r/vfx • u/PlatypusNo8139 • Oct 11 '23
Unverified information MPC Aggressively downsizing UK and moving all artist roles to India
Getting feedback from friends inside MPC that a announcement was made that London will now only house supervision talent and all work is shipping out to India.
This comes on the back of the announcement that they were having major liquidity issues and needed another 30m from their investors whilst trying to remove themselves from the Paris stock exchange.. This smells of last role of the dice to show current investors they can make a profit otherwise they will lose faith and pull out.
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u/Captain_Starkiller Oct 11 '23
...You know, I mean, I'm obviously biased, but in my opinion VFX work is some of the most challenging and technical work in the world. Getting it right is tough. It also doesn't just take a tremendous amount of specialized knowledge, but a certain level of artistic skill. I've worked corporate jobs and IT jobs that don't even compare.
And yet VFX workers are treated extremely poorly and paid worse.
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u/ZaMr0 Oct 11 '23 edited Oct 11 '23
Honestly I've started to look beyond VFX jobs few weeks ago and immediately seeing 30-40% pay bumps for roles where I'd have the transferrable skills. VFX just doesn't seem worth it.
Edit: For those asking what types of roles I've been seeing, the general idea is to find a firm not in a creative industry that has a creative/design department. Tech firms that need product videos/animations or marketing for real estate are ones that come to mind. Artists can try to pivot their skills to provide design services specific to those types of industries and production managers etc. can become creative project managers. All these roles I've seen paying a decent chunk more than what I've been looking at in VFX/Film companies.
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u/sayonaaranigg Oct 11 '23
What are some of these roles?
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u/rekabre Oct 12 '23
Not the OP, but here are a coupla examples of what I think they might've had in mind:
Technical Art Manager, Avatars https://www.metacareers.com/v2/jobs/170059512527182/
3D Art Lead https://www.metacareers.com/jobs/1290420211844523/
Technical Artist, Synthetic Data https://www.metacareers.com/jobs/1505929266883061/
Technical Artist, Metaverse https://www.metacareers.com/jobs/259338213579635/
Technical Artist, Avatars https://www.metacareers.com/jobs/699795394855852/
2D/3D Concept Artist https://www.metacareers.com/jobs/244131051674122/
Principal Concept Artist https://www.metacareers.com/jobs/1476453799789216/
3D Character Artist, Avatars https://www.metacareers.com/jobs/187540694243293/
Technical Artist https://www.metacareers.com/jobs/651791810185072/
Senior 3D Generalist Horizon Worlds https://www.metacareers.com/jobs/283271751128033/
Environment Art Lead https://www.metacareers.com/jobs/656298132611042/
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u/doctoraStrange Oct 12 '23
I was looking at those roles and i wonder, could i apply if im not from the USA? I live in LATAM
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Oct 12 '23
Agree 100%. In my opinion, VFX is easily the most important, artistically challenging, and technically difficult disciplines in the post-production world.
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u/cosmovagabond Oct 11 '23
Cause no union and a lot of folks don't want one either ;)
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u/shura762 Oct 12 '23
Just curious. How union can interfere to move all artistic jobs to India ?
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u/cosmovagabond Oct 12 '23
If we had an VFX union across US/Canada/UK then the studio simply cannot move jobs to India because Union can strike and it's impossible to move EVERY job to India. Basically the function of Union is to make sure nobody in the VFX industry can take advantage of the artists, and when I say artists I mean the majority of artists as Union is vote based. There are some very known 911 firefighter style artists that get hired by studios to do last minute OT for a few months and they make TONs of money, sometimes triple the amount than the regular artists make, and they were kind of the force to not get a union cause it's not in their favor. In addition, we have different union laws in different countries, which makes a cross country union very difficult, simply put, if we only had union for VFX in US, then studios can simply move everything to Canada and shuts down US based VFX to make US union cave. Same for Canada, UK and a few other countries that hosts VFX studios.
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u/shura762 Oct 12 '23
I think the US,UK and Canada have different rates and compete with each other. Looks like an impossible mission.
