Los Angeles feature film visual effects industry in full collapse

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/business...onger-animate-its-films-in-the-us-100102.html

Sony's VFX House Imageworks Moving Headquarters to Vancouver

Animation and visual effects studio Sony Pictures Imageworks has confirmed what many in the industry had suspected for a long while: the studio is moving its headquarters from Los Angeles to Vancouver, Canada to take advantage of generous tax credits provided by the Canadian government. This move, combined with Digital Domain’s jump to Vancouver and Rhythm & Hues’ bankruptcy, prompted Variety’s VFX chronicler David S. Cohen to say that the Los Angeles feature film visual effects industry is “in full collapse.”

Imageworks is the studio that produces the animation for Sony Pictures Animation (SPA) films, including the upcoming Hotel Transylvania 2 and the all-CG Smurfs movie. They also make non-SPA animated films like Rovio’s Angry Birds, and provide vfx on live-action films such as the recent Amazing Spider-Man 2, and the forthcoming pics Guardians of the Galaxy (Disney/Marvel) and Pixels (Columbia).

The new Vancouver studio will be located in the Pacific Centre shopping mall, directly above a Nordstrom department store. Expected to be fully operational by 2015, the studio will have the capacity to house 700 employees. There is no word on what’ll happen to the approximately 270 Imageworks employees who currently work in Los Angeles, or whether they will be invited to relocate to Canada. Sony Pictures Animation’s development and pre-production teams, which number well over 100 employees, will remain in Los Angeles.

 

More jobs leaving the US. Will it ever stop?

 

This too.....

http://fortune.com/2015/01/20/dreamworks-animation-begins-layoffs-number-unknown/
DreamWorks Animation begins layoffs, number unknown

The studio as been the subject of merger rumors in recent months, but is now letting people go.

DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc has begun a round of layoffs, a labor union said on Monday, while media reports indicated that up to 400 employees could be cut from the studio’s workforce.

Months after talks to find a buyer sputtered and a few weeks after high-level management changes, the studio run by Jeffrey Katzenberg intends to “significantly reduce” the size of its workforce, the Los Angeles Times reported, citing two people familiar with the matter.

Variety said 150 to 400 employees could be affected at the Glendale and Redwood City, California campuses of the studio behind hit franchises like “How to Train Your Dragon,” “Shrek” and “Kung Fu Panda.” DreamWorks Animation employs around 2,200 people.

A spokesman for DreamWorks Animation DWA -7.22% declined to comment on the reports.

Some DreamWorks employees told their union, the Animation Guild, last week that they had been let go.

“There are layoffs going on because I have had members call me who have been laid off,” said Steve Hulett, business representative at the Animation Guild.

He wrote an email to the company last week requesting more information, but had not yet received a reply.

Layoffs at DreamWorks Animation are expected to include animators, story-board artists and other production personnel and support, the L.A. Times and Variety reported.

The news comes two weeks after the studio appointed new co-presidents of feature animation, Bonnie Arnold and Mireille Soria, while its Chief Creative Officer Bill Damaschke stepped down.

Katzenberg had been in talks about a potential sale of the studio, but early discussions with SoftBank Corp in September and with Hasbro Inc HAS -0.88% in November ended shortly after they were reported.

During what are generally considered robust years for animated features, the studio has suffered from big misses on films like “Mr Peabody & Sherman,” “Turbo” and “Rise of the Guardians.”

Last week, DreamWorks Animation received a piece of good news – an Oscar nomination for best animated feature for “How to Train Your Dragon 2.”

 

I hope Vidiot isn't losing any business.

 

I told him months ago to save his pennies .
Which really means save all $$$ you can the movie industry
as I have been saying for few years it will go into crapper.
Because the blockbuster cannot save a movie studio set in it's
current ways of thinking.
Look at what happened MGM, New Line.
The days of big go standard of movie studio will end at some point.
I feel sorry for those people who are loosing there jobs. Animation game had it's peak.
It's sad it's going down hill. Sad to say this 90's or early 2000's anymore.
Can people who worked for Dreamworks Sony find jobs in that field again?
Who knows.? I am glad I don't work in that industry.

 

"Life of Pi" has some of the best visual effects I've ever seen on the big screen, received an Oscar Award for them and then I read that the VFX company who did the job went bankrupt. WTF?!

 

The evolution of technology seems to require diminished human participation.

 

....and still there are people saying we should breed more and more.

 

Bend Me, Shape Me...

 

I watched a short making-of documentary about that film and they said it took a team of approx. 700 animators over a year to complete the FX. That's a lot of paychecks.

 

Thanks to the march of progress it now take one animator 700 minutes to do the same thing Well, not really. But you would think computer jobs like this a susceptible to the advances of the technology.

