A Vanishing Piece of the Pi

Life of Pi’s Production

Life of Pi is a 2012 film directed by Ang Lee based on the popular 2001 novel of the same name by Yann Martel. The book sold seven million copies, encouraging producers to explore the possibility of adapting it to the silver screen. Yet, skeptics wondered whether the novel’s limited cast and imaginative flights of fancy could effectively be translated to film, which led to years of pre-production development. Pi follows the spiritual journey and self-discovery of Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel after a shipwreck that leaves his family dead and him stranded aboard a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. For the majority of the film, Pi struggles to survive adrift on the ocean, fighting dehydration, starvation, and the threat of his ferocious computer-generated companion.

Before Lee joined Pi, three other directors were attached to the project: M. Night Shyamalan, Alfonso Curaron, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Jeunet had already written a screenplay and started early visualization experiments using clay animation before leaving the project. When Lee came aboard, he hired David Magee to write a new script. Filming was set to begin in 2010, but Fox delayed filming at the last minute over financial worries and asked Lee to cut tens of millions from the production budget (Horn and Fritz 2012). Principal photography for Pi ultimately began in January 2011 with the majority of the footage shot over a five-and-a-half-month period in Taiwan, with subsequent cinematography in India and Montreal. The film’s central ocean scenes were filmed against a green screen at a giant wave tank constructed in an abandoned Taiwanese airport (Caro 2012). Lee shot Pi with a budget of seventy million dollars, and Fox 2000 distributed the film as a wide release, hoping that it could tap the popular enthusiasm that surrounded the novel. The plan worked.

Life of Pi was a critical and commercial success. Online movie review aggregators, such as Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, showed scores of seventy-nine and eighty-seven out of one hundred, respectively. Pi was nominated for three Golden Globe Awards and won for Best Original Score. Moreover, the film received eleven nominations at the eighty-fifth Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It took home Oscars in four categories, notably Best Director for Ang Lee and Best Visual Effects for R&H. The award for the latter was a bittersweet victory, as R&H management was at that very moment wrestling with bankruptcy proceedings and an ensuing change of ownership. VFX artists were no less ambivalent, as 500 employees and supporters protested deteriorating labor conditions across the street from the Dolby Theatre where the Oscars were being held. Commercially, Pi earned almost $125 million in the United States and roughly $485 million in foreign markets, reaching a worldwide total of around $610 million (“Life of Pi” 2013).

Pi’s production arguably represents broader trends in contemporary feature filmmaking. First of all, Lee shot the film in 3D, saying it was necessary to the narrative, but which was most likely encouraged by the precedent set by Avatar, allowing higher-priced tickets to be sold to boost box office totals. Second, Pi included an international cast and location filming across the world, including Canada, India, and Taiwan, taking advantage of tax incentives and cheaper labor in these locations. Third, the film relies on computer-generated graphics for many of its key elements, including a shipwreck, a visit to an exotic island, the lifelike tiger, and the construction of the breathtaking ocean that Pi calls home for the most of the film. In fact, three out of every four shots in the final cut of Life of Pi involved special effects, most of them generated by R&H, working under contract for Fox 2000 films.

Established in 1987, R&H is an award-winning post-production and special effects studio headquartered in Los Angeles, California with over twenty-five years of experience in the industry. It provides services for feature films, advertisements, and other screen media. The studio won three Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects, including Babe (1995), The Golden Compass (2007), and 2012’s Life of Pi. Notably, R&H was one of the first California-based effects firms to open satellite operations across the globe in India, Vancouver, Malaysia, and Taiwan. This allows it to take advantage of lower labor costs, benefit from foreign tax incentives, and keep up with product demand by outsourcing animation, lighting, and compositing operations.

