And the last decades' exponential increases in productivity could have lead to keynes' famous 15 hour workweek - except they didn't.

Instead, productivity got directed to more output and more profit and working hours stayed the same if not increased.

As such, I'm more predicting this will simply lead to less VFX artists being employed by the studios than for there being a substantial improvement in working conditions.

My friends who work in animation describe a constant back and forth between the union and the studios over demands for more work for the same pay. Generative AI will just make it easier for directors to ask for even more ludicrous tasks.

What are you basing this on and why would this be the case?

And, in fact, this one of the reasons why VFX gets so heavily overused for stuff that you could do in-camera.

Is the actor wearing the wrong pants? Well, reshooting that requires paying union actors, gaffers, camera operators, etc. to shoot it again. Fixing it in post means you pay a couple of ununionized VFX artists.

It doesn’t happen with the actual costume department quite like that, but properly lit sets have definitely been widely replaced by expanses of greenscreen awash in nondescript lighting that hopes to vaguely match whatever the rendered surroundings turn out to be.

You could just assemble a cast, bring them into a greenscreen studio, and shoot a complete matrix of poses and angles and lighting variations. Then synthesize the film from that when someone decides what it should be about.

Some of the reason they gave for that at the time wasn't just saving on real world costume designers by outsourcing it to "cheap" VFX teams, but also for added "security" to avoid "spoilers" leaking to the press in tabloid photos.

(Spoilers of a sort: My favorite meta-joke on all this was Spider-Man: Far From Home's "primary" Mysterio costume which had tabloids and fans doing all sorts of speculation what the CG composited costume on top of it would look like, given the Avengers situation, only to find out that was actually the outfit for many of Mysterio's scenes because it very well fit the character in that medium.)

This is why game developers have some of the worst working conditions in the the software industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

What are you basing any of this on? I have seen demos that would be incredible for previs and animatics but nothing that would pass for final quality.

Computer graphics research, software and hardware continues to march forward, that's a reason visual effects have progressed so much in the last 20 years.

However some of the larger vfx houses like ILM and some of the feature animation houses like Dreamworks are are union. (ILM is IATSE...not sure about others)

In my experience, whether or a vfx shop is union or not has little impact on salary and job stability.

Without unionization across the industry, that makes sense.

1) Viewers can tell the difference between good and bad VFX and have a lot of complaints about the quality of VFX on a lot of projects. 2) Studios don't seem to care. They care about price and about tight deadlines.

Marvel is getting criticized a lot for the quality of its VFX, which has been poor at times in recent years, and a bit culprit of that is that release dates are set with schedules for work. But rewrites and reshoots happen, which push back when VFX can do their work, but the release dates don't move. So this leads to a lot of rushed work.

Yes.

Hollywood in the general sense is also an industry packed to the brim with ego and wishful thinking. Nobody wants to rock the boat because, heaven forbid, an artist may never be allowed to live their dream working on the next Avatar or the next Toy Story for crossing the wrong person.

For better or worse, most young artists I've known are wishful thinkers. They each had a dream of working on the next Jurassic Park or the next equivalent to 2001 A Space Odyssey, or the next Frozen or whatever. Although the software industry is filled with aspirations of working at The Google or Meta, unlike programmers, artists in entertainment are willing to work for peanuts because they can't have their grand vision shattered.

The fantasy of being important is what fuels the entertainment industry. It's numerically infeasible for every artist to work on The Next Big Hit, but everyone is required to believe they can in order for there to be enough fresh artists to be chewed up and spat out.

I'm so glad I left animation and became a programmer. The worst coworkers in software pale in comparison to the giant throbbing dicks that exist everywhere in the entertainment industry. I can refuse to work weekends or, even more drastic, quit my job when the deal gets bad, and it's unlikely to permanently damage my career if it even does at all. My career isn't founded on a combination of free work and brown-nosing.

> this is one of the places I feel generative AI can do a lot of good.

I seriously think that studios aren't far from having their lunch totally eaten by small groups of individuals using various forms of AI. No doubt that GPT has been used in Hollywood already, but VFX and animation are stuck in the past in many ways. These studios are afraid to experiment, which is why they resort to using old school methods that are outclassed by individuals with deepfake tech.

Screenwriters and VFX artists, not so much. There are more people wanting to do these jobs than there are positions to be filled. That means anyone who isn't willing to put up with being used and abused can be easily replaced. It's why nearly every skilled trade in Hollywood has a union, because collective bargaining is often the only way to guarantee any sort of stability or fair treatment. VFX artist unfortunately don't have a useful union, so they get to experience firsthand what Hollywood was like for everyone else 90 years ago.

FAANG is pretty much US focus, although they happen to have a couple of sites outside.

So by definition programmers have to work elsewhere anyway.

Also not every culture sees programming as a worthy job, rather as kind of low level stuff that one has to endure for the real job, being a manager.

Naturally one can say since this is about Hollywood, outside US doesn't matter, even though the cinema working conditions is pretty much the same everywhere.

Yes, this is true literally everywhere in the arts: there are far more aspiring artists in any given field than there is money to support as full-time artists, and the way the market for art works you end up with a very small number of artists making lots of money, a modest number of artists making barely-adequate money, and a whole lot of people making occasional incidental money but unable to devote themselves exclusively to the field because of lack of funds unless they have unrelated support, where the skill/quality differences between being in the top category and the bottom may be very narrow for individuals, even if they are notable on average, because there is so much volume that a lot of the filtering mechanisms that exist in practice are rough.

Its so bad, it allows (and requires) 600 ppl to sit together and produce a few seconds worth of mindless forgettable sensory over stimulation, to keep a 14 year old glued to his seat. I mean Bill Waterson does a better job with just a pencil.

On top of it, there arent enough over stimulation requiring eyeballs on the planet to sustain such a mindless mega machine(see Odlyzko Content is not King), that the trash software enables. Its natural the whole thing keeps breaking down regularly.

It will only change when people step back from keeping the ship afloat and ask where the ship should be heading.

The studio I worked at lost a ton of money on films but did them for prestige, then tried to break even on grueling commercial and episodic work, all while pinching every penny imaginable--like firing a staff artist when his twins were born and bringing him back as a contractor to avoid paying his health insurance.

Around Superbowl time artists were forbidden (not physically, but by threat of e.g. "leave and you're fired") from leaving the studio for the weekend until all the Superbowl commercials were finished and rendering.