[Top image Credit: Kevin Geiger]
So, you’re running the world’s biggest entertainment behemoth, namely The Walt Disney Company, which covers Industrial Light & Magic, Lucasfilm, Pixar, Marvel, Disney theme parks etc., making money, hand over mouse-glove.
You’d think Disney CEO Bob Iger would see clearly the people whose actual talent he’s using, are cementing his place in the industry. “Treat them better, Bob.”
Back in his day, Walt Disney himself was never one to be kind to writers or animators. He just never made the connection. His battles with the people in his own studios are legendary.
Today, it isn’t just about Disney, though when you think of visual entertainment from the USA, it’s pretty much all Disney. (Perhaps that’s the problem)
The writers stopped work some weeks ago, and have been marching around on Hollywood Boulevard, and in front of the Burbank Studios. And now the Actors Guild in the States has done the same. So, prominent names and screen icons, are grabbing the billboards and megaphones and making this a real problem for the bigger studios. And the shows productions are shutting down.
And within a couple of weeks, SIGGRAPH 2023 is opening in Los Angeles. This is the 50th-anniversary conference for all the artists and technologists who work on the visual effects in movies, TV shows, ads and games, all part of the US entertainment industry’s bread and butter. Now, we know the VFX artists have protested, for very good reasons over the years, but they have yet to unionise.
The most well-known case was the studio Rythym & Hues studio lockout of visual effects artists after they worked incredibly long shifts for literally years. They were unpaid, the studio closed, and the movie they all worked on for so long, ‘Life of Pi’ won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects. Cold comfort.
Now, the walkout, by Hollywood’s writers and actors, might have struggled to get traction in the national conversation in a country accustomed to dismissing such groups as elites. Then union boss Fran Drescher delivered a devastating polemic. And Iger replied with an interview seen by many as dismissive scorn. Let them eat cake, anyone?
The dynamics of the double strike – the first time both unions walked off the job at the same time since the 1960s – are relatively simple: the studios are holding the line on smaller-than-asked-for residual payments and want a free hand with artificial intelligence (AI) in film and TV production. The unions disagree.
Then Iger, 72, was at the “summer camp for billionaires” in Sun Valley, Idaho, an event hosted annually by the investment bank Allen & Co. You don’t need a degree in PR to see that the optics of such a conversation were terrible from the outset, given the context of the strike.
“Don’t get me wrong,” said Lauren Augarten, an Australian writer based in Los Angeles, in an opinion piece in The Melbourne Age on Sunday, “the network was populated by smart, passionate executives who harbour a love of TV and film equal to my own. It’s not them we’re fighting. It’s the CEOs, who take bonuses of $27 million, yet deem us “unrealistic” in asking for a living wage. It’s the system, built to find ways to pay us less, work us harder.”
The studios reached that point muted years ago, where they can contract actors and use their image, mannerisms, voices and, well everything, in 3D, in any project they want to. A system that uses AI not as a tool but as a replacement for people. A system that, to increase profit at an unsustainable rate, is breaking the very industry it profits from.
This system is run by tech giants, attempting to use data models to improve the way stories are distributed. Yet, in a manner I can only deem “unrealistic”, they’ve failed to appreciate the importance of the way those stories are told. They’ve forgotten the people behind them.
Worlds are built in writers’ rooms, brought to life by actors, and made real by the crews currently forced to put their cameras and hammers down. We, the workers, cannot be minimised or removed from the equation.
It’s time for the streamers and studios to listen. We need their help to tell our stories, but without us, there won’t be any stories to tell.
Kevin Geiger has over three decades of experience in the arts & entertainment, including 15 years with The Walt Disney Company in Burbank and Beijing as an animation supervisor and creative executive. Geiger wrote about Hollywood’s Inflection Point very well in this column in the front cover story of Animation World Network, https://www.awn.com/blog/hollywoods-inflection-point
I’m hoping there will be some navel-gazing at SIGGRAPH this year to bring the studios to account to ensure the thoughtful, intelligent use of AI, far better payments to the people who are creating the products the studios sell, and the ability of the studios to see where their product is coming from.
VFX SCIENCE 