What’s the solution?
In my PI VFX Town Hall
talk I listed many of the problems of the visual effects industry.
Problems
Subsidies
Too much
competition
Broken business
model
Massive Overtime
Unpaid Overtime, broken labor laws
Health Care
Coverage
I also listed a number
of possible solutions with their pros and cons.
Possible solutions
Making our own
content
Residuals and
royalties
Working for the
studios
Post-production
supervision
Global working
conditions
Trade
association
Visual Effects
Guild
None of these are perfect and none solve
all the industry problems.
Solution to these problems will take
involvement of the workers, the companies and the studios themselves even
though none of those groups seem to be particularly eager to attempt to solve
the problems.
Yet I continue to see
posts, tweets, etc that there must be other solutions. Solutions that are
perfect and that solve everything. People have stated they are working on
solutions and will be releasing these new solutions any day now.
…
And yet they still have
not provided them.
Finding problems with
proposals and criticizing is the easiest thing a person can do. How about
people actually make suggestions of a solution?
John Berton, another
visual effects supervisor, reminded me of what Chuck Jones has said:
Because this was not a brainstorming session in the usual
sense, it was a “yes” session, not an “anything goes” session. Anything
went, but only if it was positive, supportive, and affirmative to the
premise. No negatives were allowed….
The “yes” session imposes only one
discipline: the abolition of the word “no”.
…if you find you cannot contribute,
then silence is proper, but it is surprising how meaty a little old stringy
“yes” (which is another name for a premise) can become in as little as fifteen
or twenty minutes, when everyone present unreservedly commits his immediate
impulsive and positive response to it…A good premise always generates the most
astonishing results.
Jones, Chuck. Chuck Amuck: The life and times of an animated
cartoonist. New York: Chuck Jones Enterprises, inc. , 1989. pp 150 – 152.
Rather than focusing on
every negative of every proposal and ending up with nothing, review the
positive aspects of the options and proceed to choose the best ones.
So please step forward
and provide your solution. Your answer.
If you don’t have one
then consider the positives of the various solutions suggested here and
elsewhere and support those.
Related posts