Deteriorating Working Conditions

Renowned as one of the best employers in the effects business, R&H provided its employees with pay and benefits that were well above the industry norm, reasoning that this was the best way to attract and retain topflight talent (Lang 2013b; Caldwell 2008). Yet, such enlightened leadership is increasingly threatened by the growing competition among more than five hundred firms that now compete for VFX contracts with film and television producers. Such rivalries have taken a toll on workers. Although some effects artists are full-time employees at blue-ribbon companies, many more toil long hours under intense deadline pressures and do so without health care, sick days, or paid overtime. The average salary is modest (eighty-nine thousand dollars) given the cost of living in Los Angeles, but the biggest concern is job security, since companies increasingly hire freelance staff on a project basis and terminate them after a movie is released (“Occupational Employment Statistics” 2013). Constantly searching for new projects, artists scramble to cover their health care and retirement costs, and must be willing to relocate to distant locales.

In Production Culture, John T. Caldwell (2008) describes the generally poor working conditions in the digital media sector, arguing that the contract labor system is widespread in Hollywood but especially pernicious with respect to effects artists. At the same time that the demand for elaborate VFX was growing, studios contained costs by exploiting new technologies and tapping an available pool of nonunion labor largely drawn from music video production. By contracting with small suppliers, producers both contained costs and satisfied demand for technical expertise that was unavailable on the studio lot (Caldwell 2008, 155). As the number of digital boutiques mushroomed, their combined workforce swelled in numbers (Caldwell 2008, 160-1). Yet, as Caldwell notes, these boutiques existed outside of the jurisdiction of the International Association of Stage and Theatrical Employees (IATSE), the union that represents most below-the-line workers. Therefore, the shops did not have to offer a forty-hour workweek, paid overtime, or standard benefits such as health care and retirement (Caldwell 2008, 161). Many of these early firms made the mistake of expanding rapidly and investing in technology rather than talent. Highly leveraged and serving at the whim of the studios, many shops succumbed, but Caldwell mentions R&H as a boutique that resisted the rush to expand and made a policy of supporting “humane artistry,” a reputation for which it became known within the VFX community (2008, 162). It was one of the best places to land a job, enjoying high levels of employee satisfaction that made it possible for a relatively small firm to retain topflight talent. But working conditions at R&H were exceptional by comparison to the generally precarious contract labor in most digital effects shops.

These demanding and uncertain conditions did little, however, to discourage the swelling ranks of VFX workers. During the 1990s, as the business began to grow, companies staffed their rosters with young, ambitious techies who seemed comparatively unconcerned about the sorts of protections and benefits that Hollywood unions offered. Most were young white males in their twenties, many of them enthused by the prospect of working at the cutting edge of screen media technology and doing so on projects that were transforming the visual style of film and television. ² Today, however, the artists who got started during the boom are now in their thirties and forties, with families and mortgages to support. Short-term gigs and tight studio budgets mean that workers face recurring bouts of unemployment, and many are now pressed to look outside Hollywood for their next job. Relocating or commuting to a distant job can throw personal lives into turmoil and amplify the already taxing pressures of the workplace (Nakashima and Perry 2013).

Landing a position overseas can feel bitterly ironic as well, since LA artists sometimes find themselves overseeing workers who will eventually replace them. As for their new colleagues, many of them confront workplace pressures as well. For example, artists in the United Kingdom and Canada worry that they too will lose their jobs if industry subsidies from their governments evaporate, while those in Mumbai and Shenzhen face persistent pressure to pare back their already lean paychecks and benefits. Although there is no hard data on working conditions across the globe, anecdotal evidence and casual surveys suggest that hard deadlines, managerial pressure, cramped conditions, long hours, and short-term contract positions are shared across territories (Squires 2013). Indeed, one thing that VFX workers around the world now share is the escalating demand for longer and often unpaid work hours, especially during “crunch times” that precede the release of a major movie. The president of one effects company claims the pressures began to grow in the mid-2000s. At that time, he observed,

The final instructions are arriving later and the work is being delivered sooner, not just for the movie itself but for trailers, for teasers, for marketing, for campaigns, for overseas, for international vs. domestic, for different versions. Literally, the pressure is on all sides of this cooker.” (Cohen 2007)

As a result, many skilled and experienced VFX workers no longer share the heady optimism expressed by proponents of the “creative economy” who argue that such jobs are the most promising wave of the future.

