VFX Solidarity / Insult at the Oscars 2013

My New Facebook Profile Pic. Image from http://www.lycra-zentai.com/Green+Modal+Fibre+Fullbody+Zentai+Suit-p-705.html

Facebook has been turning chroma-key green to raise awareness for how VFX artists were snubbed at the Oscars last night.  Nearly 500 organized in a mere 2 days to march in front of the red carpet in Hollywood.  Life of Pi won several awards, yet the VFX house (Rhythm & Hues) that made it has just filed for bankruptcy, with many workers unpaid.  Weird, right? Makes no sense?  If you have no idea what the hell is going on, read this for a good summary of our plight and abuse.  Also, it feels great to see that this issue frontpage’d Reddit.com!  It’s so hard to explain VFX work to the uninitiated, I was worried the general public would not care.

Digital badge to raise awareness for how messed up the VFX/movie industry is now.

Here’s the insulting video where the VFX artists accepted their Life of Pi Oscar and tried to speak out about these issues, but were then promptly cut off by the Jaws theme (ironic!), accompanied by a smash-cut to commercials.

LINK: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xxuav0_life-of-pi-won-oscar-for-vfx-supervisors-speach-cut-off_people#.US7FFVfzlRc

Seems like WordPress.com is not letting me embed it properly, but thanks to c70016 for the updated link!

Disregarding Nicole Kidman’s dismissive expressions in that video, what is even shadier is they keep taking down the video!!!!  Youtube, Vimeo, what have you.  Let me know if this goes down too and I will update it with an active one.  I watched this on a different link around 11am this morning, the same link now looks like this:

Taken down an hour after I watched it this morning….

To those who say they were cut off because there’s a 2 minute limit on acceptance speeches, that is not true.  Watch the Oscars and get your stopwatch (app) out; these VFX guys were cut off not even a full 60 seconds in.  Many other acceptance speeches for the Oscars 2013 were allowed well past 60 seconds, well past 120 seconds, with no “play them off” music to drown them out.

For more information:

• VFXsoldier.wordpress.com – the blog that started the Oscar demonstration with this comment, beginning “I had a vision tonight.  The perfect storm has occured..”
• VFX Solidarity International (Facebook Page)

Everyone is welcome to change their Facebook, Twitter, whatever profile pic to chroma-key-green in support, doesn’t matter if you work in VFX yourself or not, and of course paste a blurb explaining why in the photo description…or link to one of those things I’ve listed above.  I have absolutely no idea what my industry will look like in 5 years, or even 2 years.

But change is coming.

There’s a million examples we VFX workers could pull from our harddrives and prove how much we make movies look the way they do.  But I’ll just leave you with this final pic instead, one of the first to meme-ify:

You just hit the button on the computer keyboard that says “Make Art”, right?