of our craft. Most importantly, unless we talk about it it will not get better for any of us.
There’s a very good reason the UK based studios are always quite a bit larger than their U.S. outposts. Ever since the Harry Potter productions and the UK based tax subsidies dried up in the mid 2000s and the film studios sought cheaper locations, there’s been an influx of high quality but underpaid vfx talent in the UK. You see evidence of this if you look at the Flame Artist Anonymous Wage Survey. Flame Artists in the UK seem to be earning about half of what their U.S. counterparts are earning. Low UK wages mean their home UK-based studios are almost always huge in comparison to their U.S. sites. On average, they are between 2-5 times the headcount of US sites. They can lean on the scale and scope of the U.S. economy….all $22 trillion of it compared to the U.K.s “paltry” $3 trillion…to drive business and support sales yet use their cheap UK-based labor to offset costs. If I had to guess then for every 1 worker in the U.S., there’s probably 3 in the UK and probably 15-20 in India. And for those reasons, most of the big studios are mandating that between 30 and 40% of their work be fully executed overseas.
At this scale, it’s an image manufacturing business. And manufacturing images for television commercials is a messy and expensive business of labor. At least with film it can be a bit more streamlined at scale. Therefore, their only choice is to scoop up as much staff as they can to control wages. For example, in the mid 2000’s I’d get wage increases averaging 10-15% year over year. That stopped around 2016 or so, with not only myself being affected, but members of my team, coworkers in other departments, and other studios were averaging raises in the 2-4% area, if any were received at all.
The result is a mass exodus of career employees at these major studios with 10-30 years experience which has never been seen before. And with that exodus comes to largest reshuffle of wages at the big studios this market has likely ever seen. Blacksmith, Parliament, Preymaker, Rascal, Traffik, Untold, Mayda…and the several more studios I can’t recall at the moment, are all post MPC/Mill/Framestore studios to which artists flock. New adventures with old friends, it seems.
So why are the big studios so hostile? They can’t afford not to be. With profit margins likely in the low to middle single digits, pretty soon you’d make more money by parking your cash in a bond fund somewhere instead of all the grey hair the “craft” of visual effects provides. So they scale up with staff, traditionally underpay them 20-40%, and refuse to pay overtime and weekend rates to contractors. The staffers get hosed time and time again until hey break. And the saga continues. The freelancers swoop in and charge them a premium…possibly a 10-30% surcharge. And they pay it. And the cycle continues.
If you are looking for great places to work, they are out there. There are plenty of small and nimble studios owned and operated by incredible visual effects artists that are not only trying hard, but they are kind too. They charge their clients for overtime, weekend work, and holiday work. And they do their darndest to make sure you get to clock out and leave your desk on time. And if you don’t they pay 1.5x after 8, and double after 10 hours. Sure, our business gets messy and sometimes stuff hits the fan and we need to swoop in and save the day. But its a lot easier to smile and suck it up when you make more in overtime from that all nighter then you used to make in a week at your staff job.