The Broken Studio Contract System

The key to understanding these disturbing trends is the subcontracting system used by producers of “tentpole” feature films, such as Skyfall, The Hunger Games, and The Dark Knight Rises. Although financed and distributed by major studios, the actual production of each film is conducted by hundreds of employees, most of whom work for independent companies that sign contracts with studio producers to provide specific services at a set price, which in the effects business is usually based on the number of shots contributed to the final product. A 2012 Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation (LAEDC) report indicates that independent firms of ten or fewer employees employ more than 90 percent of the Hollywood workforce, indicating the system of contracting is indeed pervasive (De Vol 2001; LAEDC 2012).

This explosion of smaller companies is the result of the court-ordered breakup of the vertically integrated Hollywood studio system during the 1950s. Studios that once operated as vast factories with large pools of resident labor began to trim their payrolls and turned instead to a contracting system that transformed them into what Allen J. Scott refers to as “nerve centers of vertically disintegrated production networks” (Christopherson and Storper 1986; Scott 2005, 37; Storper and Christopherson 1987).

The studio break-up sparked an explosion in the number of small, specialized firms that provided specific products and services for the industry, a seismic shift that allowed the majors to cut overhead and survive in a new competitive environment. Today, studios negotiate contracts with countless independent companies during the planning or pre-production stages, well before shooting begins. Therefore, effects companies must fashion competitive bids that nevertheless allow leeway for the inevitable revisions that take place during filming and post-production. Such revisions can result from the creative choices of the director, or decisions made by producers or studio executives attached to the project. Yet, contracts rarely include a clause for cost “overages,” nor do they include a profit participation clause that might bring additional revenue to a VFX company that contributes to box office success.

Studios bargain hard to keep costs down and to get the most for their money. Reportedly, one producer remarked, “If I don’t put a visual effects shop out of business (on my movie), then I’m not doing my job” (Scott 2005, 37). Although hyperbolic, the remark points to the fact that major studios operate very much like Wal-Mart, Apple, or Trader Joes, constantly pressuring suppliers for price concessions and threatening to move their business elsewhere in the global supply chain. Under these conditions, executives at effects companies bid aggressively against competitors around the world, some of them supported by tax breaks or subsidies, and others by access to cheap labor. For example, Canada offers a 33 percent tax break on VFX production costs, and Chinese officials have subsidized the construction of state-of-the-art production facilities. Meanwhile, effects shops in India and the Philippines enjoy significant labor cost advantages.

As these facilities expand, they put pressure on existing companies so that the anonymous producer’s words do in fact capture the precarious circumstances of the VFX sector. Of the four biggest companies in the 1970s—Boss Films, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), Dream Quest Images, and Apogee—only ILM remains in business, having been acquired by Disney when it purchased Lucasfilm in 2012 (Kaufman 2013). ³ In the last ten years, more than twenty effects firms have closed or gone through bankruptcy, according to a list compiled by Phil Feiner who was the CEO of effects firm Pacific Title for thirty years before it went bankrupt (Heusser 2013). This list includes many major firms like R&H, Digital Domain, CIS Hollywood, Asylum VFX, and The Orphanage. More firms buckle every year. Even as we prepare this document in August 2013, one of Germany’s largest post-production effects companies, CinePostproduction, filed for bankruptcy protection (Roxborough 2013). These were major firms, not fly-by-night organizations, and they worked on dozens of high-profile Hollywood titles. Digital Domain Media Group was cofounded by James Cameron and rose to fame as the lead effects provider for Titanic. The company’s long list of credits includes Marvel’s Avengers, Transformers, and Enders Game. In business for almost twenty years, it filed for bankruptcy in September 2012, after which India’s Reliance MediaWorks and China’s Galloping Horse purchased it for $30.2 million (Giardina 2013a). CIS Hollywood shut its doors in 2011, despite successful contributions to Titanic, Matrix Revolutions, X2, and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, among many others. Asylum VFX closed in 2010 after working on the Transformers films and 2010’s Alice in Wonderland. The Orphanage contributed to many blockbusters, notably creating the helmet interface for Marvel’s Iron Man in 2008, yet within a year of that film’s release, the studio suspended operations indefinitely after ten years in business.