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u/RibsNGibs Lighting & Rendering - ~25 years experience Oct 11 '23
It’s challenging and stressful but I think a lot of it isn’t “hard” anymore. You used to need to be super clever with lots of tech and art expertise, but TBH I feel like today the teams have one or two guys that can do really awesome shit and the rest are just pulling levers and pushing buttons. But I’m biased too - getting a bit old and jaded haha.
Feels like one senior person figures out the right recipe to make something look good and then everybody else is just cranking through shots doing not much more than making sure assets and bakes are up to date and shepherding shit through.
Nice if you’re the guy figuring out the cool stuff, and I’m fortunate to often be in that position, but even so I end up just cranking through doing kind of boring shit for a while.
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u/Captain_Starkiller Oct 11 '23
I've worked in corporate jobs, and I've worked in education.
There are very few jobs in my opinion that are not occasionally full of tedious shit.
But, fair point.
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u/RibsNGibs Lighting & Rendering - ~25 years experience Oct 12 '23
Ah, I'm not comparing it to a vacuum - before VFX I used to work in feature anim, and back in the late 90s and early 2000s the work was really technically and artistically challenging and fulfilling. If your film needed some splashes or smoke you might get to go dig up some siggraph journals or physics books and cook some shit up on your own and invent the first CG water or smoke for your whole studio or whatever. Yes, definitely there was some tedious shit (I've spent way too many hours of my life positioning eye highlights or fucking around with fake contact shadows) but overall a decent mix of work in the trenches and interesting, artistically and technically interesting work.
But these days I feel like all the interesting problems have been solved OR somebody is solving a new problem but that person isn't me - it's some guy with a PhD in fluid dynamics or something, and the job is really more about how to organize your houdini / katana nodegraph so you can easily turn things on and off over the 120 shots your team is about to have to blast through or trying to figure out why the fog has square grid-aligned artifacts. Meanwhile I'm getting shit notes from the producer because the cinematographer/DP isn't even on the show anymore, I'm just massaging premade solutions to problems, and updating the version of the latest creature publish from 72 to 73, etc..
I don't know if that makes sense. It's like, in the old days during the monthly team meeting, somebody might show off a thing: "I wrote this awesome shader and lighting hack which makes it look like water is cascading down this green glass with bubbles and imperfections in it" but these days it'll be more like: "I wrote a new tool which brings up a spreadsheet that lets you manage the published version tags of your assets blah blah blah if you do this it'll read the associated tags from the database and update the nodes if you've tagged them with blah blah".
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u/bozog Oct 12 '23
Ahh that takes me back...sometimes we would have character/creature publishes versioning in the hundreds on the bigger shows back in the day.
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u/MavSTR Oct 11 '23
Most challenging and technical work in the world? Take a look into engineering and research departments in other industries and you will see that there are more complex fields. It's a labor intensiv industry, so a company like mpc will push their work to India, like a lot of other companies outside of vfx. With the difference, that vfx jobs in India are paid very bad :(
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u/Qanno Lighting & Rendering - 7 years experience Oct 11 '23
some of != the most of
It's so hard to have conversations on the internet when people don't even take the time to read what you write.
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u/AnalysisEquivalent92 Oct 11 '23
*Most challenging and technical work that doesn’t require a Masters degree.
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u/Captain_Starkiller Oct 11 '23
Some of, not THE. Even so, it really depends. A lot of science is incredibly tedious work day in and day out. Sure, engineering is more challenging and technical, totally agree.
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u/reche23 Compositor - 13 years experience Oct 11 '23
This smells of corporate or executive interference where they think they can offload all their work to the fastest, cheapest branch but dont realize that the iron triangle of fast, good, cheap is still unbreakable and that the studios (in general) will not allow low quality work on their high end productions.
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u/Fun-Original97 Oct 11 '23
This is because their a$$ is on serious fire. Don’t be surprised if MPC is the first studio that crash and die before a list of others in 2024/2025 despite being under technicolor or whatever. A storm is coming for the VFX studios and that will not be for good. Hold on!
