Is this just a flame problem or an industry problem covering vfx as a whole though? Were your nuke peers getting better pay or treatment? Sometimes regarding outsourcing for instance it feels like with margins what they are in VFX as vendors are getting squeezed for more and more for less money, or even if its the same number of shots, an arbitrary dismissal from clients of the idea that you might get what you pay for and you can’t afford perfection, VFX feels like its in a rough place. And I think there are a lot of folks that feel like with the plane crashing all we can do is hope for a safe enough landing but there’s no real opportunity while careening towards the mountain range to redesign the airplane so that in the future it doesn’t slam into the ground. I think you end up with, and I’m not saying this maliciously, some short-sighted thinking by necessity because there is always an immediate crisis regarding margins and profit and future reliable income always over the horizon that is taking up all the oxygen. But that’s going to have a cost. You need juniors in order to have future seniors. It bums me out immensely. I wish there were more junior artists. I love teaching and mentoring when I have the opportunity.
Hey, thanks for asking!
It’s not just a VFX problem — it’s a wider post-production issue in the UK. Zeb actually wrote a piece about it in Televisual earlier this year: Exploitation in Post Production: The Human Cost - Televisual
The facility I worked for handled the whole pipeline — offline, online, grade, dub, and delivery. We were often asked to do VFX, but that wasn’t our main focus. Most of our work came from documentary, true crime, and indie drama. Not particularly VFX-heavy — just the usual online fixes.
As damning as that report was, the “Flame Facility” I worked for in London wasn’t even the worst post house I’ve been in — not by a long shot.
In the two years I spent there, the facility shed around 10–15 juniors across different departments (machine room, online, grade, dub, etc.). All left in search of better pay, and most were never replaced. Any extra work was simply piled onto the (long suffering) seniors.