Even those firms that do not go bankrupt must trim their workforce at the end of each major project. Even as R&H sought a buyer for its ailing business, London-based The Mill, which has worked on fan-favorites Doctor Who and Sherlock, announced it was closing its TV VFX department. That same week, another California company, Tippett Studio, laid off fifty people (40 percent of its workforce) after completing work on After Earth. Such layoffs are common practice for firms in the VFX industry after completing projects, with core staff normally much smaller than peak personnel size during crunch periods before deadlines (Rome 2013).

Like all independent film and television companies, R&H tried to strike a balance between creative excellence and cost containment, but it was required to do so in a business with very thin profit margins, ranging between 3 and 5 percent. This allowed little room for error, and although the company had a long and distinguished track record, it continually operated in the shadow of financial insolvency. Cancellation, delay, or failure of a major project threatened to push the company over the edge. To the outside world, however, R&H seemed a huge success, reportedly flourishing on revenues from tentpole features for Fox and Universal that brought in roughly ninety million dollars per year. But in 2012, both studios cut back on effects-driven titles, engendering a perfect storm for R&H, as its total revenues from studio films plummeted to eighteen million dollars, a substantial drop from the ninety million dollars it had been pulling in for several years (Cohen 2013b). Lacking a nest egg from profit participation on successful films of the past, the company ran out of operating cash on the eve of its Academy Award for Life of Pi. Its failure signaled to many that the bidding and contracting system was broken. It furthermore heralded the demise of the last major independent VFX studio in Los Angeles.

Globalization and the Race to the Bottom

In the latter half of the twentieth century, manufacturing industries have increasingly migrated from developed nations to the Global South, seeking cheaper, nonunion labor and more compliant regulatory regimes. As developed countries began to suffer the effects of de-industrialization, many governments embraced creative industries policy to upskill their workforces and protect their existing creative capacity in the face of a perceived onslaught from Hollywood. A second aspect of this policy agenda, although somewhat contradictory to the first, was to offer tax incentives to foreign productions, predominately Hollywood ones, to attract them, their jobs, and their abundant budgets. Indeed, tax credit incentive schemes have become central components of creative industry policies and are now embraced by both developed and developing countries, including Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Czech Republic, Turkey, South Africa, India, and many countries in Southeast Asia. Besides these efforts to lure footloose feature film productions, governments around the world have been subsidizing the development of infrastructural capacity in VFX, animation, video games, and digital media, seeing them as key drivers of future economic growth.

Proponents of these policies place them in the context of broader critiques of the knowledge economy in the twenty-first century, arguing that employees that add intellectual value to products—value that can be patented or copyrighted and is therefore not easily replicated elsewhere—will be the most prized workers in the global economy. Since monopoly rents can be charged for intellectual property (IP), such products and services are especially lucrative by comparison with the marginal profitability of most manufactured goods and commodities. Biotech and computer firms are common examples of enterprises that add significant intellectual value to their products, but so too are elite service sectors, such as finance, engineering, and law. The most glamorous sector, however, is media and entertainment, where Hollywood reigns supreme as a hotbed of creative talent and sophisticated services, or so it would seem. Nowadays, however, many worry that Hollywood’s creative edge is eroding, as digital post-production facilities in China, India, and the United Kingdom confidently assert that they can compete with Hollywood counterparts in terms of quality and cost. Even the major studios in Los Angeles have grown more receptive to these overtures, in large part because the volume and expense of VFX have grown tremendously since the 1990s.

Most tentpole feature films today involve a robust range of VFX tasks that vary in complexity, as do the creative and technical requirements of the tasks. Consequently, studio producers usually line up several shops, often spreading the assignments around the world. This is evident in the examples of now defunct studios cited above, with many of them claiming credit for the same blockbusters. Thus, effects houses vary in size, scope, and specialization. At the top of the pyramid is a small cluster of firms renowned for their ability to generate stunning and innovative visuals, such as Sony’s Imageworks (Amazing Spider-man, Alice in Wonderland), Technicolor’s Moving Picture Company (Harry Potter), Disney’s ILM (Star Wars, Star Trek, Avengers), and Weta Digital (Lord of the Rings, Avatar, The Hobbit). These VFX firms are arguably in a class of their own. Two are owned and bankrolled by major studios, three have operations around the globe, and all of them manage a diverse ensemble of screen media projects. For example, Technicolor’s MPC is renowned for its leadership in the advertising industry as much as it is for accomplishments in the feature film business.