 

Tax breaks and a significantly weaker & weakening CDN $ vs the US greenback means Hollywood North might be re-born again…...

 

I'd wager that a great many of those 700 animators were located outside of North America, in a place where wages are much lower. Vidiot might now for sure but that's my guess.

 

I did read that the industry up here was doing well despite the at par nature of the C$ vs the USD. I never keep the article I read but I should really start doing that. It was probably in Playback.

But recent events will make it even more attractive for them to shoot up here. Too much money to be saved.

 

Who ever left in LA will have to leave town to get work I am afraid- Vancouver; Montreal; London or maybe China... There's plenty of work in VFX and animation, it is just not being done in California any more.

 

I'm sure it has nothing to do with keeping the stockholders happy by cutting costs and moving to a cheaper operating environment. It's not like there's precedent or anything from say Google or Apple or <insert a legion of outsourcing/inversion companies>. /s

 

It's a struggle for everybody I know, but we're hanging tough as best we can.

Short-turnaround work like TV VFX jobs are still being done in LA because there isn't time to ship them overseas, get all the work done perfectly, and then get the finished visuals back in time to make an air date. So that's a rare exception.

The studios are cheap bastids trying to save a buck. Post technicians and VFX workers are paid very, very low wages in the grand scheme of things, yet the studios will disrupt lives and ship out work 10,000 miles away if they can cut 1% from a major film's budget. Trust me, they're not sending out work to Vancouver, Mumbai, and Malaysia because of the quality. It's all about de money.

 

I sincerely hope Vidiot, and others affected by this, do survive, and not have to suffer any financial hardships. Selfishly, I thank God my son is going into HVAC, people will always want their heat and AC. I also hope my two grandsons go into fields that ensure them a steady income. Funeral Directors ?

 

Spot on. Spot on. Spot on!!!

That's the main reason. The big wigs want more and more and more, and at this point they don't even care about their fellow countryman/women losing their jobs, so:

Sadly this is happening everywhere.The tasks that in the past (without going too far: 10-15 years ago) could be previously done by a single, experienced pro are now accomplished by 3 people (usually from what were previously known the 3rd world countries) for half the cost. All it takes is publishing a "wanted" ad on the net, and suddendly a bunch of starving people from all over the world are ready to accept any wage under any conditions.
I am notorious for often saying the people I know stuff such as "actually, we were living better lives before the net, before the globalization and without all that info". Still waiting to be proven wrong. Worst lives but "enhanced" by powerful computers, facebook and smartphones turned on 24h a day ? WTF!

So, these artists are the next victims of the "progress", aren't they? Big hugs the VFX guys who may lose their jobs or forced to relocate elsewhere, that sucks.

 

I think the relocation has already started...VFX artists have to go where the work is. It is next to impossible to have a life when you have to move from continent to continent.
A lot of companies are not paying LA wages in Canada or UK either, so not only do you have to move, you have to take a pay cut at the same time. And you will be told to take it or leave it, there are many people waiting to take your place.
However, workers in third world countries are not all as bad as people think- for example the big chunk of 'Life of Pi' that was done in India ain't bad . Wages are much, much lower than LA, there are VFX artists working on big films earning $250 USD a month. Hard for studios to resist sending work there.

 

According to Variety, Dreamworks is laying off 500 people (that's like 30% of their workforce)!

http://variety.com/2015/film/news/layoffs-underway-at-dreamworks-animation-1201409054/

DreamWorks Animation is cutting approximately 500 jobs across all locations and all divisions of the studio.
It’s also cutting back its feature film output from three to two a year with plans to release a sequel and an original title in 2016, 2017 and 2018.
The job loss figure is significantly higher than the estimate of a workforce reduction in the 150 to 400 range that emerged Monday. The firings began last week.

 

News just in- Dreamworks will shut down PDI/Dreamworks- one of their major studios; the birth place of all the Shrek and Madagascar moves; Megamind etc....
Sad news, I had so many great memories there- the first animated feature film Oscar for Shrek was the high light, amongst others.....

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/business...-over-500-jobs-will-be-eliminated-108161.html

 

What the average family size in Italy?

 

I worked for Cinesite/Hollywood when Kodak made the decision to eliminate the VFX division and laid off 300 people, right after we finished X-Men 2. I think about 40-50 of those people uprooted their families and all moved down to New Zealand to work for Peter Jackson at Weta Digital. One supervisor told me he was going to sell his $600,000 LA house and move into a new house in Miramar, Welling for $150,000... and have cash left over. The pay was less (a lot less), but the cost of living was far less expensive down under.

 

Build a brige from Mexico to Canada. They'll need plenty of workers.