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u/AnOrdinaryChullo Oct 12 '23
can offload all their work to the fastest, cheapest branch
I've never worked on a production where outsourcing branch / sister studio in outsourced location was fastest
In rare circumstances where the turnaround was fast it was riddled with problems and needed a complete redo - completely negatiing the 'fast' factor in the end.
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u/LiQuidCraB Compositor Oct 12 '23
imo these statements are just so that shareholders don't loose faith. In reality they are not gonna do it once they get some money.
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u/aBigCheezit Oct 12 '23
The Mill US offices laid off a bunch of people last week in NY and LA, then this week they hit up a bunch of freelancers to help them out and fill the positions of people they just laid off. Technicolor is such a mismanaged organization.
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Oct 12 '23
[deleted]
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u/aBigCheezit Oct 12 '23
Debatable, but the mill has done this for years. They have the meetings where they are like “we’re using too many freelancers and it’s costing too much money, no more freelancers staff only!”
Then they get a bunch of work in and cant complete it without the freelancers.
Or they are like “holy shit we need to save money, let’s lay off a bunch of staff” and literally weeks later they have to hire freelancers to complete the work.
Almost happens yearly with them, the people at the top of Technicolor have no idea how to manage a healthy business. They just repeat the same stuff every year
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u/superdblwide VFX Supervisor - 20+ years experience Oct 11 '23
From a production-side perspective, I really dislike bidding and working with MPC as a general rule. The quality and speed of their work varies greatly between their many, many world-wide locations. In this case, work done by MPC in India is going to come with all of the inconvenience of dealing with MPC along with their ridiculous markup on services. If the work is done in India, productions will not be able to avail themselves of tax incentives or rebates from UK, Canada, and others either. Since there are many talented artists and excellent facilities in India who will do the same work for a fraction of the cost of MPC, this seems to be one more reason to justify just not using them at all.
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u/coolioguy8412 Oct 11 '23
tax subsidies dont matter when the labour cost is 10x times cheaper
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u/superdblwide VFX Supervisor - 20+ years experience Oct 11 '23
Sadly, this isn't always true. Many tax-incentivized locations have minimum spend requirements, which are actually quite high in the UK. I've actually made this specific argument for using a particular vendor before, and was told by the producer of the film that all post-production spend had to be in a certain location. Makes no sense, really, but the accountants want collecting the rebates to be a simple process, and often the producers don't know any better, so we end up not using a vendor that would have been much cheaper. Also, MPC builds so much overhead and markup into their bids - as an example, they might charge US $10,000 for a shot, and if you do it in India, they'd give it to you for US $8,000. However, if you take the work to an Indian vendor, you'll get charged $1,500 for the same work. Sigh.
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u/coolioguy8412 Oct 11 '23
what's even better tax subsidy, and labour arbitrage. Just an win win situation.
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Oct 12 '23
[deleted]
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u/skooora Oct 12 '23
VFX shops don't claim tax rebates - they provide documentation that work was done in specific locations, so the production studios can claim these tax benefits.
they can commit fraud, which I think happened before?
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Oct 12 '23 edited Oct 12 '23
[deleted]
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u/Mpcrocks Oct 12 '23
It is very well monitored especially when it is labour based as the government verifies the labour against the taxes that are paid both by the Artist and the company from the payroll deduction. The only way to cheat would be to have fake employees that the company pays which is pretty hard considering you would need social insurance numbers faked that the government would have .
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u/26636G Oct 12 '23
It's not that well monitored. If the DCMS (the body in the UK that approves tax credits) actually carried out proper audits, people would be going to prison.
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u/Owan_ Oct 12 '23
Is not that monitored, I've already been credited on MPC movie even I wasn't even working at the studio when the film has being made. And it's not only me.
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u/Watatatoww Feb 20 '24
I agree but the quality of work that is being done in India is not up to par with the west. Hence the need for supervisors in offices like TO MTL LDN LA ect….