Another two-dozen independent firms cluster near the top, focusing on particular specialties, such as animal imagery or green screen sequences. A few notable examples of second-tier firms that have not closed or gone bankrupt include Almost Human, Drawn by Light, and SPIN VFX (Idelson 2013). Almost Human specializes in pairing practical makeup effects with VFX on small- to mid-budget films, such as 2010’s The Crazies. Drawn by Light works largely in television production on longstanding shows like “CSI” and “Mad Men.” SPIN VFX comes from a background in VFX technology and software development but now specializes in environmental effects for films such as Twilight and television series such as “Game of Thrones.” Indeed, these specialty shops use business models that rely on a steady stream of television projects and films with modest budgets. When they do take on a tentpole feature project, they tend to partner with top-tier firms.

Further down the hierarchy are hundreds of smaller shops. When not working on feature film or TV projects, these smaller firms get by contracting for smaller promotional and educational projects, as well as visual imaging assignments for medical, military, or commercial interests. Many of these firms also take on labor-intensive and relatively straightforward tasks, such as wire removal or simple compositing for films. Wire removal involves digitally erasing the wires used to hold actors during action scenes where characters fly, jump, or fall through the air. Compositing involves the layering of multiple images into one final image, and most films today use this technique to greater or lesser effect. These rudimentary tasks, therefore, can be outsourced to a couple of guys working in a garage in Van Nuys or a small shop in Chennai. Thus, the division of labor on major films is routinely global. For example, several firms and more than 500 VFX artists contributed to the Life of Pi, with 53 percent of the artists based in LA, 20 percent in Hyderabad, 17 percent in Mumbai, 7 percent in Kuala Lumpur, and 3 percent in Vancouver (CG Meetup 2013). Studios distribute the labor both to achieve cost-efficiencies and to keep suppliers and their workers on edge, constantly bidding against competitors near and far (Miller et al. 2005).

This evidence adds substance to Miller’s critique of the NICL. In Global Hollywood 2, Miller et al. (2005) show how NICL divides and reorganizes labor processes, exploiting cost differentials and pitting workers against each other in a relentless competition that is aided and abetted by government policies. They cite the animation industry as a precursor, saying that it has outsourced labor operations since at least the early 1960s, a noteworthy comparison to what is happening now in VFX (Miller et al. 2005, 125). Moreover, the authors contend that the development of Internet and satellite technology has allowed real-time collaboration between geographically distant studios, further facilitating the transnational co-production of animation and special effects. One of the best scholarly studies of such collaboration is Kristin Thompson’s (2007) analysis of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, a film that was largely produced for Warner Bros.’ New Line Cinema at Weta Digital and Weta Workshop in Wellington, New Zealand. From Jackson’s perspective, Weta represents a tremendous success for his homeland and for his talented colleagues. ⁴ For effects shops in Los Angeles, it is part of a troubling and accelerating trend toward the spatial reorganization of craft labor. Critics blame such “runaway productions” for costing Los Angeles County tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars each year (LAEDC 2012).

With this spatial refiguring of the production apparatus, the inside and outside boundaries of the Hollywood effects business is growing ever more ambiguous. Consequently, the largest VFX firms in LA are not only pressed to compete with outsiders but also pressed to embrace them. Like many other companies, R&H resorted to overseas expansion, opening facilities in Canada, Malaysia, and India. This global footprint allowed them to offer a greater variety of services and to exploit the advantages of each location, but it also increased their ongoing overhead costs, which in some ways made them more vulnerable to fluctuations in demand from the major studios. Despite such risks, the company found the temptations of cheap labor and state subsidies almost irresistible.

But those are not the only reasons that companies set up subsidiaries overseas. In some cases, they need to secure a foothold in a burgeoning cluster of creative activity. London, for example, is the new runaway production city of choice for Hollywood, sparked by a lucrative tax incentive program started in 2008. Several of the largest current Hollywood productions, including Star Wars Episode VII and Avengers: Age of Ultron, are therefore being shot in the United Kingdom. Concomitantly, many special effects firms have migrated to London, pursuing both post-production incentives as well as access to the city’s experienced crews, burgeoning facilities, renowned acting talent, and complementary media enterprises in theater, advertising, and television (Shaw and Lang 2013).

