VFXSoldier and VFX Law have an interesting “thought experiment” going on where they ask the (Somewhat scary) question, “What Purpose to VFX Facilities Serve?”  It goes something like this:

What if one day we woke up and all vfx facilities went out of business?

Well before you freak out, consider that the studios would still have a need for a huge capacity of vfx work. There still exists a talent pool that can do the work.

Doomsayers say all vfx work would just go overseas but the fallacy in this is that vfx isn’t very scalable. For example, many facilities in the UK are booked up 2 years in advance by subisidy-hungry studios.

If vfx facilities didn’t exist tomorrow, the production would probably have to hire the talent directly.

The end result being that if the studios hired talent directly, then the VFX people would (theoretically) get the same privileges as all the other “behind-the-scenes” staff in the product, and get future dividends to pay for benefits ongoing.

Now, I’m not in the VFX industry so take this with a grain of salt, but this discussion comes up often in my line of work as well (A Visualization Lab offered to researchers around the world).  This argument comes up occasionally, and we fight for exactly the opposite:  Keep the Visualization Lab (or VFX Facility).  Visualization, like VFX, is a “bursty” business.  When there’s data (a movie), you do a lot of work, but that work is for a finite time and then there’s either nothing or another project.  Can one Researcher (or studio) generate enough data (projects) to keep a fully-staffed Visualization (VFX) department busy full-time?  In Visualization, the answer is typically No, which is why there is a centralized group that is “rented” out to groups on an as-needed basis.

What do you think?

via What Purpose Do VFX Facilities Serve? « VFX Soldier.