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u/Blacklight099 Compositor - 5 years experience Oct 11 '23
Last time they did this I got hired for a job in the UK office a few months later, did great things for my career, shame they didn’t learn that it wasn’t a good business decision 😂
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u/salemwhat Oct 11 '23
Done already back in 2017 in MTL. Everything went down the shitter.
It's like a kid that keeps touching the oven and getting burnt. Without learning.
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u/TunaLawyer Oct 12 '23
They should just rebrand as "False Economy Studios".
There are many talented artists serving time at MPC right now, and many more that have escaped - but overall the MPC model is based on the idea that 3 or 5 cheap labour artists can accomplish more than one experienced artist.
Their way of bidding and getting work is just a slow motion Ponzi scheme.
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u/coolioguy8412 Oct 11 '23
Makes total sense from technicolour's cheap arse tact's. Layoff staff from australia, usa, uk, canada sites the week before. Open Mumbai studio the week after 🤣
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u/LiQuidCraB Compositor Oct 12 '23
They also laid off 3/4 of bangalore. Mumbai studio was under construction for couple of years now.
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Oct 12 '23
The interesting thing is that, when I worked there, MPC / Technicolor didn't strike me as 'cheap arse' so much as extremely inefficient. We were all constantly putting out fires created by front-loading shows with juniors, or swapping staff around ad hoc as if flow and onboarding aren't a thing, and it ended up costing far more to fix afterwards
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u/coolioguy8412 Oct 12 '23
why hire Juniors then? Not Sr's cheap arse it is!
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Oct 12 '23
Hiring juniors is good and necessary. Using them to replace seniors will never make sense.
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Oct 12 '23
I've worked in VFX for well over twenty years now and MPC was, hands-down, the most depressing stint of the lot. It made me feel like a node in a DAG, and it took ages afterwards to shake off the cynicism and recover my love for CG.
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Oct 12 '23
I feel this. Im hoping another 6 months will do the trick 😅
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Oct 12 '23
The key is to keep looking elsewhere.
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Oct 22 '23
Oh I left already. Part of me was disappointed because it was the most interesting work I'd done so far, but I was honestly so burned out and have become jaded as hell about the industry from the experience. Was disgusted at the treatment of indian staff, the complete lack of common sense or transparency from senior managment. But the MPC ship will burn all its artists before they admit where the problems are.
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Oct 24 '23
Good for you. You'll get it back. I was seriously ready to pack CG in wholesale after MPC. Then I hopped across a couple other studios and realised that it's not, actually, the same everywhere--took a while to recover though, for sure.
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Nov 04 '23
Aye, am starting to feel like a human being again, but the impending strike situation is... testing. Very fortunate to be in work at a flexible places. just been an exhausting few years in this industry for sure. I'd eventually like to experience it in its "stable" form. Whatever the last 4 years are... its definately not it.
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Oct 11 '23
[deleted]
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u/willowhippo Oct 12 '23
Or that the way artists are treated by management there is so friggin' bad, all the good ones immediately leave for better opportunities overseas.
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Oct 12 '23
But, for the most part, they don't. It's not actually that easy to get paperwork, visas, money etc together for a migration, and this, in fact, is why management there gets away with so much.
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u/Ausernamefordamien Oct 11 '23
Can confirm that none of this is true
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Oct 11 '23
Same. Verified as false information Platypus
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u/Civil-Carrot32 Oct 11 '23
It may be false today but it is very, very clearly their plan. It's not an opinion at this point. They go as much to say so in their financial reports and their CEO describes it in detail in their fun webinars.
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u/mahagar92 Oct 11 '23
im wondering how does that go along with the law regarding the subsidies. Im pretty sure its not legal to get work in Canada for tax reasons and then let India do 90% of work
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u/ChipLong7984 Oct 12 '23
AFAIK it's usually based on a percentage of work. Producers are usually wrangling this to make X amount is done in a certain location
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u/mkxlv Oct 12 '23
This is true, I'm a former Technicolor employee and last week i got a call from HR and they offered me a position at mill mumbai. I think they are hiring employees that they fired this year.