Given all these factors, VFX firms that remain in the Los Angeles area, like R&H, face fluctuating demand and can easily slip into bankruptcy, even if they try to protect themselves by outsourcing labor to satellite operations abroad. ⁵ The increasingly complex geography of the industry became apparent during R&H’s bankruptcy proceedings when contenders from India and China emerged as the leading bidders for control of the troubled studio. The ultimate winner was Prana Studios, backed by Bollywood investors (Cohen 2013a). In some cases, companies that pick up the pieces during a bankruptcy proceeding are seen as “white knights” by employees, even if it means a deterioration in their terms of employment. They hope that fresh financing and new management can get the company back on track and that labor conditions could improve down the line.

Unfortunately, not every buyer has the necessary operational expertise. Others have ulterior motives. Some companies, such as the investment group that purchased Pacific Title, see bankrupt VFX studios as debt dumpsters: a business they can purchase, offload their unrelated debt, and then allow it to slip back into bankruptcy, thus wiping their prior financial obligations (Kaufman 2013).

Even seemingly legitimate buyers sometimes prove otherwise. When China’s Galloping Horse partnered with Reliance MediaWorks to purchase Digital Domain in September 2012, many thought the embattled VFX studio had lucked out (Verrier 2012). However, recent reports paint a much shadier picture of the acquisition, involving mysterious investors, “shell” companies, and backdoor dealings, all of which resulted in pay cuts, infighting, and an uncertain future for the supposedly rescued studio (Cohen and Frater 2013). Less nefarious but no less damaging, some inexperienced investors with little VFX experience seem to believe that fire sale prices at the bankruptcy court provide a lucrative opportunity, only to discover the pitfalls of learning to manage a demanding and erratic production cycle, and a ferociously competitive bidding environment.

Given the dreadful track record of bankruptcy acquisitions, some fear that R&H will discontinue its LA operations, since indications are that 80 percent of production is likely to be moved overseas whereas previously the company kept the vast majority of its work stateside. This will no doubt give a boost to the Asian effects industry, but it casts a pall over the business as a whole, since VFX shops in Asia are likely to face the very same pressures going forward. In fact, the special effects industry in India seems to be experiencing similar adversity. In July 2013, one of its largest firms, Crest Animation Studio, had to ask most of its 250 employees to leave because of temporary cash flow problems, a situation they kept secret for nine months before they finally came clean and shuttered their operations (Sadhwani 2013). Moreover, other industry leaders like Prime Focus and Reliance MediaWorks have been struggling with volatile cash flows as well (VFX Soldier 2011; VFX Soldier 2013). Nevertheless, financial fluctuations have become the norm in the VFX industry. At the same time that Prime Focus was publicly expressing concern about its mounting debt, the company turned around and secured a fifty-three-million-dollar equity investment from Macquarie Capital, with which it now hopes to add a Beijing branch to its existing slate of locations in Los Angeles, New York, London, Vancouver, and Mumbai (Giardina 2013c).

Transnational Labor Organizing

The vivid contrast between Life of Pi’s award-winning success and the adverse fortunes of R&H stimulated a great deal of online discussion within the effects community. Many expressed frustration with the bankruptcy, layoffs, and general indifference of film executives to the plight of effects companies and their employees. Dedicated blogs and Facebook pages drew heavy traffic, and as of November 2013, the Facebook page VFX Solidarity International has garnered more than seventy-seven thousand followers. In the months following the Academy Awards, the group was primarily used to disseminate information, and to organize meetings and chapters in cities around the world. Other websites featured online videos that poked fun at antagonists and pointed to the importance of the VFX craft. In one particular video, the filmmakers created a parody trailer for a fictional Life of Pi sequel, trying to communicate what the film would look like without the extensive CGI effects that were added in post-production. The narrative quickly devolves into a young man flailing in front of a green screen while various people in motion capture suits skulk like animals around him (“Life of Pi 2—Official Trailer” 2013). The video champions the creative contributions of effects artists while bitterly chastising the greedy short-sightedness of Fox studios. The range of online materials is remarkable, but perhaps most important is that websites became organizing tools for face-to-face and virtual meetings that brought artists in Los Angeles together with counterparts in Canada, India, and New Zealand (Yamato 2013b).

