Visual effects professionals behind Marvel, Disney and Avatar have ratified their first union contracts. The agreements include minimum hours guarantee, overtime pay, rest periods and a pension plan

For one thing, hopefully scripts and creative decisions will probably be forced to be finalized earlier in production, as one of the big ways that studios abused CGI workers was to use them to hedge their bets on creative decisions.

For example, in the old days, if you were making a Thor movie and your script said "Hela puts Thor's eye out", but you weren't sure whether you were gonna stick with that or not, then you might film everything with Thor having two eyes. Then later in post you could either decide to have him lose the eye or not, and if you decided to go with the lost eye, you could suddenly dump that on your CGI people and say "CGI a wounded eye socket onto all the third act shots of Thor" and then the CGI guys would be stuck trying to meet the deadline despite being informed so late in the process and maybe not even getting paid extra for all the extra work.

Presumably (if this union contract is any good) the new system will be that CGI studios need to be informed of any changes BEFORE a specified date, and any changes you request AFTER that date will cost the production extra, as the CGI studio suddenly needs to hire more animators they hadn't originally budgeted for, in order to get everything done in time. If it costs the production extra, then directors will be disincentivized to do it willy-nilly, as it increases their budget which might hurt their future career prospects.

A lot of Marvel projects in recent years have fallen into a "we'll fix it in post" attitude and this might curtail that.

5 comments

This is excellent news and I hope overall successful. I know Disney can be a dick in a lot of these cases, but hopefully this works out well for everyone.
Congratulations!
Congratulations to my fellow union workers!
I wonder how this will change movies. We went to 3d animation and gratuitous cgi specifically because they're more or less the last ones in the industry to unionize.
- For one thing, hopefully scripts and creative decisions will probably be forced to be finalized earlier in production, as one of the big ways that studios abused CGI workers was to use them to hedge their bets on creative decisions.
  For example, in the old days, if you were making a Thor movie and your script said "Hela puts Thor's eye out", but you weren't sure whether you were gonna stick with that or not, then you might film everything with Thor having two eyes. Then later in post you could either decide to have him lose the eye or not, and if you decided to go with the lost eye, you could suddenly dump that on your CGI people and say "CGI a wounded eye socket onto all the third act shots of Thor" and then the CGI guys would be stuck trying to meet the deadline despite being informed so late in the process and maybe not even getting paid extra for all the extra work.
  Presumably (if this union contract is any good) the new system will be that CGI studios need to be informed of any changes BEFORE a specified date, and any changes you request AFTER that date will cost the production extra, as the CGI studio suddenly needs to hire more animators they hadn't originally budgeted for, in order to get everything done in time. If it costs the production extra, then directors will be disincentivized to do it willy-nilly, as it increases their budget which might hurt their future career prospects.
  A lot of Marvel projects in recent years have fallen into a "we'll fix it in post" attitude and this might curtail that.