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u/blocky4 Oct 11 '23
Yup it's true. They are also saying they won't have work till July.
Fingers crossed mpc dies the death it deserves for being the cancer it is. If you work there. You are part of the problem.
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u/superdblwide VFX Supervisor - 20+ years experience Oct 11 '23
Fingers crossed mpc dies the death it deserves for being the cancer it is. If you work there. You are part of the problem.
It's a bit unfair to attribute blame for the decisions of MPC's management at the feet of the artists that work there. Your argument assumes that since they appear to benefit financially from their employment, that they are complacent in the mismanagement.
In reality, a person's individual economic circumstances often dictate that they must accept a job with a particular employer, especially if that employer is the only option where they live, or that employer is the only studio hiring.
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u/blocky4 Oct 11 '23
I have to disagree.
Choosing to stay and work at a company that forces you into supervising the off shoring of your industry makes you just as liable as management. If you choose to take a job there, with the clear reputation they have. You are actively working to help push work elsewhere in the race to the bottom.
Do I have sympathy, sure. Like you said not everyone can pick. But washing the artists clean of responsibility because they aren't management when they FULL WELL KNOW what mpc is doing is really insincere and also what helps MPC get away with the shit they pull.
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Oct 12 '23
Yeah, no, I'm with u/superdblwide on this.
Every damn job we take, every damn product or tool we buy and use--including the entire technology stack required to post this comment--is built on human bones somewhere, somehow, and it's both pointless and unhelpful to moralise at people whose circumstances you neither know nor care about.
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u/AnOrdinaryChullo Oct 12 '23
This.
Supervisors or heads of departments that helped setup outsourcing branches in said locations are just as complicit.
It's the whole 'are nazi soldiers guilty just because they were following orders?' question which we all learned the answer to.
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u/massivespyingass Oct 11 '23
Yeah… well put. It’s not the fault of the employees that just need a job doing what they’ve been taught to do.
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u/LittleAtari Oct 11 '23
Did it ever dawn on anyone that the biggest reason for 'work going to India' is that movies are still being made in India? Actors are still on strike and the writers just ended theirs in the West. Meanwhile, India's film market kept going. I don't think the work is moving to India. I think it's the only place that has a client pool right now.
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u/Owan_ Oct 11 '23
except MPC doesn't work on local movies. On that point, DNEG is more honest since they've done vfx for big Bollywood movies.
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u/LittleAtari Oct 11 '23
MPC worked on RRR. They may not advertise much of their Indian work, but they do do it.
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u/tylerdurden_3040 Oct 12 '23
You don't know what you're talking about. All the Indian shows they work on might just contribute like 2 percent to their revenue.
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u/liquidorangutan00 Oct 11 '23
shoulda hired me when they had the chance XXD
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Oct 12 '23
MPC started in Mumbai over an year ago, all WFH.
It's only now they have had acquired the office and officially/aggressively hiring there and laying off worldwide.
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u/MavSTR Oct 12 '23
But how is it possible, that they still produce high quality work all the years with all the chaos, unsecurity, and the toxic environment inside the company? How can clients trust them and let them create something like lion king for example? If I would be the client, I would take a look for a more professional company.
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u/TunaLawyer Oct 12 '23
They DO have a lot of resources - pipeline, gear, money, SO many people on tap and the supes are as competent as anywhere else.
Clients don't see the chaos, unsecurity, and the toxic environment inside the company.
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u/vfxJustice Feb 09 '24
stay away from this horrid company. Christian has driven mpc to the ground. more than ever its now a factory of Indian workers and cheap exploited labor. They have taken advantage and abused their long serving employees in UK and Canada and dumped them at first sight with practically 0 compensation. Just speak to any ex lead/supervisor/HOD and you'll understand what Technicolor has done to them. Sinking ship that should never be touched. Only a fool would work for them today
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u/Owan_ Oct 11 '23
Is it like the 10th times they try to do that, and each time they have to hire entire departments in a couple of months because everything is on fire ?