Such labor-organizing activities are both impressive and unprecedented. Before the digital era, special effects work involved miniatures, models, and masks, which meant that most artists were members of the props or cinematographers guilds. Digital artists did not fit into these conventional labor categories and therefore became one of the few groups of Hollywood employees (along with many reality TV laborers) that today lack union representation. If they are to organize, however, VFX workers seem to recognize that globalization of the effects industry will require transnational solutions (Lang 2013a). While some argued for a trade association, others contended that artists should form a union.

As a launching pad for broader, global organizing efforts, the Visual Effects Society hosted a summit in March 2013 that brought together studio executives, effects producers, supervisors, union organizers, artists, and others to discuss the state of the VFX industry (VFX Tipping Point 2013). Most attendees were from California, although there were a few from Canada and Australia or from companies with locations in a number of other countries. The resulting white paper that was released in July 2013 outlines key concerns in the global VFX industry and offers best practice solutions to counteract these problems (Visual Effects Industry 2013). Unfortunately, these best practice suggestions are toothless without a significant global coalition of VFX labor to press for substantial change.

Those in favor of a trade association contend that such an organization could establish bidding templates that would standardize contracts, encourage profit participation, and set minimum standards for compensation (Plantec 2012). This solution would, however, require cooperation from the major studios, since without it, association members might be quietly shunned by producers who will instead turn to firms outside the group. A trade association would also require solidarity and trust among its members, which is difficult for some to imagine given the history of fierce competition in the bidding process.

Given these challenges, some artists believe they should simply form a union, with IATSE’s animation guild making a strong pitch to protestors that turned out in the wake of R&H’s demise. This approach has the imprimatur of IATSE behind it, but as with any unionization process, it could take time for artists to gain enough leverage to substantially alter their working conditions. Others also fear that the union dues are unfeasible for VFX firms already strapped for cash. While larger firms could likely cover the costs of health care and pension for their employees, smaller firms would collapse under the increased financial demands of unionization given current practices within the industry. Finally, many artists view foreign subsidies as the main problem, a contentious issue among the community, but one that IATSE will not touch since it suggests the organization has little power to enact change.

Indeed, as long as foreign subsidies exist, feature film VFX work will not return to LA. Locations like Canada, London, and New Zealand offer substantial rebates and subsidies on special effects work that Hollywood studios count on for expensive feature-length projects. One solution Animation Guild organizer Steven Kaplan offers is to introduce countervailing duties on foreign VFX work that is subsidized, a levy that could either be imposed by the WTO or by court order in the United States. This taxation would effectively erase the value of foreign subsidies. So far, VFX Soldier has hired a legal firm to perform a feasability study, yet even if by some chance such a victory was won it would not prevent studios from going to countries that benefit from cheap labor instead of subsidies.

That leaves labor organizing as the most viable alternative. Yet, the road ahead will be a difficult one. Although effects artists have expressed vehement concern about working conditions and trends in the industry, they seem especially intimidated by the complex challenge of forging a transnational labor movement. As Jim Wilson (2000) suggests,

Many people in the labor relations field have been convinced that such coordinated and large-scale actions were impossible in the media sector because the national and inter-professional interests among its workers are so diverse and the job structure and organizational contexts are quite complex. (p. 153)

Although Wilson points to a series of discrete examples of solidarity and strategic planning among global media workers, he is unable to identify a single successful transnational labor organization that media workers might use as a model. In fact, the international organizations he points to, such as the International Committee of Entertainment and Media Unions (ICEMU), have proven more successful as support groups than as negotiating units. At the moment, entities such as the Visual Effects Society have a similar supporting role for VFX workers, offering outreach and research services without any real ability to enact tangible change or successfully organize VFX artists or studios in disparate, competing geographic areas. Without such innovation, however, working conditions will continue their downward spiral, and protests are likely to intensify. Demanding their “share of the Pi” on Oscar night, hundreds of effects artists took a first step toward what could become a transformative era of global labor organizing. Whether they can take further steps remains to be seen.

Conclusion

The controversial Life of Pi is emblematic of the precarious working conditions confronting VFX workers who must contend with long hours, hard deadlines, international competition, temporary employment, and a lack of basic benefits, such as health care and retirement. Such conditions are the outcome of a studio contracting system that encourages aggressive bidding wars and a globalized mode of production that exploits local and national governments eager to subsidize media ventures to enhance the productive capacity of their creative industries. Ironically, these new operations then become part of the larger circuit of exploitation, and many firms ultimately find themselves vulnerable to the very same pressures that have decimated the VFX business in Los Angeles. This in turn leads to exploitation of the local workforce, thereby accelerating the race to the bottom of the so-called creative economy.

By tracing out the linkages between localized practices and global political economy, we have tried to extend and enrich the interaction between several analytical traditions. The political economy literature, notably Miller et al. (2005), have provided valuable insights into the NICL by adopting an expansive global perspective, largely though the lens of metatheory. Unfortunately, this approach lacks on-the-ground particulars of labor conditions and the lived experiences of screen media employees. Moreover, although Miller et al. point to case examples of the roles that particular countries play in runaway production, these nations are presented as dupes of Hollywood schemers, thereby obscuring many of the benefits and opportunities that government subsidies sometimes provide to workers who would otherwise lack access to employment in the media industries. For example, Weta Digital in New Zealand has benefited tremendously from national creative policy and Hollywood investment (Thompson 2007), even as it contributes to the hollowing out of the LA VFX industry and faces the looming threat of being hollowed out itself. It is therefore important to parse through the politics of particular circumstances to recognize that government policies and subsidies can benefit local industry and labor, at least in the short term, but policymakers and labor organizers need to communicate and collaborate with a more globalized perspective.

Similarly, creative economy scholars often adopt sweeping perspectives that are more concerned with prescribing policy changes that promote the establishment and growth of creative clusters without carefully considering the everyday conditions of labor for men and women working within these clusters. In other words, these approaches tend to be more concerned with overall job growth than with conditions in the workplace or the unequal power relations between local creative enterprises and global media conglomerates. Through our case study, we have attempted to recognize the legitimacy of such policies while pointing to the areas of consideration that often fall outside the creative economy discourse.

Finally, we have tried to situate our analysis in relation to production studies that have so fruitfully identified and analyzed the everyday experiences, routines, and representations of media workers. These studies largely forego global political economy in favor of nuanced, particular investigations of a localized creative community, with much of the work concentrated in the Los Angeles area. We offer a middle-ground approach that marries a close analysis of the VFX contracting system with a global political economy to demonstrate the importance of transnational perspectives among workers, labor organizers, and policymakers. Too many effects workers in LA contend that subsidies and runaway production are the most pressing problems they confront, when in fact, the most significant challenge is to build worker alliances that are as spatially expansive as the networks and relays of the global contracting system.

In July 2013, the Visual Effects Society released a thirty-one-page report on the state of the global VFX industry, recommending better management training for executives who run VFX businesses and new alternative pricing models to replace the fixed price bidding that has been so damaging to the industry (Giardina 2013b). Although these steps may help to shore up the viability of some VFX enterprises, we also wish to reiterate that solutions to these global problems will require innovative and protracted organizing among VFX laborers worldwide. This is a difficult and unprecedented challenge that will require a greater awareness among Hollywood artists that a dispersion of job opportunities is not necessarily a bad thing. Building global worker solidarity will require moving away from a fortress mentality to focus on the general improvement of working conditions worldwide. It will also require political activism to encourage transnational regulation of market and policy mechanisms that have run off the rails. These are truly monumental challenges, but perhaps the dearth of historical precedents will open the door to fresh approaches that can harness the growing unrest among VFX workers around the world. For increasingly, they seem to understand the consequences of a global system that continually pits creative locales against each other, leaving today’s winners relieved but on edge and the losers to wonder why their “piece of the pi” has vanished.